Open the Eyes of my Heart, Lord! - Mark 8:22-26

 

Open the Eyes of my Heart, Lord!

Mark 8:22-26

Introduction: This short account of the miraculous healing of a blind man in Bethsaida is unique to Mark. Because of how the healing is done, some see it as one of the more difficult passages in the NT. The context will make the meaning clear. The setting is in Bethsaida, a town near the border of Galilee, north of the lake, just on the east bank of the Jordan. This would be the last miracle Jesus does in this region (after this scene Jesus continues north, into the region of Caesarea Philippi, before beginning the final trip to Jerusalem). It leads into a climactic and transitional scene of the gospel, as the questions Mark has been asking and answering are explicitly addressed, 1) “Who is Jesus?” 2) “Why did He come?” and 3) “What does it mean to follow Him?” The rest of Mark 8 (Peter’s confession, Jesus’ explicit statement about his coming death and resurrection, and the call to discipleship) will bring to the forefront those questions. This miracle, like the healing of the deaf man in Mark 7, is done in private. It is done for the benefit of the person who is healed, and also as a revelation to bolster the faith of the disciples. Unlike any other healing that Jesus does this one comes in two steps, first a partial healing, and then a second touch, and the man sees “…everything clearly...”

       Immediately before this scene, with the disciples in the boat discussing leaven and bread (and just before that the Pharisees, questioning Jesus and despite all they had seen and heard, asking for “a sign from heaven”) and then the climactic confession by Peter that follows (Mark 8:29), it seems certain that Mark intends us to read this account as a kind of “historical parable.” First of all, it is historical. There is no question that this is a real time and space event. Like the other miracles we have seen in Mark, this is a miracle that reveals Jesus’ identity and anticipates the coming Kingdom. The prophet Isaiah was given a glimpse of the future when He wrote, “In that day the deaf shall hear the words of a book, and out of their gloom and darkness the eyes of the blind shall see…” (Isaiah 29:18). We’ve already looked in an earlier study at Isaiah 35:5-6,

“Then the eyes of the blind shall be opened, and the ears of the deaf unstopped; ⁶ then shall the lame man leap like a deer, and the tongue of the mute sing for joy. For waters break forth in the wilderness, and streams in the desert…”

Jesus’ works revealed that the future was already breaking into the present because He, the King and Savior, was present. I also think that this scene, sandwiched as it is between the revelation of the spiritual blindness of the Pharisees, and the spiritual dullness of the disciples before it, and Peter’s confession of faith after, it is a story that teaches, an illustration, something like a parable that goes beyond the event itself, to a spiritual point behind it. It reveals a gradual development of faith and understanding in the followers of Jesus. The man is healed, he sees, and so will the disciples.

The BIG Idea: Only God can open a person’s eyes to see the truth about Jesus. Like this man, and like the disciples, many gradually come to see and understand.

Context: This miracle comes after Jesus exposed the spiritual blindness of the Pharisees (10-13) and the dullness of the disciples (14-21); and before Peter’s confession of faith in Jesus (27-30).

I. People Need the Lord! Only He can open the eyes of our heart (22).

²² And they came to Bethsaida. And some people brought to him a blind man and begged him to touch him.

      The Oikos Principle: Friends brought the blindman to Jesus and pleaded with the Lord to help him. It is not the main point here, but it is something to consider: Most people are brought to Jesus by someone they know. As we have been going through the gospel of Mark, have you been surprised at how frequently the oikos principle has come up?  This isn’t something I or someone else simply “invented.” We have to mention it again because it is right here in the Bible. Mark doesn’t emphasize the details, but as we saw with the Syrophoenician woman who came to Jesus, and who fell down before Him to plead for her daughter to be set free from a demon, as we saw with the deaf-mute who was taken by some unnamed friends to Jesus, and the friends begged Jesus to heal the man, these people brought the man to Jesus, and begged Jesus to touch him. There is a pattern here that I believe Mark wants us to see. The same verbs in the same forms appear again, they brought the man to Him, they begged Jesus to heal, interceding on behalf of the needy man. Once again, Mark draws as little attention as possible to the people who brought the blind man. There isn’t even a pronoun stated [“they” is implicit in verb] much less a description of these people. Men or women? How many? Family or friends? We don’t know. How do you like that? Don’t we like to get a little credit, at least a mention, when we do something to help someone, or do something for the Lord? Maybe there is a lesson here: It is not about us! It is about God working in us for our good and for His glory. God is the one who heals, and He is the one who saves. These unnamed friends brought the man to Jesus, and they interceded, begging Jesus to touch him. They cared about this guy enough to do all that they could to bring Him to Jesus, and they interceded fervently, effectively, on his behalf.

        If you have been following this series you know where I am going with this! Of course we care about the people that God has sovereignly and strategically placed in our lives! We are His ambassadors, His representatives, His spokesman among our friends, relatives, co-workers, and neighbors.  That is our first platform for being His witnesses. Occasionally, we see people in the limelight, entertainers or athletes or even politicians [!], expressing faith in the Lord, and giving God the glory for their accomplishments. It is nice to see when people use their success as a platform, an opportunity to lift up the name of Jesus. But you don’t have to be a professional athlete or an American Idol to be a witness. Most of us are not going to get that kind of a platform with millions of people all around the world listening!  But we too have a platform. It is smaller, more selective, more unique to each of us. I am talking about our oikos, our extended family and friends, the people who know us and who we rub shoulders with on a regular basis. We can tell them God is real, that sin is a worse problem than they know, that God addressed our problem by sending Jesus, making a way through His substitutionary death to reconcile sinners to himself. We can say that He defeated death itself in the resurrection and that the empty tomb leaves no doubt that Jesus is who He claimed to be. And even before we speak we can be pleading with the God of the universe on behalf of our friends: Lord open the eyes of their heart!

       You might think I am going a little too far reading this into this story. But remember the message of Mark and remember the context here in the heart of the Gospel.  Later in v.26 Jesus tells the healed man not to go into the village right? But where is he to go? Where was he sent? Jesus “sent him to his home [oikos].” After the healing, Jesus tells the man to go to his oikos, his “home” (26a). There are a few different Greek words that can express the idea of “sending” someone. This is the verb apostello, the same root from which we get the term “apostle.” It often has the idea of sending someone on a mission, with a task to do, often, as the representative of the one who sent them. This man wasn’t to go first to the village. Bethsaida had had ample opportunities to hear Jesus and to see the miracles that bore witness to His messianic identity. Don’t go to the village, Jesus said, go home, go to your own people, that is your first mission field!

       God may call you to be a foreign missionary. But you don’t have to wait to go on a mission trip to some far away country to be called to serve Him. You live on the mission field. The people right around you are not there by chance. You are called to be God’s spokesperson, His ambassador, right where you are. *The Big Idea: God works through us, but only He can open a person’s eyes to see the truth about Jesus. Don’t give up. Like this man, and like the disciples, many only gradually come to see and understand.

II. The Lord works according to His will, in His time, in His way: He is sovereign. Here, Jesus used means to first partially restore sight to the blind man (23,24). Could it be that as He takes his hand, He is also leading the man on a path toward faith?

²³ And he took the blind man by the hand and led him out of the village, and when he had spit on his eyes and laid his hands on him, he asked him, "Do you see anything?"  ²⁴ And he looked up and said, "I see men, but they look like trees, walking." 

       As Jesus had taken the deaf man aside, He seemingly goes further here and took the blindman by the hand and led him out of the village. This healing would be a sign to just a few.  The man, his friends, and also the disciples. There is tenderness in this scene: Jesus takes the man by the hand and leads him out of the village. He didn’t simply say “Follow me!” He didn’t ask the friends or the disciples, “Bring him this way, over here!” Jesus Himself took him by the hand and led him. Already, He is communicating to this needy person His care, His interest in Him, His compassion for him. As He leads the man, He is leading the disciples, that their eyes might be opened fully to the truth.

       As he had in healing the deaf/mute, He uses saliva in healing this man. Why? On other occasions He healed people with just a word, or with just a touch. The woman who touched the fringe of Jesus’ garment when Jesus was on the way to the house of Jairus was healed instantly. Jesus healed the son of an official at the end of John 4 without even going to the house - "Go; your son will live." — the man went and found that the child was healed at that very hour. He spoke, “Lazarus, come forth!” - and a dead man was alive! Jesus healed in many different ways. He is Lord, He can do whatever He chooses. We don’t know why Jesus used saliva here. Perhaps He was showing the man that He was doing something for him, maybe He was giving the man an opportunity to believe, to hope, to trust that something was about to happen. And, maybe, Jesus was also talking to the disciples. Here He asks the man, “Do you see anything?”  Does that sound familiar? Just a few verses back in Mark 8:18 Jesus was rebuking the unbelief of the disciples and asked, “Having eyes do you not see…?” Coincidence? Just before that Jesus had rebuked the Pharisees who asked to see a “sign from heaven.” They were, once again, revealing that they were spiritually blind. In another context, after Jesus healed a man born blind and then leads him to believe that He is the Messiah, we read,

“Jesus said, ‘For judgment I came into this world, that those who do not see may see, and those who see may become blind.’ ⁴⁰ Some of the Pharisees near him heard these things, and said to him, ‘Are we also blind?’  ⁴¹ Jesus said to them, ‘If you were blind, you would have no guilt; but now that you say, 'We see,' your guilt remains.” (John 9:39-41).

       Here in Mark, the man was healed, but at first only partially. He could see men, like trees walking.  Why this two-stage process? Could it be Jesus was also asking the disciples, “Do you see anything?” Like the old phone company commercial, “Do you hear me now?” They were a work in progress! What was your experience of coming to faith in Christ? Do you remember a clear moment when your eyes were opened? Was it like the hymn writer, “I once was lost but now am found, was blind, but now I see!”? That is the experience of some people, but not all. Some hear the truth over time and can’t point to the exact moment they passed from darkness to light. Even so, they know that they clearly have their trust in Jesus! Don’t feel bad about that, God works differently in different lives. One writer mentioned that Billy Graham and his wife Ruth had very different experiences…

[Billy] …was a rebellious 16-year-old in North Carolina. He accepted a friend’s invitation to attend a tent crusade where the Baptist Evangelist Mordecai Ham was preaching. On the second night of the crusade, Billy Graham and his friend Grady Wilson came to the altar and gave their lives to Christ. Billy would later say that until that night his hero had been Babe Ruth, but that night Jesus Christ became his hero. He knew the exact place and date. And yet, Billy’s wife, Ruth Belle Graham, didn’t know the exact point of her conversion…

Regeneration is a work of God in us, bringing life where there was none. Some know the exact moment they first believed, for others they know that they believe but can’t honestly say the exact moment it happened. The main thing is that we are sure we believe… that our trust is in Christ alone for salvation. The disciples were in a different moment in history than we are, before the Cross, resurrection, and Pentecost. Jesus was preparing them for what would soon happen, and laying the foundation for the faith that would allow them to lead His mission after His departure. They were a work in progress… and so are we. He is growing us, teaching us, conforming us to the image of His Son.  For a purpose. Amazingly, God works through us. He has committed to us the ministry of reconciliation. But we don’t save anyone. That is the BIG IDEA: God works through us, but only He can open a person’s eyes to see the truth about Jesus. So don’t give up. Like this man and like the disciples many gradually come to see and understand.

III. He will bring to completion His good work in us: With a second touch, Jesus restored the man’s sight fully (25,26).

²⁵ Then Jesus laid his hands on his eyes again; and he opened his eyes, his sight was restored, and he saw everything clearly.  ²⁶ And he sent him to his home, saying, "Do not even enter the village."

       Again, why did Jesus do this healing in stages? I take comfort in the fact that R.C. Sproul, in his commentary on Mark, said that he too couldn’t dogmatically say why Jesus healed in two steps! He does venture a “sanctified guess” based on the context, that Jesus was drawing a parallel between the spiritual understanding of the disciples, and the healing of the blind man…

It is as if, through this two-stage healing, Jesus was saying that the disciples had begun to see dimly. They were not in total darkness as the pagans were. Their eyes had beheld many of the marvelous things of Christ. They had some understanding. But they had not yet seen clearly. If they had been asked to describe Jesus, they might have said, in effect, “I see a mighty oak walking around, but I do not really understand the full measure of who He is.”

I think Dr. Sproul got it right: that is what Mark wants us to see here. Jesus, apart from the crowd, outside the village, healed the man. Perhaps He did it in exactly the best way to evoke faith in the now seeing man, and he could now see spiritually as well. But He used this miracle also to build the faith of the disciples who still only saw in part. He would soon ask them later in this chapter, “Who do you say that I am?” (8:27). Jesus tells this man who had been blind, now healed, not to go back to the village – Bethsaida had had ample testimony that the Messiah had come. They had already seen many miracles. After the work of the Messiah had reached its climax in the Cross and the Resurrection, the gospel would be preached there once again. But for now, the man was to go to his home, to his oikos, sharing the story of God’s grace with his own people.

What is God saying to me in this passage? Amazingly, God works through us, but only He can open a person’s eyes to see the truth about Jesus. Like this man, and like the disciples, many gradually come to see and understand.

What would God have me to do in response to this passage?

   1) Let’s start with the point that this healing was different than others we have seen in Mark. In fact, we’ll see another blind man, Bartimaeus, healed at the end of Mark 10. In that case Jesus doesn’t touch him at all, He just pronounced him healed! Then there is yet another case in John 9 where He spits and makes mud and puts it in the man’s eyes, and tells him to go to the pool of Siloam and wash… The man does so and he is healed! Each case was different, in each situation the Lord was revealing His sovereignty and His power.  We are a somewhat diverse group, we come from different backgrounds, we’ve had different experiences. God is in control. He has a plan for each of us. Have you believed? Is your hope of eternal life in Christ alone (Jn 14:6; Acts 4:12)?

   2) Let’s also consider where Jesus sent the healed man, and where He sends us. Where are you going after church? When you leave this building, you are on the mission field! Almost certainly some of the people you’ll see this week don’t go to church, some don’t know the Lord. You have a platform, not a microphone after a sports event, but the hearing that you have earned by sharing your life with them. I remember a Christian football player saying, “We know that this is a platform. Football isn’t our purpose—Jesus is.” You too have a platform—you have a purpose. Eternity is at stake, so let’s embrace His call to make disciples—starting right where we are! Jesus was preparing the disciples to make disciples. What does it mean to follow Him? The world around us desperately needs Jesus. Start at home, and hold forth the Word of Life!

   3) Do the results seem slow? Be encouraged! Jesus is building His church.   AMEN.