"I see..."

“I see…”

Mark 8:22-26

This morning, I would like to offer a pretty close reading of our text.  What happens when you look at a text and then look at it again?  How does the text speak differently with each new pass?  This is a big part of my little world, re-reading scripture to see what I missed before.  Maybe there’s something you missed, too?

For as much time as I spent in Sunday School and worship as a child and an adolescent, I don’t remember ever hearing the story of the healing of the blind man at Bethsaida.  In my tradition (Presbyterianism) there was a lot more emphasis on Jesus as a teacher than as a healer.  Presbyterians jokingly refer to ourselves as “God’s frozen chosen.”  We generally will not be found swaying and throwing raising our hands in praise.  Rather, we sit very still, as if we are at a charity auction that is way out of our price range and we desperately want to make sure that no gesture that we make could be mistaken for a bid.  We sit still and listen carefully until a text pushes the envelope and makes us uncomfortable.  Then, we hold our breath and turn the page.

Jesus as a healer is a challenge.  At one level, when we read such stories, we simply need to come to grips with the notion that if Jesus was fully human and fully divine then he may well have been able to do things that we can’t do.  (Of course, we suspect that the televangelist who “heals” people on television may be no more capable than we are, too!)  Still, if Jesus is Jesus we may have to grant that some unexplainable things took place.

I’m going to be honest.  In my lifetime, I’ve seen Nureyev dance.  I sat in someone’s living room and listened to a man who won the Tchaikovsky competition in Moscow play the cello.  I’ve sat court side and watched Michael Jordan fly.  You get my drift here, right?  The notion that someone else may be able to do something that I can’t do shouldn’t be that much of a stretch if we have a shred of humility and if we are paying any attention at all.

So, layer one concerns granting that miraculous healings may have taken place.  I can’t prove they did.  I can’t prove they didn’t.  I can only grant that I live in a world in which sometimes you really would have to be there to believe it.  Or, sometimes, perhaps, you have to take the word of those who were…

If that was the only layer of meaning attached to the miraculous healings—that Jesus could do cool tricks—then they would become uninteresting pretty fast.  Okay…so Jesus had skills.  It seems like the only people who benefited were the folks who happened to be in the right place at the right time.  That hardly seems to get God off the hook for why so many people were suffering, then and now, right?

So, we take another look.  As we do, I want you to know this:  ancient Israel was a terrible place to get sick.  Living in Lake Bluff, we have so many options when we need medical help.  We have Northwestern and Rush and the University of Chicago for research hospitals.  We have fantastic physicians of every specialty, five minutes away.  This was not the case in ancient Israel.  Israel’s purity laws made illness a religious and moral failure.  Illness was a punishment from God.  When you got sick, you didn’t need a doctor.  You needed to go to the temple and see a priest.  

Now, before we get all judgmental at this point, we need to be honest.  The question, “What did you do wrong?” still accompanies illness on a regular basis.  Did people eat the wrong things?  Did they have the wrong habits?  Did they not meditate and practice mindfulness enough? What could they have done differently to avoid this fate?  What links the ancient world and ours is that seeing someone who is sick is frightening. We wonder, “What if that happened to me?”  In our fear, we look for a reason or two or six for why that couldn’t be us…because we didn’t do what they did!  Even when someone feels better, we inquire how they are doing, in part, to reassure ourselves that if we got what they had then we would get better, too.  Self-interest is always a factor in human affairs.

Greed usually comes in somewhere, too.  With so many people getting sick— 2000 years ago and today—there is real money to be made, right?  The temple saw this opportunity.  The temple’s own laws stunted any actual science and medicine in Israel because sick bodies and dead bodies were considered abjectly unclean.  So, the temple stepped into the void.  If you came to the temple, you could make a sacrifice to try to atone with the God who was justly punishing you with this disease.  If that didn’t work and you were rich enough, you might see one of the very few physicians who were available.  However, the best that they were likely to do was “prescribe” you a spice or two.  So, the bottom line was that if you got sick you were likely to get some “sacred” roasted goat and a baggie full of pizza spices—if you could pay for such things. Healing was a “pay-to-play” world—just as it remains in our own.

Of course, the actual bottom line was that the poor had no real access to quality health care.  (Honestly, if you wanted good healthcare you had to go to Egypt, regardless of how wealthy you were.)  Everyone knows that we’ve solved the problem of unequal access to healthcare, right?  (We haven’t?)  The only option that you had for any hope of a cure was to visit a traveling healer when they rolled into town.  (At this point, all of us should be quietly making quacking noises…)

The itinerant healers were mostly…quacks.  They came to town, often had people planted to be their miracle patients and were in it for…wait for it…the money.  They went to the center of town to draw a big crowd.  Their goal was to wow people, make a few bucks and move on to the next village or town.  You had to be desperate to see one of these guys but if you’ve been really sick, then I suspect you know what feeling desperate can lead us to do.

Early on, perhaps the primary way that Jesus was known was as a traveling healer.  If you were an average person in the days of Jesus’ ministry and someone asked you about him, you would have been most likely to say, “Ya…I hear he healed a deaf guy over in Vernon Hills!”  Again, the reason for this is that Jesus was actually healing people, which set him apart from the charlatans and also brought real hope to life.  Here’s the takeaway, though, at this point: when Jesus was identified as a traveling healer this meant, first and foremost, that he cared about the poor.  Jesus could have made a fortune healing the rich.  Instead, he spent his days with the overlooked and the ignored.

As the first Gospel written, Mark  acknowledges what that Jesus healed people.  However, he wants us to see that Jesus was so much more.  So, unlike the other healers who would have shouted out their successes, Jesus tells those who have been healed to tell no one.  Jesus insists that the sick person’s faith made them well.  Jesus never takes a dime.  He heals people and quietly moves on.

Our text takes this “Yes, I’m a healer, but…” motif one step further.  The worst thing that could ever have happened to a traveling healer was to try to heal someone and fail.  Perhaps, when this happened, they had some magician-like slight-of-hand way of distracting people as they made a hasty exit.  Listen again to our text this morning and hear how different Jesus’ response is…

We are in Bethsaida.  This happened to be Peter, Andrew and Phillip’s hometown.  It also happened to be the place, according to Luke, where Jesus would heal huge crowds of people and feed the five thousand.  This day was nothing like that.  A group of people bring a blind man to Jesus and beg Jesus to touch him.  Everyone of us who has been desperate to have a friend or family member healed can imagine the hope and the trust that are on the line for this group in handing over their loved one to Jesus.  It’s that moment when your spouse or your child or you friend is rolled on the cart back into surgery and you watch the sliding doors close behind them.  We all stand there and hold our breath.

Jesus does more than touch the man.  He takes him by the hand and leads him out of the village.  Can you imagine how terrifying that was for that man?  As a blind man, he must have counted every step and felt every wall.  Maybe, if you’ve been the patient wheeled back into surgery, you can identify here.  Nothing is familiar.  You are totally disoriented and completely in the hands of these people.  It feels like you are lost in space.

This, of course, is the moment when things nearly always get even weirder.  This is certainly the case for the blind man.  He stumbles along with Jesus holding his hand.  (I’ll just say, as an aside, I’ve been there and done that… stumbling through he dark, hoping God keeps a hold on me.)  Then, just after they stop, he feels something wet on his eyes.  Gross!  Then, he feels Jesus’ hands on his face.  Imagined how overwhelmed this man was!  

At that moment, Jesus breaks the silence:  “Can you see anything?”  Had Jesus been one of the regular, huckster traveling healers, he might have had magic words to say:  “Ta-Da!” “Presto Change-O!”—something like that.  Instead, Jesus is quiet.  The man opens his eyes.  Pretty quickly, the man announces that he can see something which is more than he could say before.  However, what he sees is so strange:  “I see trees but they look like men walking.”

This is the final point for me in my previous encounters with this text.  In this amazing moment of a partial healing, Jesus doesn’t flee in embarrassment or run for the hills like any self-respecting traveling healer would.  Nope, Jesus digs in:  “We’re trying to do something good here.  Let’s give it another go!” Since almost all of my life is filled with partial-successes, at best, I love the affirmation that you keep on trying.  Jesus doesn’t give up, nor should we!

Jesus tries again.  The man’s sight is restored.  He sees everything clearly—20/20 vision from now on.  And Just to drive the point home that Jesus is not your average traveling healer, Jesus tells the man, “Don’t go to the village. Head straight home.”

That’s as far as I’ve ever gone in this text…until this week.  Yes, Jesus cares about the plight of the poor and the sick.  Yes, Jesus wasn’t in the healing business for the dough or the fame.  Yes, Jesus never gives up.  But here’s the other thing…go back and think about what the man sees in his partial vision:  “I see men but they look like trees walking.” Just nonsense, right?

I don’t think so, not this time around.  Ask yourself, who would have looked like a tree, walking?  Got it? Jesus was going to look like that soon, as he carried his cross through the streets of Jerusalem toward the hill known as “The Skull.” Even before he is completely healed, the blind man sees who Jesus is.  What if the blind man is not having a vision problem? What if he’s having a vision? The formerly blind man now sees the truth to which everyone else is blind:  that the man who is intent on relieving his suffering is going to suffer, himself, that this man may not just be a healer but may be the Messiah.  Then, Jesus leans in and places his hands on the man’s face again until everything becomes clear.