The symbolism in today’s Gospel is obvious. The blindness of Bartimaeus represents our spiritual blindness but most especially the blindness of the Pharisees. They refuse to recognise that Jesus is the Messiah. They do not see things in their true perspective, most particularly when they come out with the nonsensical statement that by this healing Jesus is not keeping the Sabbath.

Bartimaeus experiences a double healing. His vision is restored and in addition he receives the gift of faith. Jesus is therefore presenting faith as true sight—seeing things as they really are.

This is most important. When we come to believe in God and in Jesus his Son we begin to see how things really are. Our view of the world and all that is in it is seen through new eyes. We recognise that what is visible with our own eyes and experienced through our senses isn’t the whole story.

The whole story is that God is the creator of all this, it has a purpose and in due course all created things will return to God. A crucial part of this is that God gives us free will because he wants us to love him voluntarily but that mankind has abused this privilege and so God sends Jesus to live among us and to give his life for our salvation—this is the greatest sign that there ever could be of God’s love for us.

Unfortunately only a few people see these things, only a few recognise what God’s plan is; only a minority understand and marvel in the wonders that God is working.

But we can count ourselves in that number. We are recipients of this Good News and we recognise it for what it is. And we do so not because of any special quality we have or because we are in any way intrinsically better than others—most likely it is the opposite because as we know Christ chooses the weak to confound the strong.

We can count ourselves in that number because God has given us the gift of faith—he has opened our eyes just as surely as he opened the eyes of blind Bartimaeus.

And it should always be our prayer that God will continue to bless us with this gift of faith which gives so much meaning to our lives. We don’t want to grow lukewarm and slack and lose this marvellous vision of the works of God; so each day pray that this gift will be renewed in you that as time passes the richness and wonder of God’s vision for the world will become evermore clear.

We all know what it is to cross a dark room searching for the light switch. We have all stubbed our toe on a chair leg as we grope in the dark searching for light. Sometimes we get a glimpse through the curtain as a car passes in the street and this might be just enough to enable us to orientate ourselves and find our way to the switch.

We have all experienced occasions such as these and they provide us with a very good metaphor for the sight which faith gives us.

St Paul says: You were darkness once but now you are light in the Lord. We have all surely experienced times in our life when we were in thrall to sin. But we know that while we experienced the glamour of sin for a while it soon became distasteful and unsatisfying. We know in our hearts that the only truly fulfilling kind of life is, to use the words of Paul, a life lived in complete goodness and right living and truth.

In our first reading we hear about how Samuel under the guidance of the Lord chose David, the most insignificant of Jesse’s sons, to be King. In the words of the reading, as Samuel anointed David: the spirit of the Lord seized on David and stayed with him from that day on.

I suggest that the very same thing has happened to each one of us gathered here. The Spirit of the Lord has seized hold of us in our Baptism; that is why we are here blessed with the gift of faith. We know that David was a very fallible man and on several occasions committed sinful acts but the promise was kept and the Lord remained with him and he always returned to the right path.

The Lord will remain with us also and he will gently lead us back to the right path. On Friday 22nd March we will be holding a Service of Reconciliation with the opportunity for individual confessions. If you feel you need a bit of “leading back”, then that might be the very opportunity you are looking for.