ODJ: what do you see?
June 28, 2011
Then Jesus placed His hands on the man’s eyes again, and his eyes were opened. His sight was completely restored, and he could see everything clearly (v.25).
READ: Mark 8:22-30
You can look at a window and see its glass and frame or you can look through a window and see the mountain vista it’s there to reveal. Today’s passage is a little like that. A superficial reading will miss the beauty of all that we’re meant to understand.
On first glance we see just another healing story about Jesus—albeit an unconventional one. Jesus takes a blind man and spits on his eyes in an attempt to heal him (Mark 8:22-26). “Can you see anything now?” Jesus asks afterward. “I see people, but I can’t see them very clearly,” the man replies. A second action completes the healing and his eyes are opened.
But what do you see in this story? Let’s widen our view. Mark’s gospel presents Jesus’ disciples as spiritually short-sighted. They missed the significance of Jesus’ two feeding miracles (6:52, 8:19-21), leading Jesus to say to them in frustration, “You have eyes—can’t you see?” (8:18). They hadn’t grasped what these miracles revealed about Him.
Now look at the story following the blind man’s healing (vv.27-29). The community doesn’t see who Jesus is either, thinking that He was a returned prophet. But when Peter utters that monumental phrase, “You are the Messiah” (v.29), Jesus’ identity is finally revealed.
This, says biblical scholar Ben Witherington, is what the two-stage healing of the blind man is really about. It mimicked the disciples’ early blindness to Jesus, their partial sight about Him, and then their full understanding.
What a parable of modern belief! We too start off blind about Jesus, gain partial sight (perhaps when we acknowledge Him as “a prophet”?), then finally see Him for who He really is—the Messiah, the Christ, the Son of the living God, and the One to whom we owe our lives. —Sheridan Voysey
How does this story match your own growth in understanding who Jesus is? What might the story tell us about how people come to know Him today?
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