Take Heart! God Shows Mercy Mark 10:46–52
Take Heart! God Shows Mercy
Mark 10:46–52
Rev. Dr. Rhonda Abbott Blevins
October 4, 2026
They came to Jericho. As he and his disciples and a large crowd were leaving Jericho, Bartimaeus son of Timaeus, a blind beggar, was sitting by the roadside. 47When he heard that it was Jesus of Nazareth, he began to shout out and say, “Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me!” 48Many sternly ordered him to be quiet, but he cried out even more loudly, “Son of David, have mercy on me!” 49Jesus stood still and said, “Call him here.” And they called the blind man, saying to him, “Take heart; get up, he is calling you.” 50So throwing off his cloak, he sprang up and came to Jesus. 51Then Jesus said to him, “What do you want me to do for you?” The blind man said to him, “My teacher, let me see again.” 52Jesus said to him, “Go; your faith has made you well.” Immediately he regained his sight and followed him on the way.
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I love to go to Starbucks; it’s a guilty pleasure. And this is the perfect time of year to get a grande oat milk pumpkin spice latte with three pumps of sugar-free vanilla and a dash of cinnamon on top. Yum. If you’ve ever gone to Starbucks, after you’ve placed your order, you surely remember barista asking your name to put on the side of your cup. Now, my name is Rhonda. It’s a good 70’s name, not too complicated. So the barista asks, “What’s the name for the order?” guess what I tell them? I tell them, “Rhonda.” A few moments later, I’ll hear another barista yell out, “Wanda!” No one responds. “Wanda, your order is ready.” And that’s my cue. I’ve been “Wandafied.”
There’s something very special about the story we read from the Gospel of Mark a moment ago. Most of the people Jesus heals in the Gospels don’t get names. Last week we met simply “The Syrophonecian Woman.” The week before that, “The Woman With the Issue of Blood.” (What an unfortunate way to go down in history!)
But this man that Jesus heals, Mark remembers. Bartimaeus, son of Timaeus. Somebody made sure that name got written down right.
So let’s go to Jericho.
Jericho is the last town before Jerusalem. From there it’s a long, steep climb uphill to the city. It’s almost Passover, and the road would have been packed with pilgrims, families, and people singing psalms as they walked. It was loud, dusty, and festive.
And Jesus is in the middle of it, walking toward the cross. He’s told his disciples three times now what’s waiting for him in Jerusalem. Three times. They still haven’t really gotten it. (Honestly, I’m not sure I would have either.)
Off to the side of the road sits a blind man, begging. He’s in the spot where everybody sees him and nobody really looks at him. You know that spot. Most of us drive past it at an intersection every week and suddenly find the traffic light very interesting.
Bartimaeus hears the commotion and asks what’s going on. Somebody tells him it’s Jesus of Nazareth. And he starts shouting.
“Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me!”
Hold on to those words for a minute, because they’ve had a long life.
In the Greek of Mark’s Gospel, “have mercy” is eleēson. Put “Lord” in front of it and you get Kyrie eleison: Lord, have mercy. The early church heard this blind beggar’s cry, along with others like it in the Gospels, and they took it into their worship. By the late 300s, a pilgrim named Egeria wrote home about visiting Jerusalem. She described children answering the prayers of the church with Kyrie eleison, over and over.
Later, when the Western church moved its worship into Latin, they translated nearly everything. But not this. For centuries, Latin-speaking Christians prayed this one line in Greek, as though nobody quite had the heart to change it. It’s still there in the Mass. It’s in the Orthodox Jesus Prayer: Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me. You’ve probably prayed it in some form your whole life without knowing whose words they were first.
They were his. A blind beggar on the side of the road gave the church one of its oldest prayers.
I don’t think that’s an accident. Worship starts where Bartimaeus started, with honesty. I need something I can’t give myself. And notice, this isn’t groveling. Bartimaeus isn’t cringing. He shouts because he expects mercy. He believes this Jesus, this Son of David, is the kind of person who gives it. Kyrie eleison isn’t a timid prayer. It’s a confident one.
Which brings us to the crowd.
“Many sternly ordered him to be quiet.” That’s how Mark puts it. Hush. Not now. Jesus has important places to be. Know your place.
I think we’ve all heard some version of that. Maybe it was spoken out loud. More often it’s just implied. Your question is too much. Your need is too messy. Your voice isn’t the one people want to hear. Some of us heard it in church, God help us.
And what does Bartimaeus do? He shouts all the more.
That’s courage. It’s not that he wasn’t afraid. I’d bet he was. It’s that he refused to let anybody else decide whether he was allowed to ask for mercy. He just did not care what those people thought. And I find that a little bit thrilling.
Then something shifts.
Jesus stops.
Think about that. He is walking toward Jerusalem, toward betrayal and a cross, with the weight of the whole world on his shoulders. And he stands still for one beggar on the side of the road.
Then he says, “Call him here.”
And suddenly the crowd changes its tune. These same people who were shushing him a minute ago now say, “Take heart; get up, he is calling you.” Take heart. It’s the same word Jesus spoke to his frightened disciples on the water, way back at the start of this series. Funny how quickly a crowd can go from shutting you down to cheering you on once Jesus notices you.
Now watch what Bartimaeus does. “Throwing off his cloak, he sprang up and came to Jesus.”
I can’t stop thinking about that cloak. For a blind beggar, a cloak was everything. It was his bed at night and his shelter from the weather. It was probably the blanket he spread out on the ground to catch coins. It was all he had. And he throws it off. Before he’s healed. Before he knows how any of this will turn out.
He comes to Jesus, and Jesus asks him a question. “What do you want me to do for you?”
This is where Mark gets a little sneaky. Just a few verses earlier, James and John came to Jesus, and he asked them that exact same question. What do you want me to do for you? They asked for the best seats in glory, one on his right and one on his left. Power, status, and position.
Bartimaeus asks, “Let me see again.”
The insiders asked for thrones. The man on the roadside asked for sight. And I wonder which one of them saw Jesus more clearly all along.
Jesus could have just healed him. He obviously knew what a blind man wanted. But he asks, because mercy doesn’t treat you like a problem to fix. It treats you like a person whose voice matters.
There’s a scene in Les Misérables I can’t read without getting choked up. Jean Valjean has just gotten out of prison, and nobody in town will take him in. Then a bishop opens his door. He feeds him, gives him a bed, and treats him like an honored guest. And in the middle of the night, Valjean steals the bishop’s silver and runs.
The police catch him and drag him back. And the bishop looks at Valjean and says, in effect, There you are! You forgot the candlesticks. He hands them over. Then, after the police leave, he tells Valjean that he has bought his soul for God.
That’s mercy. Not just you’re off the hook. It’s here is a whole new life you did not earn and could not have imagined.
That’s what Jesus does on the road outside Jericho. “Go; your faith has made you well.” That word well can also mean saved. Healed, whole, and made new.
And then the last line of the story, which might be my favorite. Bartimaeus “followed him on the way.”
Followed him where? Up that steep road. To Jerusalem. Toward the cross. The man who couldn’t see now sees exactly where he wants to go, and it’s wherever Jesus is going.
God shows mercy. Not reluctant mercy, not mercy with a waiting list. It’s mercy that stops in the middle of the road for you.
So let me ask you, gently. What’s your cloak?
What are you holding onto that has kept you on the side of the road? Maybe it’s shame, or an old story about who you are that you’ve told yourself so long it feels like the truth. Maybe it’s the need to look like you’ve got it all together. Maybe it’s a voice, from long ago or from this week, that keeps telling you to hush.
Or maybe it’s just something familiar. The cloak was warm, after all. It kept him safe. Some of what we cling to isn’t bad. It’s just been ours for so long that we’re afraid of who we’d be without it.
You don’t have to throw it all off today. But you can loosen your grip. You can let Jesus ask you what he asked Bartimaeus: What do you want me to do for you? And you can tell him the truth.
He’s not going anywhere. He has stopped. He’s standing still. And he’s calling you.
In a moment, we’ll come to this table. Some of us will come confident and some of us will barely make it. That’s fine. Bartimaeus came stumbling, half-blind, with his cloak lying in the dust behind him.
You come too. Leave what you need to leave. Bring what you need to bring.
Lord, have mercy. And friends, God does. Take heart! God shows mercy.