Mark 8.22-26.
People are fascinated by healing stories where Jesus cures people with spit. ’Cause he didn’t just do it the one time. Twice he cured blind men with it; here, and in
What mainly gets us is the ick factor. Our culture doesn’t think of saliva as sanitary. Even though people spit-shine things all the time—glasses, phones, jewelry, shoes, their children—a number of people cringe at such behavior, because spit has germs in it. And yeah, human saliva has bacteria in it. But it also has a lot of digestive enzymes and white blood cells in it. Saliva protects us from a lot more than we realize.
Whenever Jesus cured people with spit, it was reflective of the ancients’ attitudes about spit. Like us, they cleaned with spit. And when Jesus cured people with spit, it represented cleaning. The Hebrews thought of sickness as a form of uncleanness. It made you
Blindness too. ’Cause let’s face it, sometimes people get stuff in their eyes, and it blinds them. Happens to me every allergy season.
Tobit 2.9-10 KWL - 9 That night I sat shiva, and slept by the courtyard wall because I was unclean. My face was uncovered.
- 10 I didn’t know there were sparrows on the wall.
- My eyes were open, and the sparrows emptied their bowels into my eyes.
- My eyes became white as tablets. I went to “physicians,” and they didn’t help me.
Tobit spent the next four years blind, till an angel instructed his son Tobias to cure him by anointing his eyes with fish-gall salve. And while this story isn’t in the Hebrew bible, it wasn’t unfamiliar to people of Jesus’s day: Blindness was related to uncleanness. People had stuff in their eyes. Tobit had bird poop, Paul had scales,
Yeah, I’ve heard theories the ancients thought spit had magical properties. Did not. People cleaned with it. So did Jesus. When he felt it necessary, he spat.
Nowadays when people ask for prayer ’cause they want God to heal them, sometimes they ask for certain things. They want us to put our hands on their head, or on the affected area. They might want to be daubed with oil. They might want a certain prayer. They don’t actually need any of these things, y’know. They only need Jesus. And sometimes they know they don’t… but it comforts them, and there’s nothing wrong with comforting people. Jesus didn’t need to cure anyone with spit, but he recognized his patients needed it, so he provided, because
Oh yeah, the story:
Mark 8.22-26 KWL - 22 Jesus and his students went to Beit Chayda.
- People brought him a blind man, and encouraged Jesus to touch him.
- 23 Grabbing the blind man’s hand, Jesus took him outside the village.
- Spitting in the man’s eyes, placing his hands on the man, Jesus asked him, “Can you see anything?”
- 24 Recovering his vision, the man said, “I see people—like trees. I see them walking around.”
- 25 Then Jesus placed his hands on the man’s eyes again.
- He saw clearly, his vision restored. He gazed at everything clearly.
- 26 Jesus sent him to his house, telling him, “You ought not enter the village, nor say anything in the village.”
In stages?
The other thing Christians find fascinating about this story is the man wasn’t instantly, totally cured. He was gradually cured. Cured in stages.
It strikes a lot of people as wrong: Isn’t Christ Jesus almighty? Shouldn’t people, when he puts his hands on ’em, be instantly, finally, totally cured? Shouldn’t his healing power surge through them so mightily, not only does he cure the ailment they’re worried about, but everything else gets cured at the same time?—they came to him with partial deafness, but after he’s through with them, their acne also clears up, their occasional indigestion goes away, their hangnails and cavities disappear, they now have perfect eyesight and instant recall, their hair never turns white, and they inexplicably live to the age of 150?
Yeah, I deliberately made it sound ridiculous ’cause it is ridiculous. The only time God’s gonna absolutely, finally cure us of absolutely everything—including death—is at our resurrection
He has his reasons for not fixing everything at once. They vary from person to person. For one it’s because he has more to teach them through their suffering. For another (
So perhaps that’s the deal with this blind guy: Jesus cured one thing, which restored the man’s vision partway. Then he cured another thing, which restored it the rest of the way. First cataracts, then severe nearsightedness.
The other deal is this: Most
Here, not. Jesus put his hands on the guy, got a partial result, put his hands back on, and kept ’em there till he got a full result.
So why might the Holy Spirit work like this? Well when he does this sort of thing with us—when we pray for healing, and he cures us part of the way—it’s obvious he’s trying to
But would that apply to Jesus? Did he need his faith stretched like that?
No. Not that people who write
If Christians don’t bother
So if the point was to stretch faith, whose faith needed stretching? Anyone who witnessed this miracle. His students. He blind man. The folks who’ve been reading Mark ever since he wrote it 1,950-some years ago. Us too.
Don’t stop till you get enough.
I translated
“I see people—like trees. I see them walking around.”
This man wasn’t so blind he couldn’t see something so massive as a tree, but people weren’t so easy. After Jesus did his thing, now he could see people.
It may be other faith-healers tried cleaning this man’s eyes to see what results they might get—and this was as good as they got. He could see shapes and forms. Not much more; nothing distinct. And it may be, up to this point, Jesus hadn’t actually done a miracle yet: He simply cleaned the guy’s eyes with his spit, and this was as far as a natural cure would get ’em. So now it was time for the Holy Spirit to take things further.
Hence Jesus put his hands on the man’s eyes, and now he could see everyone and everything. People looked like trees no more. He could distinguish faces. He had his eyesight back.
It’s likewise our duty, as God’s followers, to push the Holy Spirit as far as he’s willing to go. Jesus taught us to pray for things and not give up.
And yet some people are perfectly satisfied with slight improvement. Which is why they’re not entirely cured, even though the Spirit is entirely willing to cure them. Never settle! Keep praying.