Bartimaeus and The Shawshank Redemption – Homily for the 30th Sunday in Ordinary Time – Year B

You might remember the movie The Shawshank Redemption,
the story of Andy Dufresne, a man unjustly imprisoned for many years.
In the course of his time in prison,
he gains the trust of the prison staff by helping with various tasks,
like handling the finances and overseeing the prison library.
One of the most powerful scenes in the movie happens
when Andy finds himself unsupervised in the warden’s office.

He is sitting in the warden’s office in a chair, all alone,
and he notices a crate on the floor.
He notices the crate is full of vinyl records.
He notices that one of the recordings is an opera by Mozart.
He notices that there is a record player in the office.
And he notices that the prison PA system is in the warden’s office.

So what does Andy do?

He locks the door.
He takes the opera record out of the crate and out of its sleeve.
He puts the vinyl record on the turntable.
He connects the turntable to the PA system.
And in clear defiance of the rules,
and risking certain punishment,
he broadcasts a beautiful duet from the opera
to the entire prison.

For one brief moment, the music transcends the walls of the prison,
reaching the ears and hearts of every inmate,
lifting them out of their harsh reality.

For this act of defiance, Andy is put in solitary confinement,
and when he finally gets back to the general population,
his friend Red asks how in the world he survived the isolation.
Andy replies, “It was easy, I had Mr. Mozart to keep me company.”
“They let you have the record player?” Red asks.
“It was in here,” Andy says, tapping his heart.
“That’s the beauty of music. They can’t get that from you.”

That scene captures something profound:
In the darkest, most confining moments of life,
something deeper—a song, a truth, an awareness—
can lift us out of our suffering.
It’s something that no prison, no circumstance can take away.
It is, in the words of spiritual writer Thomas Merton,
the divine presence within us—the part of us that longs for freedom,
for connection, for healing.
And it’s always there, waiting for us to tap into it.

In today’s Gospel, we meet Bartimaeus,
a blind man begging by the roadside.
In his own way, Bartimaeus is imprisoned—
confined by his blindness,
confined by the limitations placed on him by society,
confined by his circumstances.
But something inside him, deep within, longs for more.
He knows there is a presence, a light,
a healing that can lift him out of his suffering.
And so, when Jesus passes by, Bartimaeus cries out,
“Jesus, Son of David, have pity on me!”

The crowd tries to silence him.

How often do the voices around us,
and even the voices within us,
try to quiet that deeper longing?
They tell us to accept things as they are,
stop hoping for something better,
stay in the dark.

But Bartimaeus refuses to be silenced.
He cries out all the louder,
“Jesus, Son of David, have pity on me!”
His blindness is real, but so is his faith,
his deep awareness that something greater is possible.

And Jesus stops.
Jesus always stops when we cry out from the depths.
He stops, and he asks Bartimaeus a question that seems so simple,
yet is so profound:
“What do you want me to do for you?”

That question is not just for Bartimaeus;
it’s for all of us.
What is it that you truly seek?
What is the deeper healing, the deeper freedom,
that your heart longs for?
Take some time this week to uncover that for yourself, and tell Jesus.

Healing isn’t always about fixing what’s on the surface.
It’s also about transformation.
The healing Bartimaeus seeks isn’t just about physical sight.
In his blindness, he sees more clearly than the crowd around him.
He knows that the healing he seeks
can only come from the One who is the light of the world,
the One who gathers the broken, the lame, the blind—
just as Jeremiah prophesied in the first reading.

We all have our own form of blindness.
Maybe it’s the blindness of fear, of doubt, of shame, or of distraction.
We live in a world that constantly tells us to look outside of ourselves
for meaning, for healing.
But the answer isn’t out there somewhere.
It’s in here, in the heart that longs for God,
in the cry that won’t be silenced,
in the divine presence that dwells within.
And as Andy says, “They can’t get that from you.”

When we have the courage to cry out like Bartimaeus,
to name our blindness, to ask for healing,
we find that God is already there, waiting for us, asking us,
“What do you want me to do for you?”

It’s not a question that comes from a distant, uncaring God.
It comes from a God who is close, who is always near,
and who longs to bring us to a place of deeper freedom and joy.
“For in him we live and move and have our being.”

Notice that after Bartimaeus receives his sight,
he doesn’t go back to his old life.
His old life was all about sitting by the roadside, alone,
disengaged from the world.
Now, he follows Jesus on the way.
His healing leads to a new journey,
a new way of seeing and being in the world.
It’s a reminder that God’s healing always calls us forward.
It’s not just about restoring what was lost;
it’s about opening us up to something new, something deeper.

And so, the question to meditate on this week
is the question Jesus asks each of us:
“What do you want me to do for you?”

Like Andy Dufresne in The Shawshank Redemption,
there’s a part of us that longs for something beyond the walls
of our daily struggles—
a beauty so profound it can’t be described,
a love so powerful it breaks through all darkness.

When Andy played that opera duet
and it soared throughout the prison,
his friend Red described it this way:
“I have no idea what those two Italian ladies were singing about…
some things are left best unsaid.
I would like to think they were singing about something so beautiful
it can’t be expressed in words
and makes your heart ache because of it…
It was like some beautiful bird flapped into our drab little cage
and made these walls dissolve away.”

Jesus is that beautiful song for us.
He comes into our lives
to lift us beyond the prison walls we’ve built for ourselves,
dissolving them with the beauty and freedom of his healing love.
Like Bartimaeus, we only need the courage to cry out
to the divine presence within us that nothing—
not even life’s hardships—can take away.