We inhabitants of the earth are a people in exile. We are not at home on the very land we occupy, and so we rape and plunder it. We are not at home with each other, and so we violate each other’s dignity and kill. When one of us cries out prophetically to the Lord, as the blind beggar Bartimaeus did, the others “scold him to make him keep quiet.”

Fortunately, though, we have a Lord who “will bring them back from the land of the north, who will gather them from the ends of the world,” so that they can “return as an immense throng.” (First Reading) This is the Lord who has “done great things for us,” especially for the blind and the lame such as Bartimaeus. 

  “What do you want me to do for you?” Jesus asks the blind beggar. What do the people of the world want us Christians to do for them? Can we bring them home and lead them out of exile? Can we follow in the footsteps of Christ and “do away with death?” Can we provide the faith that will heal?

We do not know the time for the consummation of the earth and of humanity. Nor do we know how all things will be transformed. As deformed by sin, the shape of this world will pass away. But we are taught that God is preparing a new dwelling place and a new earth where justice will abide, and whose blessedness will answer and surpass all the longings for peace which spring up in the human heart.

Vatican II, Constitution on the Church in the Modern World,
1965: 39