A Blind Man - Mark 8:22-26

Coming to Bethsaida, the people brought to Jesus “a blind man… and besought him to touch him.” Jesus doesn’t just heal him automatically like he had with many others. First, Jesus takes him by the hand and leads him out of the city, then out spit on his eyes, then laid healing hands on him. But unlike all the other healings that we have learned of, when this man was first healed, he told Jesus “I see men as tree, walking.” This is a really interesting description of things, some of it indicating to me that this man probably wasn’t born blind, I think that he had been able to see for at least some of his formative years because he knew what people looked like, how they looked when they walked, and the normal appearance of trees. My guess is that what this man is describing is a lack of depth perception. I had a teacher point out once that there is a huge difference in recovery after vision restoration surgery between someone who had lost their sight during their lifetime and someone who was born blind. For the people who lost and then regained their sight, the transition is shorter and less stressful. But for the people who are born blind, once their sight is restored, the recovery process is immense because they have to under go months of occupational therapy in order to learn about depth perception. I’m sitting here looking at the files on my desk and I’m pretty confident in just how far away they are from me. I know, just by looking at them exactly how far I need to reach my hand out to grab them. Surely that ability to gauge distance came to me as a child when I learned to reach for things, but really, if I didn’t have the opportunity to learn about what everything was around me then nothing would make sense. I wonder if someone who sees for the first time as an adult, if they are so overwhelmed that they wish they could go back to being blind because it was easier for them because it’s what they knew. I just wonder that because so many times I think that I want to go back to California so badly, but the whole time I was down there I wanted to be back up here. Or how the Hebrews wanted to go back into slavery in Egypt because it was more comfortable than the freedom that they were just now learning. The point of what my teacher said was that it’s important to realize that when Jesus healed someone, he didn’t just heal their physical ailment, but he also healed their mind so that they had the knowledge they needed to implement their new ability seamlessly.

This man had been healed from his blindness so that now he could see, but he hadn’t been given the tools he needed so that it would make sense. I think it’s a good insight into the fact that there is never just physical healing, anything that is broken physically has a mental component to it that must be addressed also for a complete healing, mind and body. It seems like this first healing did in fact cure the man from blindness, but didn’t address the mental aspect of his blindness. I wonder if that’s a commentary on the fact that no amount of knowledge or ability matters, if there doesn’t also come with it an understanding. Why did Jesus do it that way? We aren’t told of a specific reason, but the IM quotes Elder Bruce R. McConkie as commenting, “Certainly the manner in which this healing took place teaches that men should seek the Lord’s healing grace with all their strength and faith, though such is sufficient for a partial cure only… (then) they may then gain the added assurance and faith to be made whole and well every whit. Men also are often healed of their spiritual maladies by degrees, step by step as they get their lives in harmony with the plans and purposes of Deity.” We can also learn that when the Lord heals us, it’s on his time line, he does what we need to grow, even though it might not be what we want.

The man answers that he sees “man as trees, walking,” and Jesus “put his hands again upon his eyes, and made him look up: and he was restored, and saw every man clearly.” He was given the mental component of his healing. Then Jesus “sent him away to his house, saying, Neither go into the town, nor tell it to any in the town.”