This Sunday's gospel lesson (Mark) in the Common Lectionary involves Jesus' healing of blind Bartimeus outside of Jericho, so please bear with me as I connect the dots between him and Wall Street execs lined up at the trough.

The brief lesson informs us that Bartimaeus was blind from birth and it is fair to speculate on the nature of his blindness. You see, his name is a curiosity, a combination of Hebrew and Greek meaning son of Timaeus, a melding together of two contrary worldviews. The Timaeus was Plato's paean to philosophy... so Mark is taking a potshot at all philosophical schemes, all worldviews about how the world is to ordered. Mind you, in the background lurks the Roman Empire, a pyramid scheme if ever there was one, where wealth and power flowed to and emanated from the top and was ruthlessly enforced by brute force. It was a world where naturally Caesar was Lord.

Bartimaeus, we might conclude, bought into this so-called natural order. But it was anything but natural; it was a scheme of human devising.

The Lords of Wall Street may well imagine that theirs is the natural order. But it is anything but. And since humans made it, humans can unmake it as well. We are not hapless prey, waiting for the predators to pick clean our bones.

Bartimaeus came to see the errors of his ways and pleaded for healing. Too bad the Lords of Wall Street are captive to a sick belief system which surely must go -- and are heedlessly blind to the danger of rising populist wrath.