The Daily Office · Mark 10:46–52
Have mercy
Mark 10:46–52
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What's happening here
Mark is the shortest and fastest-moving of the Gospels, and the scene at Jericho is one of the only times he slows down enough to give a beggar a name. Bartimaeus — "son of Timaeus" — sits by the road, hears that Jesus is passing, and cries out with a two-word formula the church would later build into the most repeated prayer in Christian liturgy. The crowd tells him to be quiet. He shouts louder. Jesus stops.
The word that matters
Greek · have mercy — the imperative of mercy
Eleēson is the imperative form of eleeō, the verb behind "alms" and "almsgiving." It is not simply "be kind to me"; it is the full-weight request for the mercy a superior owes a supplicant, the word a defendant shouts to a judge. Bartimaeus's two-word cry — "Son of David, have mercy" — pairs a messianic title with the formal petition word. The early Greek church built it into the Kyrie eleison that has been sung in liturgy for seventeen centuries. The blind man on the roadside wrote the shortest and most durable Christian prayer.
Where else this shows up
Luke 18:13
The tax collector in the temple, standing far off, beating his chest: "God, be merciful to me, a sinner." The same cry, shorter.
Matthew 9:27
Two blind men on another road with the same formula: "Have mercy on us, Son of David."
Psalm 51:1
David's Hebrew anticipation: "have mercy on me, O God, according to thy lovingkindness."