He took the blind man by the hand and led him outside the village. When he had spit on the man’s eyes and put his hands on him, Jesus asked, “Do you see anything?”. He looked up and said, “I see people; they look like trees walking around”. Once more, Jesus put his hands on the man’s eyes. Then his eyes were opened, his sight was restored, and he saw everything clearly. Jesus sent him home... (Mark 8:23-26a NIV).
I’ve always been intrigued by this Gospel episode. Unlike all the other accounts of healings by Jesus, this one doesn’t seem to “take” right away. Jesus has to lay his hands on the man twice because after the first time, the man’s vision is only partially healed. People “look like trees” to him; their particular humanity is lost on him.
Jesus takes the man off by himself, away from the clamor and distractions of the town. Only there, alone with Jesus, does this healing take place. The man’s encounter with Jesus is extremely intimate. Jesus uses his saliva to heal the man, something very personal indeed. It is interesting to note that an ancient tradition believed that God used his “saliva” and the dust of the earth to fashion the clay used in the creation of Adam. Is Jesus perhaps “re-creating” this man who was born with a defect that keeps him from seeing properly? No matter, the man must willingly submit to this unusual ointment without drawing back; he must humbly trust the process, stay very close to Jesus and literally put himself into Jesus’ hands. And so must we if we are to receive our spiritual sight. We must give up our own ideas about how our healing is to come about. We must let Jesus have his way. He asks only that we ask for the grace to trust him fully.
The blind man is an icon for our own particular issues, be they emotional, psychological, or physical. The man is physically blind, while most of us are not that. But our own maladies cause us to be spiritually blind. Jesus wants to heal that spiritual blindness so that we might not see life through the lens of our pain and distorted thoughts any longer, but rather see Him, in the midst of our circumstances, loving us and caring for us and redeeming our past pain. Only Jesus can do this, and this is what he longs to do.
St. Mother Teresa of Calcutta referred to the ones she and her Sisters ministered to in India as “Jesus in a distressing disguise”. The healing of our spiritual vision allows us to begin to be able to see the image of God engraved upon every soul we encounter; to see with Jesus’s own eyes, and not just our own wounded, myopic ones. Like the Prodigal’s father who was able to recognize his own son underneath all the filth and ruin, we desire to be fully healed so as to “see everything clearly”.
The end of the Gospel account is instructive. Jesus sends the man home. For many of us, home is the most challenging place for us to “see” differently and relate with fresh eyes. Jesus wants the man in the Gospel to be an apostle of his love, a witness of Jesus’s power to heal and transform. He sends him back so as to experience the joy of bringing others into their own experience of healing. And that is what Jesus wants of us as well.
Lessons From Love School 