CRY FOR MERCY

Mark 10:46-52

And so they reached Jericho. Later, as Jesus and his disciples left town, a great crowd was following. A blind beggar named Bartimaeus (son of Timaeus) was sitting beside the road as Jesus was going by. When Bartimaeus heard that Jesus from Nazareth was nearby, he began to shout out, “Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me!”

“Be quiet!” some of the people yelled at him. But he only shouted louder, “Son of David, have mercy on me!” When Jesus heard him, he stopped and said, “Tell him to come here.” So they called the blind man. “Cheer up,” they said. “Come on, he’s calling you!” Bartimaeus threw aside his coat, jumped up, and came to Jesus.

“What do you want me to do for you?” Jesus asked. “Teacher,” the blind man said, “I want to see!” And Jesus said to him, “Go your way. Your faith has healed you.” And instantly the blind man could see! Then he followed Jesus down the road.

(New Living Translation)

The rest of the family has already made their way from the supermarket to the

parking lot. The mother and her young son, a child of about four or five, are the last ones

out the door. Just as they are about to cross over to the lot also, the boy hesitates, his

eyes drawn to the man sitting off to the side of the entrance. He hesitates uncertainly,

knowing he is supposed to stay close to his mother, but knowing also that his feet

suddenly will not cooperate. The mother sees the man also, and comes over to the boy,

placing a coin in his hand. He still hesitates, not fully understanding what he is to do, but

she gently encourages him, “Go ahead.”

He walks timidly, slowly over to where the man sits. As he approaches from the

side and comes around in front of the man, he gets a better look at the face he has seen

only from the side. The man is old, and the boy thinks he is probably the oldest man he’s

ever seen. But he sees something else unusual, something totally unexpected: where the

man’s eyes and eyelids should be, there are two solid folds of skin covering empty

sockets. The sight is so unnerving, the boy freezes for a moment, unable to move, or to

take his eyes off the strange sight. Then he sees the hat in the man’s hand and he

suddenly understands what the coin is for. But he is puzzled at the pencils he sees in the

hat with the other coins, not realizing they are there to be sold. He holds the coin for a

moment over the hat, then drops it. The man grunts something the boy doesn’t

understand, and then, his task performed, the boy runs quickly back over to join his

mother.

I rarely come to this story without remembering that incident. You see, that was

the first encounter I ever had with a blind person, and the images have stayed with me

ever since. I’ve often compared that moment with the stories of Jesus healing blind

people in the Bible, and this time has been no exception. But as I re-read the story this

time, I was drawn to a striking difference that for some reason I had not thought of

before. Unlike the man I had seen, whose almost inaudible grunt of thanks was the only

sound he made, this man is loud—very loud. He refuses all urges to be quiet, screaming

all the more loudly; not the quiet asking of a beggar for assistance, but the anguish of a

suffering man pleading for deliverance.

I call your attention today, not to the beggar, nor to the actions of Jesus or of the

crowd, but to that cry for mercy. I believe that cry is at the heart of this passage. I

believe that cry reached the heart of Jesus, because the scripture tells us that “when Jesus

heard him, he stopped.” I believe it was not necessarily the cry itself, but something

Jesus heard in that cry that stopped him in his tracks. The genuine cry for mercy catches

the very heart of God and seems to draw a response from God that will not be received in

any other way. So it is that cry that I want to draw into our focus today.

I would suggest to you first of all that the cry for mercy is always heard, because

it is a cry of sincerity. There is something in the genuine cry for mercy that gets beyond

all the insincere motivations that sometimes control our actions. Sometimes when we

feel we come in genuine faith, our cry for mercy is in reality a cry for attention. Or

perhaps it can be a cry simply for partiality, or for recognition, or any one of many wrong

motivations. But while we may deceive ourselves, the heart of God cannot be deceived,

and when the cry for mercy is genuine, God will know it and will hear.

Notice in our text, for example, that Jesus heard this voice even though there was

a “great crowd” present. And with the clamor of the crowd, and the voices insisting that

the man be quiet, it would have been very easy for this man’s voice to be lost among the

noises and voices of the crowd. I don’t believe the man was heard simply because he was

louder than the crowd. I’ve always compared this singling out of this one voice with

another incident in Jesus’ ministry, when a woman in another crowd pushed through to

touch the hem of his garment in search of healing. In the same way as Bartimaeus, she

had a sincere desire to be healed, and a sincere belief that Jesus could heal her. And in a

different sense, her cry also was “heard” by Jesus, who recognized immediately that she

had touched him. Whether that cry is as vocal as the cry of Bartimaeus, or as silent as

this woman’s cry, it is a cry that catches the attention and the heart of God.

Over and over in Scripture, the sincere cry of God’s people has been the occasion

for mighty acts of God. The first example that comes to mind is the descendants of Israel

in Egypt, who cried out to God and were heard, and delivered. In addition, who could

not be touched by the heartfelt cry of Hannah for a son, and God’s response to her? Or

how about Hezekiah pleading with tears when told he would die from the illness he had?

But God responded to these prayers. Perhaps the most prominent example we have is

David, who again and again in the Psalms pours his heart out to God, and is heard and is

blessed by God. And though sometimes it may feel like God doesn’t hear, you can be

assured, that sincere cry for mercy is a cry that will always touch the heart of God.

Not only will that cry always be heard, but the cry for mercy will not be silenced,

because it is a cry of desperation. You will never cry out from the depths like this man

did until you come to an inner realization that your situation is desperate. Webster’s

dictionary defines desperate as “having lost hope”; and yet people and circumstances

that we define as desperate have not lost hope, they have lost every hope but one. People

who do desperate acts have placed all their hope on one final avenue that they see as the

avenue of escape.

That’s the way I view the cries of Bartimaeus. We are not told how long he had

been blind, but it surely was long enough to drive him to the point of desperation. His

life had been an existence of roadside begging, a common sight along the roads of Israel.

It was one of the most powerless forms of life in Israel, which may have had a lot to do

with the crowd’s insistence that he be quiet. Who are you to bother the Master? He was

considered a distraction, much as the children had earlier (10:13). But Bartimaeus had

heard about the miraculous things Jesus had done, and this was the one in whom his hope

had come to rest. Jesus hears the cries that will not be silent, for the things that his

followers considered to be distractions are the very things that Jesus seems to have

singled out as important.

I believe in our time, we still tend to silence the cry for mercy, but we have found

more subtle methods. Rather than silencing the cries, rather than insisting directly that

they be silent, we simply ignore the cries. There are a variety of means of ignoring: we

move to better neighborhoods if poorer neighbors move too close; we tune out the

evening news reports of calamities that in themselves are a cry for mercy; we distance

ourselves by calmly considering that anything we can do to help would be so little, or that

these things are in such faraway places. Very few people, for instance, would remember

that nearly thirty years ago, a cyclone and a tidal wave in Pakistan brought a death toll of

150,000. But let Fort Lauderdale, Florida get wiped out completely and they would

never forget. There are cries for mercy all around us, and our ignoring them will not

silence them.

Ignoring those cries often reaches us at personal levels. I recall a cry for mercy

that went unheeded in my life—or would have, except that the man’s desperate cry would

not be silenced by my complacency. While I was a student in Kentucky, a man I had

known, whose sons I had been good friends with while a teenager, was diagnosed with

terminal lung cancer. My mother had been to see him, and she had called me to tell me

that when the man found out I was at seminary, he seemed insistent that I come see him

the next time I came home. A couple of weeks passed, and in another conversation with

her, she told me she had seen him again and he had repeated the request, and that “he

really wants to see you.”

This time there was something in the request that stayed with me, and I could not

get it out of my mind for the next couple of weeks. So I made the seven-hour trip home

ahead of my planned schedule, found out the directions to the man’s house, and went to

visit him. It didn’t take long to discover that he wanted to see me to reconcile a falling

out he had had with my brother many years earlier. My brother would not speak with

him, so he needed someone close to my brother to hear his side of the situation. At the

same time, he was about to reach the end of his life’s journey, and he wanted all paths

clear before his departure. I was the one he desperately clung to with the cry for mercy,

because in a sense I fulfilled a dual role. His was a cry for mercy, and a cry of

desperation that almost went ignored.

How many cries go by us unnoticed each day? I am reminded of the persecution

of Christians taking place in Sudan, which went largely unnoticed for quite some time.

Thank God for the efforts of Richard Wurmbrand and his Voice of the Martyrs

publication. Richard Wurmbrand was a missionary who was imprisoned in Romania for

many years. Upon his release he came to this country and began focusing efforts at

increasing people’s awareness of Christian persecution in different places around the

world. Largely through this man’s efforts, attention was brought to the situation in

Sudan, and eventually even the United States Congress could no longer ignore what was

happening. Ignorance, willful ignorance, and indifference cannot silence the desperate

cry for mercy.

No, the cry for mercy will not be silenced, and it will always get results, because

the cry for mercy is a cry of faith. The words of Jesus to this man were, “Go your way.

Your faith has healed you.” His words to the woman who touched his garment were

similar: “Daughter, your faith has made you well. Go in peace. You have been healed.”

You see, this thing we call faith isn’t always a state of mind, or a thing that is believed in.

It is an active thing that goes in pursuit of the things claimed by faith.

We are given great encouragement from the great “faith chapter” of the Bible,

Hebrews 11. And all of those commended there are commended for their acts of faith:

“By faith these people overthrew kingdoms, ruled with justice, and received what God

had promised them. They shut the mouths of lions, quenched the flames of fire, and

escaped death by the edge of the sword. Their weakness was turned to strength. They

became strong in battle and put whole armies to flight. Women received their loved ones

back again from death” (Hebrews 11:33-35a). And one common denominator we would

find, if we were to go back and read each of the stories of these heroes of the faith once

more, would be that cry for mercy. And each of these heroes, in his or her own way,

became known for faith because of the way they responded.

You see, this cry for mercy is a call for us to respond, because it is a cry for help,

to the helper in each one of us. Each of us who trusted Christ for our salvation, were

given that indwelling Spirit, the one we call the Comforter or Counselor, the Helper, the

parakletos who “draws alongside” us. And when that cry for mercy goes out, if we are in

tune with the Spirit, if we do not shut out the cries, then that Spirit who dwells within us

will cause us to respond to the cry for mercy in ways we never expected.

I can recall when I was a young boy in church, I always looked forward to the

Communion services. And I always knew when to expect the most familiar part of the

ritual to me, a part which was made familiar by the intonation that one particular pastor

put on the words: “Have mercy on us; have mercy on us, most merciful Father.” The

years have passed, times have changed, and the rituals have changed; but the cry for

mercy is still a part of our ritual. I never fail to be convicted and challenged each time I

read the words in the confession in our ritual: “We have not heard the cry of the needy.”

I can recall an instance when I heard that cry. I was driving one day when I saw a

hitchhiker by the side of the road, loaded down with a couple of large carrying bags.

Now, I make it a practice normally not to pick up hitchhikers, which may in itself be a

refusal to hear the cry of those needy of transportation. But in this particular instance, I

was rounding a curve and did not see him until I was almost beside him; and my response

of jamming on the brakes and stopping for him was so impulsive and so instantaneous

that it surprised even me. As the young man loaded his bags into the back seat and

climbed in beside me, it did not take very much conversation for me to discover that he

was a Christian. Not only that, he was obviously a man of very evident devotion and

faith.

I had noticed as he approached the car, he had a limp, and when I asked, he told

me of an injury and operation he had had only a short time before. In fact, he revealed

that at the time I stopped, he had given up being able to walk another step and was

praying fervently that someone would stop. I eventually went out of my way to take the

young man all the way to his destination. After I left, I kept running through my mind

just how unlikely the whole incident was. I wondered why I had stopped in the first

place, but at the same time gave thanks that I did. In retrospect, I still attribute it to what

I have already suggested: that the Spirit within us causes us to respond to the cry for

mercy. I did not hear that cry for mercy, but the Spirit did, and I believe the Spirit within

caused me to respond in a way I would not have.

But I believe that very often, maybe even more often, we miss hearing the inner

voice, we miss hearing the cry. Not long ago, I was about to leave with my family to take

a planned trip to the beach. We were already behind our planned departure time when we

remembered I had not checked the mail that day. I quickly drove the couple of blocks

down to the Post Office, intending to get the mail and return quickly and be on our way.

As I came out the door to leave, I was met by a man coming off the street, who asked me

if I knew where he could find a pastor in town. Without revealing that I was a pastor, I

asked if I could possibly help him. He insisted that no, he needed to see a pastor,

something about needing financial help.

Now, ordinarily, I would have been very quick to help the man. But I knew I had

a waiting family back at the house, that we were already late, and I was in a hurry to go.

Besides, even though the church has an emergency fund, this was Saturday, and I

couldn’t give him anything that would help until two days later. So I reasoned it out

somehow that it was okay to give this man the phone number of a person at the other

main church in town, whom I had called before when we were unable to give assistance,

and let it go at that. The man insisted instead that he would rather talk to them in person

and wanted to go see them, so I gave him the address and drove off. Before I drove the

short two blocks home, the growing feeling of conviction got the best of me, and I

decided to go back and talk to him in more detail and offer what help I could. But as I

drove up the street, he was nowhere to be found. There was absolutely no way he could

have walked to the person’s house already. It was as if he had just vanished! I was left

with thoughts of how some of us, the Scripture says, have entertained angels unawares—

and sadly, I was also reminded that many times, some of us have not.

The two incidents reminded me of a very significant passage of scripture I would

like to leave with you in closing. You see, Jesus has told us that the time will come when

he will sit on his throne and the nations will come before him and there will be a

separation between those categorized as either sheep or goats. And the basis of that

separation is going to be on the basis of what each individual has done, or has not done

for those in need. That’s why it matters, and it matters very much, what you do right now

in response to that cry for mercy.

I would like to address this from two different perspectives, represented by two

different groups of people. I am sure everyone present belongs to one group or the other,

or perhaps even both. First of all, I am sure there are some here who are even now facing

a situation, or have a loved one facing a situation that is causing you to cry out to God for

mercy. If this applies to you, let me give you all the encouragement I possibly can to

continue to cry out to God. Maybe it seems there has been no response, the heavens are

like brass, and you’ve begun to despair for the answer. Take courage, and let your hope

be strengthened, to realize that God hears your cry for mercy. Don’t let your cries for

mercy be silenced by the weight of your circumstances, but let your voice be heard, and

let it be heard even more loudly.

If this does not apply to you, then I challenge you with this: are you actively

listening for that voice that stands out above the crowd, that insistent cry that will not be

silenced? Or are you simply a part of the noise that would drown that voice out? Ask

God to put your spirit in touch with the Spirit of God within, so that when the cry for

mercy rings out, it will set up such an echo within you that you will not be able to refuse

or ignore the need.

May God help us to cry for mercy; may God help us to hear.