The Gradual Healing of the Blind Man.
This miracle has a peculiarity, in which it stands absolutely alone, and that is that the work is done in stages; that the power which at other times has but to speak and it is done here seems to labour, and the cure comes slowly; that in the middle Christ pauses, and, like a physician trying the experiment of a drug, asks the patient if any effect is produced, and, getting the answer that some mitigation is realised, repeats the application, and perfect recovery is the result.
I. First, we have here Christ isolating the man whom He wanted to heal. 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. He wrought the miracles not coldly in order to witness to His mission, but every one of them was a token, because it was an outcome of His own sympathetic heart, brought into contact with human need.
II. We have Christ stooping to a sense-bound nature by the use of material helps. No doubt there was something in this man which made it advisable that these methods should be adopted. They make a ladder by which his hope and confidence might climb to the apprehension of the blessing. And that points to a general principle of the Divine dealings. God stoops to a feeble faith, and gives it outward things by which it may rise to the apprehension of spiritual realities.
III. Lastly, we have Christ's accommodating the pace of His power to the slowness of the man's faith. I take it that the worthiest view of that strangely protracted process, broken up into two halves, by the question that is dropped in the middle, is this, that it was determined by the man's faith, and was meant to increase it. He was healed slowly because he believed slowly. His faith was a condition of his cure, and the measure of it determined the measure of his restoration, and the rate of the growth of his faith settled the rate of the perfecting of Christ's work upon him.
A. Maclaren, A Year's Ministry,1st series, p. 261.
References: Mark 8:22-25. Spurgeon, Sermons,vol. xii., No. 701; Ibid., My Sermon Notes: Gospels and Acts,p. 68.