NOTES for Mar 10:46-52
Jesus performs healings a little differently each time. Sometimes He touches a person and lays His hands on him, and sometimes He says, as He said to the blind man He healed on the Jericho road: your faith has saved you. What, then, saved the others? Was it not faith? Of course it was: without faith Jesus can help no one. This is, of course, faith as trust, trust in God and trust in Him Himself, the One through whom God acts, through whom God's power and God's love act.
For healing, such trust was enough: the person being healed did not need to understand truly who stood before him; he did not need to see in Jesus the Messiah, still less the Son of God. Something else mattered: trust in Jesus as the One through whom God acts, and acts in fullness, so that nothing is impossible for Him. Given such trust, a person can do more than establish a trusting relationship with Jesus; he can become part of His life, and therefore part of the Kingdom, at least in part and for a time. The fullness of such entry into the life of the Kingdom is determined in many ways by a person's spiritual condition. In principle, every person healed by Jesus, having shared through Him in the life of the Kingdom, could have remained its inhabitant, of course on condition that he preserved the state he experienced at the moment of healing. He would then have shared Christ's path with Him and would have been one of those for whom Pentecost became not the beginning, but the completion of the path, or at least of one of its stages.
For most of those healed, however, healing became only a return to the state available to people in the fallen world. Few of them regarded healing as the starting point of a further spiritual path. Meanwhile, the blind man healed by Jesus on the Jericho road followed Jesus. He decided to share at least part of the path with the One who had healed him. Such a step requires far more trust than simply coming up and asking for healing. With such trust, healing does not even require physical contact; trust alone is enough, the relationship itself as such. The evangelist tells us nothing about Bartimaeus's further fate, but one thing is clear: he followed Jesus. How far he went is a matter between the two of them.