The Subaru car company had a slogan for a while back in 2002. The slogan was, “When you get it, you get it.” The slogan had a sort of I-know-something-that-you-don’t-know attitude. But, since it was an advertising slogan, it was hardly arrogant. After all, Subaru was telling me the good news. They knew something that I did not know; they were sharing that something with me; it was up to me to decide what to do with that information. This relates well to the concept of blindness being converted into sight.

A long time ago, Jesus was walking out of the city of Jericho, he came across a blind man named Bartimaeus. Old, blind Bart called out to Jesus for help; the people with Jesus rebuked Bart for his impertinence. Bart called out more, Jesus heard him and called out to him.

Mark 10:50-52 — And throwing off his cloak, he sprang up and came to Jesus. And Jesus said to him, “What do you want me to do for you?” And the blind man said to Him, “Rabbi, let me recover my sight.” And Jesus said to him, “Go your way; your faith has made you well.” And immediately he recovered his sight and followed Him on the way.

I find it interesting that when Bartimaeus received his sight, he immediately begins following Jesus. He did not return to his thrown cloak; he did not go back to sitting by the city entrance. He fell in step with Jesus. I can see some old friends of Bart’s bumping into him somewhere down the road and asking why Bart was following Jesus. Bart’s response: “When you get it, you get it.”

In church we talk and sing about once being blind and now being able to see — even though most of us have never been blind. We mean it in a spiritual sense: we were once blinded to something; there was some information out there that we did not know. But someone shared that information with us. And now we know. Now we can see. And now that we know it, we embrace it. We get it. But it does not stop there: we must continue sharing that good news with others. When you get it, you get it. And you tell everyone you know about it.

Tags: bartimaeus, blindness, Jesus, mark

This entry was posted by zac on Sunday, February 15th, 2009 at 6:44 pm and is filed under Weekly Jib Jab. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.