The Blind Man at Bethsaida

The Blind Man at Bethsaida

Mark 8:22-25

Forty-three years ago, the very first class that I had in seminary was an intensive Greek course.  We covered a semester’s worth of ancient Greek in three weeks. There were 5 hours of class each day, Monday through Friday.  There was a quiz every day, Monday through Thursday.  Each Friday, there was a major exam.  So, when you weren’t in class, you just buried yourself in homework and preparation for the next quiz.  To top things off, the course was taught by a terrifyingly brilliant New Testament scholar from the University of Chicago, Larry Welborn, who seemed utterly stunned that we all were not as terrifyingly brilliant as him.  Mostly, we were just terrified.

The challenge of the class wasn’t just learning to read a new alphabet, memorizing new vocabulary, and being schooled in a different grammar.  The extra challenge was that this was ancient Greek.  So, my old strategy with other languages of figuring out what was happening contextually and then kind of “reverse engineering” the details of what was being said, did not work.  In ancient Greek, they were talking about a very different world, one that involved apostles and rabbis and the like.  I kept running into the phrase, “There is a camel on the roof.”  Was this a common problem in the ancient world?

Given all of these complications, you can imagine the challenge of running into today’s text.  It was actually a text we were supposed to translate for a test.  Dr. Welborn might have been gracious and—I don’t know—picked a text that was familiar, say “The Good Samaritan.”  We could have all had that moment of enlightenment when we realized that we didn’t have to actually translate the text because we already know it in English.  Larry wasn’t going there.  He picked our text from Mark, a text that I would guess none of us remembered.  And, I would imagine, that as we all worked to translate this unknown text, we all were likely crashing into the same problem at the same time:  “Is this bind guy really saying that he saw people but they looked like walking trees?”  You try to write that down on a test and hand it to “God’s gift to Greek studies!”

Honestly, having trembled before this text decades ago, I’ve always felt a special connection to it ever since.  It always speaks to me and almost always says something new.  And always, in the end, there are those walking trees…

Here’s where we need to start.  By all reports, Jesus was a healer.  I’m not, nor are you…at least not in the “laying on of hands” kind of way.  We have doctors.  The ancient world didn’t, at least not in Israel.  So, it was a terrible thing to get sick, especially if you were poor and couldn’t access even the “sketchy” medical services of the day.  Sick people were desperate for help.  Jesus was drawn to desperate people.  Jesus also seems to have been able to do things we can’t do.  

This doesn’t mean that we can’t be healers.  We are healers in all the different ways that we demonstrate care to those who are sick:  with a bowl of soup or a casserole; with our willingness to sit in silence, with someone who is struggling.  In Iowa, when someone was sick, it wasn’t uncommon for the nearby farmers to show up and bring the sick farmer’s crop in or care for his cattle.  In my own time in the hospital, some of the most healing people were the folks who cleaned my room but connected with me while they did it.  Just because we can’t heal the way that Jesus healed doesn’t mean we should turn our back on the sick.  We do what we can and we know, deep down, that every little thing that is done matters.

That’s actually where we start in our text.  Before Jesus ever meets the blind man, healing has already begun.  Bethsaida was the home of Peter, Andrew, and Phillip, three of Jesus’ disciples.  It was also where Jesus fed five thousand people with only a few loaves and some fish to offer. This tiny town on the north shore of the Sea of Galilee might have seemed like the middle of nowhere to most people, but for Jesus and the disciples this was their home turf.  

In Bethsaida, Jesus and his disciples would have been a known quantity. Therefore, it shouldn’t surprise us that one day someone got the idea that they should take their blind neighbor to meet Jesus.  They had felt compassion for this poor man for years but his situation seemed hopeless.  Maybe if they could get him to Jesus, all hope would not be lost…

I want to pause long enough here to recognize that this willingness on the part of the community around the blind man to resurrect hope for him and to accompany him to the place where he might be helped is often the kind of healing that we get to do.  Here’s someone who has struggled with something for a long time—back pain, or grief and loss, or unemployment—whatever.  One day the thought arises, “What could we do to help this person?” Every now and then, the answer might be, “Here’s what I (or we) can do and we can totally get this done all on our own!”  (We love those moments, right!). More often, though, the best I (or we) can do, is to get this person to that other person who might actually be able to get the job done.

Referrals are a big deal! So, is the moment where the thought, “Here’s who you should see…” is accompanied by the offer, “And I’ll go with you.” I’ll drive you.  I’ll help you plan out your questions and I’ll take notes on the answers. “I know that it is scary to believe that hope is possible. Let’s face that fear together.”

Chances are that the blind man pretty much knew his way around Bethsaida.  It was his home.  He probably had a pretty good mental map.  What he wouldn’t have necessarily known was how to find Jesus.  After all, he was just passing through.  The people who took the blind man by the arm and said, “Let’s go this way… I hear he’s near the old well,” are an absolutely essential part of this healing story.  Without them, none of this happens.  It’s up to them (and up to us in our own ways) to bring hope to life for the hopeless.

Now, imagine how brave the blind man is.  How many days has he worked so hard to keep false hope shut down, to refuse to think things like, “Those flowers smell amazing!  I wonder what they look like?” All of his energy is going into getting by, doing what he has to do to cope with his blindness.  He has learned how to live in the dark.  Then, in an instant, he’s confronted with people who want to disrupt that plan:  “What if Jesus of Nazareth could heal you?  What if you could see again.”  We all have hard things that we’ve learned to live with.  We’ve all given up hope along the way.  What would we do if someone suddenly approached us and asked, “What if you don’t have to live with that—that pain, that addiction, that illness, that grief?  What if change is possible?  Would the fear of disappointment keep you from entertaining the possibility at all?

The blind man does the most amazing thing.  He trusts.  He chooses to believe in the possibility of change.  He opens himself up to the chance that he might actually be able to see…

(For all of us who are not blind, we should pause for a moment and recognize that we are nevertheless blind to all sorts of things.  We all have our blind spots.  We all have the things we choose to see clearly and the things we choose to completely ignore.  We all, when we are invited to take another look, have to ask ourselves, “What if seeing with new eyes changes everything?”)

So, the blind man trusts his community enough that he allows himself to be led toward help and healing.  That’s a big deal!  But remember, he knows those people.  He knows his town.  There is some basis for trust up to this point.  That’s when things get really crazy.  The community takes him to Jesus.  Then, what does Jesus do?  Jesus takes him away from all the people he knows and away from everything else that is familiar.  Jesus leads him out of the village and into the unknown.  

Imagine how much trust this took for the blind man!  If Jesus abandons him, he will have no idea how to get home again.  There are no familiar cobblestones beneath his feet.  There will be no one who will answer when he cries out: “Can anybody help me here?”  He is totally, 100 percent, vulnerable.

We should all probably etch this moment into our consciousness.  When we are involved in transforming change, in our crucial moment, we are probably going to feel just as exposed as the blind man.  You finally take the crucial step and face what you’ve been running from forever.  When you do that, you are looking at what you’ve tried so hard not to see.  Who do you trust when you’re terrified? If you’re the blind man, your gamble on Jesus is a good bet.  And, I hope, that when you are brave and choose to trust someone to guid youe through your darkness, those people come through and prove trustworthy! 

Right when you feel good for a moment, things almost always  get weirder.  Jesus stops leading the blind man.  He lets go of him.  (Imagine how alone the blind man felt—even for an instant.) Nothing happens until finally something does:  “Is that saliva on my eyes?” How totally unprepared would he have been for that sensation?  Then, Jesus speaks to him:  “Can you see anything?” With great expectations the man opens his eyes.

Things aren’t dark anymore but things sure as heck aren’t clear.  (Haven’t we all been there? “Well, something has changed but it sure wasn’t the change I hoped for!”). This is where the line comes in from my Greek class:  “I can see people, but they look like walking trees.” (It took all of my courage to turn that translation in.). The blind man had to be asking himself, “Isn’t this actually worse than not seeing at all?”

Here’s the thing…If Jesus had been any other charismatic healer, he would have stayed in the village and healed the man and gotten all the five star reviews.  If he was any other charismatic healer and he wasn’t sure he could do the job, he might have taken the man somewhere private.  However, if he had been any other charismatic healer, when this guy started talking about “people who look like walking trees” he would have hit the road.  Jesus isn’t any other charismatic healer.  Jesus tries again.  He lays his hands on the man’s eyes and this time, the blind man sees everything clearly.

Sometimes we will be the community carrying someone to the care that they need, accompanying them on the way to get help.  May we be trustworthy in that role!  Sometimes we will be the person who is desperately in need of help, ourselves.  May we be brave enough to be led through that darkness in the sheer hope that things might finally change.  Always, Christ will be present in that darkness and in that healing, leading us to see what really matters more clearly than we’ve ever seen it before.

We can’t give up on each other.  We have to work together to keep hope alive.  We have to remind ourselves that Jesus never, ever, gives up on us.