Concord and Jericho – as ever present events
This is the time of the year to visit New England, what with its rich autumn foliage. The inns and hotels are all booked up by people who long to walk or drive through a landscape that could have been lifted from an impressionist work of art. But such a tour might take in a bit of history as well as the beauty of nature – New England having been the location of our birth as a nation. And such a tour would list the town of Concord in Massachusetts high among places to visit. And mostly to see the old Concord Bridge where the minutemen turned back the British regulars – triggering the revolution that would result in the United States of today.
Visitors would also see there a monument erected in 1836 (60+ years after the battle) at whose dedication Ralph Waldo Emerson recited a poem we memorized in my schoolboy days:
By the rude bridge that arched the flood, / Their flag to April’s breeze unfurled, / Here once the embattled farmers stood / And fired the shot heard round the world.
The foe long since in silence slept; / Alike the conqueror silent sleeps; / And Time the ruined bridge has swept / Down the dark stream which seaward creeps.
On this green bank, by this soft stream, / We set today a votive stone; / That memory may their deed redeem, / When, like our sires, our sons are gone.
Emerson of course was a poet and as such he did not think of the event at Concord as a passing event. His poetry expects that Concord will occur again and again down through time – as, for instance, during the impending Civil War that would threaten the nation’s survival . . . and in crises yet to come. Out of such crises the ghosts of those “embattled farmers” would appear again – in you and me – to stem whatever tide of tyranny would swamp us all.
The writings of the Bible carry a similar punch. Take today’s mini-drama of Jesus’ cure of a blind man along the road in Jericho. The early church did not remember that story as a mere record of a past event about an individual back then, about a healing that “proves Jesus was divine” – turning the event into a stained glass window to be stared at from a distance of 2000 years.
Insofar as I am blind, too shallowly educated, too easily brainwashed by others as blind as I am, too preoccupied with my own survival to see the desperation on the faces of Syrian refugees drenched with rain and mud, I am that blind man of Jericho. And I cry out today, “Rabbi, I want to see!” And Jesus says in effect, “By the very fact that you want to see you have begun to see.”
The episode of the blind man of Jericho is always a current event – an old event that can catch up with us, if we are fed up with walking around in a daze, tapping our way from day to day and never seeing the bigger, wider, startling world – like New England in autumn – that lies open all around us.