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 (Mark 6:52, 8:19-21), leading Jesus to say to them in frustration, “You have eyes—can’t you see?” (Mark 8:18). They hadn’t grasped what these miracles revealed about Him.
Now look at the story following the blind man’s healing (Mark 8:27-29). 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” (Mark 8:29), 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.
NLT 365-day reading plan passage for today: Matthew 5:1-16
More:
Read the rest of Mark 8 to see how Peter’s vision of Jesus still needed improvement, even after his revelation.
Next:
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?
daisymarygoldr on June 28, 2011 at 2:40 am
Interestingly, this blind man knew what people and trees looked like. Mark does not tell us whether this person was born blind. Maybe this man had been able to see earlier in life, before he became blind. I don’t know. But this we know that even after seeing the Messiah, a believer can still suffer from partial sight.
Peter tells us when we fail to grow and develop… we remain shortsighted (2 Peter 1:8-9). We may have a close up view but have trouble seeing the bigger picture which is at a distance. Such Christians live more for present, material things than focusing on future and spiritual things which no eye has seen (1 Corinthians 2:9).
Paul’s earnest prayer for our spiritual vision is “The eyes of your understanding being enlightened; that (we) may know…” (Ephesians 1:18). There is a huge difference between knowing about Jesus, and knowing Jesus Christ Himself. It is my prayer that the Lord will open the eyes of my heart so that I can see Him. Revelation comes progressively as we grow and mature in the knowledge of God revealed through Jesus Christ His Son.
eppistle on June 28, 2011 at 6:15 am
Some people say “Seeing is believing.” And there is some truth to that in that Jesus said, “Seek and you will find” (Matthew 7:7). The problem however is that our natural state, “no one seeks God” (Romans 3:11), because sin has blinded us from the truth. In reality, “believing is seeing” – that when we have sufficient (though not overwhelming) evidence to believe, we choose to believe. At that point, our eyes are opened to see the supernatural reality that had been blind to.
janmacy on June 28, 2011 at 8:18 pm
“A glass window stands before us. We raise our eyes and see the glass; we note its quality, and observe its defects; we speculate on its composition. Or . . . we look straight through it onto the great prospect of land and sea and the sky beyond.” Benjamin B Warfield.
I found this quote on August 21, 2009. It changed my life.
We see what we want to see. We see what we are looking for.
Thanks for you devotion. It was an awesome reminder of what happened to me almost 2 years ago.
Below is my blog post from that day.
http://macymemoirs.blogspot.com/2009/08/glass-window-in-wee-hours-of-today.html?utm_source=BP_recent
winn collier on June 28, 2011 at 8:43 pm
each Sunday, I pray for “eyes to see.” Thank you for giving me another angle (view) on that.