I Can See at Last
“When they arrived at Bethsaida, some people brought a blind man to Jesus, and they begged him to touch and heal the man. Jesus took the blind man by the hand and led him out of the village. Then, spitting on the man’s eyes, he laid his hands on him and asked, ‘Can you see anything now?’ The man looked around, ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I see people, but I can’t see them very clearly. They look like trees walking around.’ Then Jesus placed his hands over the man’s eyes again. As the man stared intently, his sight was completely restored, and he could see everything clearly. Jesus sent him home, saying, ‘Don’t go back into the village on your way home’” – Mark 8:22-26 (NLT).
Jesus does something here that he does not do in any other recorded healing. He heals a man gradually. In all of his other healings, people were instantly well, but this man becomes well in two stages. There is a startling spiritual truth in why he does this, and we’ll talk about it, but first let’s look at the miracle itself.
Jesus spits on the man’s eyes. This seems unusual to us in our day and age when doctors do most of our healing in sanitary conditions. We’ve certainly never had a doctor spit on us to make us better. If he did, we’d probably sue him for malpractice!
But in Jesus’ day the use of saliva was commonly associated with healing. In his book Natural History, Pliny the elder writes about how human saliva was considered to be an effective eye ointment against ophthalmia. Ophthalmia is the severe inflammation of the eyeball or the conjunctiva (the mucous membrane lining the inner surface of the eyelid). This can cause blindness such as the man in our story had. Also, Tacitus (A.D. 55-120) describes how the emperor Vespasian supposedly healed a blind man with his saliva. Of course, we know that saliva cannot heal a disease, but that is not the point.
The point is that this man would have been familiar with the association of saliva and healing. Jesus knew this, and so he healed the man in a fashion that made sense to the man. God is ever doing this. He speaks to us on our level and with words and ways that we can grasp. He loves us enough to meet us where we are and he walks with us from there. In language that we can understand, he reveals himself to us day by day.
We should all be like that: speaking and sharing with others in ways that are meaningful to them. We should never try to “wow” others with our vocabulary or impress them with our knowledge. Instead, like Jesus, we should speak to others plainly and with simplicity, reaching them where they are.
Ah, but now to the startling insight concerning this healing. As we said earlier, Jesus heals this man gradually. Why does he do this? Well, it certainly wasn’t because Jesus ran out of power to heal. He had infinite power! Nor was it a lack of faith in this man, for faith isn’t even mentioned here. So why, then, does Jesus heal in two stages?
I believe the healing of this blind man is a picture to us of the spiritual blindness of Jesus’ time regarding his identity. At first, the disciples weren’t sure who Jesus was – this truth dominates the first half of Mark (the first 8 ½ chapters). Then at about the halfway point (Mark 8:30) Peter and the other disciples make their discovery that Jesus is the Messiah. But this truth is still not entirely clear to them. Like the blind man, they begin to see, but the truth comes to them gradually. So during the second half of Mark (the second 8 ½ chapters) they slowly begin to understand just who Jesus is, culminating with a clear vision of him after his resurrection. Like the blind man who finally saw people instead of trees, the blind disciples finally see God instead of a man when they look at Jesus. They finally grasp why he came to earth and what his purpose was. They finally know that he came to establish a spiritual kingdom, not an earthly one, and that this kingdom was made possible by his death and resurrection for the sins of the world.
It is ever this way in our spirituality. First, God’s ways are not clear to us. We are blind to him and his realities. Then, our eyes begin to open. Gradually we understand him and his dealings with us. Finally, we see him clearly as we encounter him day by day. But our vision is ever sharpened as we continue to encounter pockets of spiritual blindness in our lives that we didn’t know we had. So the entire Christian life is one grand discovery of God. Gradually, day by day, we discover him anew; ever sharpening our vision of him; ever deepening our understanding of his character and ways. Finally, one day we will see him face to face and our vision of him will be crystal clear.
Then we shall say, “Glory to God! I can see at last!”