CRITICAL AND EXEGETICAL NOTES
Mark 8:22-26. Peculiar to Mark. Bethsaida (= Fish-town).—There were two places of this name:
(1) the landing-port for Capernaum, on the western side of the lake;
(2) a village to the north-east, on which Herod Philip conferred the status of a city, naming it Julias, after the emperor’s daughter. That this latter was the Bethsaida to which our Lord now withdrew may be inferred from the indications of locality in Mark 8:10; Mark 8:13; Mark 8:27.
Mark 8:24. See R.V. “I see something confusedly and obscurely; for I see what I think must be men, and yet so dimly that they look to me like trees, only that I know that men move from their places, whereas trees do not.”
Mark 8:25-26. See R.V. for readings and renderings.
MAIN HOMILETICS OF THE PARAGRAPH.— Mark 8:22-26
The blind man at Bethsaida.—This incident, recorded only by St. Mark, may be considered both in a natural and a spiritual view, under which twofold aspect there can be no doubt that all our Lord’s miracles of healing were intended to be viewed. He adopted this method to make Himself known as the Great Physician of the soul, who “forgiveth all our sins and healeth all our infirmities”; who, by the virtue which resides in Him, and which is called forth by the application of faith, removes the blindness of our understanding, the raging fever of our passions, the palsy of our spiritual affections, the lameness of our halting obedience; commands Satan and his unclean spirits to come out of us, and raises us from the death of sin unto the life of righteousness.
I. A blind man is brought to Jesus to be cured.—
1. The restoring of sight to the blind was one of the signs to be looked for in the promised Messiah (Isaiah 35:5); and to this evidence Christ appealed, in the first place, in His answer to the Baptist’s messengers (Matthew 11:5).
2. Many remarkable instances of this kind of miracle might be referred to (see especially John 9). The present example contains some peculiarities not found elsewhere.
3. There is a moral as well as a natural blindness, to which not merely a few unfortunate persons but all mankind by nature are subject (Isaiah 43:8).
(1) Such were the Gentiles (Ephesians 4:18).
(2) Such were the Jews also, who, though they had not the same excuse of ignorance or want of light, yet were blinded by obstinate and invincible prejudice (Mark 4:12).
(3) Such are all of us by nature: born blind, and continuing so by our own fault; having no light in ourselves, and hating it when it is brought to us. Perhaps, like the Pharisees, we say we see; but this is our blindness. We see nothing as we ought to see, nothing as it really is. We see no deformity in sin, no beauty in holiness; no terrors in the law, no charms or attractions in the gospel; no weakness in ourselves, no all-sufficiency in Christ (Revelation 3:17-18).
4. It was to free all mankind from these spiritual infirmities, and not to relieve a few miserable objects from their bodily pains, that the Saviour appeared (Luke 4:18).
II. Our Lord, before beginning the cure, takes His patient to a private place, apart from the multitude.—
1. No reason is given why He did this, or why, after the cure was complete, He told him not to go back into the town, etc. (Mark 8:26). Perhaps the people of Bethsaida, like those of Nazareth (Matthew 13:57-58), had resisted the evidence of former miracles performed amongst them, and therefore did not deserve another. At any rate, when we read this, and when we observe His disinclination on other occasions to have His fame blazed abroad, we are reminded of the character given Him by the prophet (Isaiah 42:2).
2. “We also are oftentimes spiritually blind while we are in the town, i.e. this world; afterwards, being led out of the town, i.e. out of the world and its concerns, by Jesus Christ, we are healed.” He does this in a variety of ways: by afflictions, by disappointments, by the loss of friends, by a change in our situation, etc. Anything, in short, which disentangles us from the world, detaches us from our former associates and pursuits, affords an opening for serious reflexion, and a closer acquaintance with our own hearts—anything which has this effect may be considered as a merciful dispensation of Christ to our souls, a taking us by the hand and leading us out of the town, preparatory to a perfect restoration.
III. On a first exertion of His healing virtue our Lord cures the blind man only in part.—He saw objects, but not distinctly. Men and trees waved to and fro before his eyes, so that he could not distinguish one object from another.
1. This is always the case when a blind man is restored to sight by natural means; and it is necessary to obviate it by not allowing him the free use of his eyes at first, and by the gradual admission of light into the room.
2. Such was not our Lord’s usual manner. He did all things well. Those who witnessed His cures were beyond measure astonished when they saw His patients restored to the immediate and full use of their senses, without the necessity of any precautions.
3. Here, however, He departs from His usual course, and as it were puts a restraint upon the virtue which resided in Him, so as to make its effect incomplete. Perhaps, according to the faith of this poor man, so was it done to him, which, being weak at first, required nursing and rearing by a partial exhibition of the Saviour’s power.
4. At any rate the application to the spiritual recovery of sinners is much more exact than if the cure had been completed at once. When the eyes of our understanding are enlightened by the revelation of Christ, the first effect is not unlike what is here described. Our views of Divine things are very imperfect and confused. We are not all at once turned from darkness to light, and from the power of Satan unto God. We experience at first a kind of twilight illumination, which “shineth more and more unto the perfect day.” Nor is this gradual conversion in any way derogatory to the great power of God. Was the cure of this blind man less perfect or less astonishing because it was not effected all at once? The material circumstance which constituted the miracle was this; he came, seeing no man; he went away, “seeing every man clearly.” And so with respect to our souls; the great point to be considered is, what we were, and what we are (Ephesians 5:8). It is not necessary that we should be able to refer to the time or place when light first flashed in upon our mind; it is enough if we can say, “One thing I know,” etc. (John 9:25).
IV. The same process being repeated, the patient is perfectly restored.—
1. The former trial, however unsuccessful apparently in part, had had the intended effect of raising the man’s expectations and confidence in his Physician to a proper pitch. And Jesus, seeing that he had now faith to be healed, delays no longer to complete the cure.
2. It is the same with those whom He calls out of spiritual darkness into His marvellous light. The imperfect illumination vouchsafed them at first is designed only to exercise their faith, to make them love the light and desire more of it. Having once tasted of the heavenly gift, they feel an insatiable desire to increase in the knowledge of God, and to be filled with all wisdom and spiritual understanding. To them shall more be given as they are able to receive it, until they are “stablished, strengthened, settled,” and “made perfect in every good work to do His will.”
V. The remarkable injunction with which the man is dismissed.—
1. There was the same reason (whatever that might be) for desiring him not to go into the town after his cure as for taking him out in order to cure him.
2. The eyes of our understanding being enlightened to see our lost condition as sinners and the great power of God our Saviour, we are commanded not to go back into the town, nor to tell it to any one in the town, but to go to our house.
(1) Since it was the god of this world that first blinded our minds, the folly and danger of going back into the world after conversion is evident to common sense. If we do, we run the most serious risk of being again entangled therein and overcome. Nor is it enough that we should merely abstain from returning to the world; we must not even wish to do so, or indulge longing desires after what we have renounced. They are objects altogether at variance with our newly acquired sense (1 John 2:15-16; Luke 9:62).
(2) Still further to preserve us from worldly contamination, Christ forbids us even to tell or talk of what has happened to us, to the unspiritual. By such communications we are likely to do harm to ourselves, and no good to them. We may begin by inviting them out of the town; we may end by going back into the town with them.
(3) But although we are dissuaded from talking of these matters to the world in general, it by no means follows that we are to keep them to ourselves. On the contrary, having received such great mercies, we are to give glory to God, and at the same time be doing an inestimable service to those most dear to us, by endeavouring to open their eyes and to bring them to the knowledge and obedience of the faith. In the bosom of our own family, where we may count upon at least some measure of sympathy and attention, we are to do the work of a true friend for them and of an evangelist for Christ.
The clearing of the sight.—As in other cases, Jesus led this sufferer apart; as in other cases, He made use of certain means as well as of His word, teaching us the method and the secret of sacramental working; but, not as in other miracles, the cure is gradually wrought.
I. It was intended to teach us how God deals differently with different souls.—It is a rebuke to those who demand proofs of instantaneous conversion; it should be read with that passage which describes the growth of grace as gradual, like the growth of the grain of corn, “first the blade, then the ear, then the full corn in the ear,” which, while the man rises and sleeps night and day, grows he knoweth not how.
II. As to the particular words in which the man describes his growth.—“I see men walking, but they look like trees.” Large, indistinct, crowded, and hazy, like the mingled mass of the distant woods waving and bending in the breeze, or as when passing rapidly along we see the trees flit quickly by us in copse and hedgerow. The man had either never seen, or had long been unaccustomed to, the form of either man or tree; his was therefore an utterance doubly obscured, his eyes only partially transmitting objects which his mind only partially recognised. The man having thus truly described his half-restored condition, Jesus speaks to him a word of command: He bids him look up, and then he sees all men clearly.
III. Looking at the spiritual meaning of this description, it has been urged that it is often the case when the work of grace is beginning that people mistake the nature and proportion of things around them. Spiritual things and living truths still have much of the earthly clinging to them: and if life and movement be recognised at all, it is the dull vegetative life of mere existence, still rooted in the soil of this world, or spreading itself out in a hazy form of general indefinite goodness, not the active, personal, organic life of the regenerate man, which is part of the very life of God.
IV. We notice a lesson of honesty and humility in the man’s description.—He does not claim an insight which he has not attained to. He speaks a lesson, gentle but severe, to those who, after hearing a sermon, or reading a treatise, or attending a service, or feeling an awakening of conscience, suddenly consider that they are converted, that they “can read their title clear,” that they have clear views, and so forth. The precocious child, who lectures its parents or strangers on religion; the converted prize-fighter, who suddenly turns from indulging in all kinds of brutal passions and lectures his neighbours who have been walking for years in the light on which he has persistently turned his back; the uneducated convert, who has picked up one text of Scripture, and on the strength of that ignores all that others have learned of the whole counsel of God,—all these may lay to heart the humility and truthfulness of this man.
V. And in this gradual development of the spiritual powers there is also a strong and abiding word of comfort for many a struggling Christian. Oftentimes we find those who, though they are interested and anxious, cannot obtain the steadfast gaze that they desire. Clouds drive across their spiritual firmament; now all is clear and bright for a moment; now the fierce storm or the blinding mist sweeps over them, and their light is turned to darkness. They are not, as they were once, either blind or careless; the truth has shone in upon their souls, but they cannot retain it; their conscience is tender, but their understanding is dim. Let such take courage; they are just in the condition indicated by the text—they see men walking as it were trees. You who have been not only baptised and confirmed, but have earnestly worshipped and reverently communicated, you are different, widely different, from what you were once; but widely different also from what hereafter you shall be. Christ has led you to self-examination: the result is at once to excite your thankfulness for His marvellous work, and your humiliation for your own shortcoming. But He still is standing by you,—still in His house apart from the city’s noise He is bending over you as you kneel; still to your soul His voice is speaking; still on His altar He waits for you, that again He may lay His hands upon you, again He may bid you lift up your hearts. And in His house, and through His Word, by the voice of His Church and the power of His sacraments, He will free you from the bondage and the blinding power of sin, and quicken all those faculties which have so long been paralysed or misused.—G. C. Harris.
OUTLINES AND COMMENTS ON THE VERSES
Mark 8:23. Christ’s freedom in the use of means.—This case and that of the deaf and stammering man in Decapolis have many points of resemblance. In both those who brought the diseased to Jesus prescribed to Him the mode of cure. Was it for the purpose of reproving and counteracting the prejudice which connected the cure with a certain kind of manipulation on the part of the curer that Jesus in both instances went so far out of His usual course, varying the manner of His action so singularly that, out of all His miracles of healing, these two stand distinguished by the unique mode of their performance? It is certain that, had Jesus observed one uniform method of healing, the spirit of formalism and superstition, which lies so deep in our nature, would have seized upon it, and linked it inseparably with the Divine virtue that went out of Him, confounding the channel with the blessing it conveyed.—Dr. Hanna.
Christ, not means, the source of healing.—If Christ’s touch and Christ’s saliva healed, it was not because of anything in them, but because He willed it so; and He Himself is the source of all the healing energy. Therefore let us keep these externals in their proper place of subordination, and remember that in Him, not in them, lies the healing power.—A. Maclaren, D.D.
Led into solitude.—As Israel was led into the wilderness that God might “speak to her heart,” so often Christ draws us aside, if not by outward providences such as these, yet by awaking in us that solemn sense of personal responsibility and making us feel our solitude, that He may lead us to feel His all-sufficient companionship.—Ibid.
Mark 8:24-25. The man’s answer is in accord with later scientific discovery. What we call the act of vision is really a twofold process; there is in it the report of the nerves to the brain, and also an inference, drawn by the mind, which previous experience has educated to understand what that report implies. In want of such experience an infant thinks the moon as near him as the lamp, and reaches out for it. And when Christian science does its Master’s work by opening the eyes of men who have been born blind, they do not know at first what appearances belong to globes and what to flat and square objects. It is certain that every image conveyed to the brain reaches it upside-down, and is corrected there. When Jesus then restored a blind man to the perfect enjoyment of effective, intelligent vision, He wrought a double miracle, one which instructed the intelligence of the blind man as well as opened his eyes. This was utterly unknown to that age.—Dean Chadwick.
Mark 8:24. Different conditions of the spiritual life.—
1. It is a happy state, if it is the first stage towards clearly seeing in perfect knowledge.
2. It is a gloomy and uncertain state, if the Christian should remain in it.
3. Worst of all, if through his own guilt he should return to this stage, falling into the new blindness of despair.—J. P. Lange, D.D.
Man and tree.—A large part of the battle of life has been fought and gained when one has learned the difference between a man and a tree. For that is the difference between the great and the small, between mind and matter, between the eternal and the transitory, between earth and heaven.—G. Hodges.
Christian progress.—How dim and partial a glimmer of light comes to many a soul at the outset of the Christian life! How little a new convert knows about God and self and the starry truths of His great revelation! Christian progress does not consist in seeing new things, but in seeing the old things more clearly—the same Christ, the same Cross, only more distinctly and deeply apprehended, and more closely incorporated into my very being. We do not grow away from Him, but we grow into knowledge of Him.—A. Maclaren, D.D.
Mark 8:25. The restoration of sight.—In this verse the Evangelist just touches that which is the salient point in the blessing of the restoration of sight. For what is the great deprivation in blindness? It is a loss, doubtless, as the blind poet Milton sang, that not to them return, “Day, or the sweet approach of even or morn, or sight of vernal bloom, or summer’s rose, or flocks and herds”—but still more, what he adds last, that they cannot see the “human face Divine.” Were it possible for a blind person to be restored to the faculty of seeing persons, though he remained blind to everything else, much more than half his deprivation would be removed. Now a great deal of that moral blindness of which the blindness of this man was the type consists in just this—that we do not see our fellow-men. We only see ourselves; we are sharp-sighted enough to our own interests, but blind to the wants and wishes of others. The love of self brings a gradual film over the moral vision, so that, reversing the process of the miracle, though at first we see every man clearly, by-and-by they are no more to us than vague shadows, as trees walking, and presently we cease to see them at all.—Bishop A. Blomfield.
Mark 8:26. A view of the miraculous.—This fact, of a miracle done in intended secrecy and shrouded in deep darkness, suggests to us the true point of view from which to look at the whole subject of miracles.
1. People say they were meant to be attestations of His Divine mission. Yes, no doubt that is true partially; but that was never the sole or even the main purpose for which they were wrought; and when anybody asked Jesus Christ to work a miracle for that purpose only, He rebuked the desire and refused to gratify it. He wrought the miracle not coldly, in order to witness to His mission, but every one of them was the token because it was the outcome of His own sympathetic heart brought into contact with human need. And instead of the miracles of Jesus Christ being cold, logical proofs of His mission, they were all glowing with the earnestness of a loving sympathy, and came from Him as naturally as rays from the sunshine at sight of sorrow.
2. The same fact carries with it, too, a lesson about His character. Is not He here doing what He tells us to do?—“Let not thy left hand know what thy right hand doeth.” All goodness “does good by stealth,” even if it does not “blush to find it fame”—and that universal mark of true benevolence marked His. He had to solve in His human life what we have to solve—the problem of keeping the narrow path between ostentation of powers and selfish concealment of faculty; and He solved it thus: “Leaving us an example that we should follow in His steps.”—A. Maclaren, D.D.
ILLUSTRATIONS TO CHAPTER 8
Mark 8:22-25. Sight obscured by the trivial.—A silk thread stretched across the glass of the telescope will entirely cover a star, although as large as our sun. So there are some whose sight of the heavenly world is entirely obscured by what is infinitely little compared with the life of the world to come. Richardson, the blind man, used to say of his conversion, “I could never see till I was blind.” The great Earl of Chatham once went with a friend to hear Mr. Cecil preach. The sermon was on the Spirit’s agency in the hearts of believers. As they were coming from church, the great statesman confessed that he could not understand it at all, and asked his friend if he supposed that any one present did. “Why, yes,” said he, “there were many plain, unlettered women, and some children there, who understood every word of it, and heard it with joy.”