BaptistWay Bible Series for January 13: There are none so blind

Posted: 1/07/07

BaptistWay Bible Series for January 13

There are none so blind

• Mark 8:11-26

By Andrew Daugherty

Christ Church, Rockwall

Earth’s crammed with heaven/ And every common bush afire with God/But only he who sees, takes off his shoes/The rest sit round it and pluck blackberries.

This verse from English poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning captures well the essence of Jesus’ proclamation of the kingdom of God. Through his teaching and his very presence, Jesus introduced the kingdom of God to the world. Those with ears to hear and eyes to see perceived his identity as the Son of God. Everywhere Jesus walked and talked, the atmosphere was charged with the consecrated presence of God through the often controversial practices of Jesus.

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To the scribes and Pharisees, Jesus’ unorthodox methods were at odds with the message of the law as they understood it. Though they claimed to be enlightened by the law, they were in the dark about the true light that enlightened everyone; the Christ who was coming into the world. Their die-hard commitment to the letter of the law blinded them to the spirit of the law embodied in Jesus. They could not perceive that to be in the presence of Jesus was to be in the presence of God. Heaven was crammed into a human.

God’s sign from heaven was Jesus himself, but still the scribes and Pharisees asked for a sign. Their preoccupation with signs and wonders actually prevented them from seeing the sign standing right in front of them.

According to Mark, it wasn’t for any lack of evidence. They had watched as he healed a man with a withered hand on the Sabbath (3:1-6). They saw him restore to health and wholeness a paralyzed man (2:1-12). Surely they heard how he had just fed a big, hungry crowd with little loaves of bread and a few fish and had so many leftovers the people were asking for to-go boxes (8:1-10).

After all they had seen and heard, the scribes and Pharisees still aimed to put Jesus to the test by asking for a sign. No wonder Jesus sighed deeply. By now, nothing would persuade these guys that Jesus was who Mark already has told his readers he is—the Christ, the Son of God. To echo Browning’s verse, they were doing the theological equivalent of plucking blackberries.

Jesus, the man and the message, sometimes was lost on the disciples, too. Not even they always could see, hear or understand all that was happening in the person and proclamation of Jesus. Though they had witnessed the wonder of Jesus’ power and presence, they are worried now about forgetting to bring bread. They had forgotten to pack up the leftovers. What would they possibly do?

The disciples’ learning curve apparently was steep. After all Jesus taught and explained to them, they still had trouble understanding exactly who he was. Their knowledge of what Jesus had done to feed the crowds did not translate to faith that Jesus would take care of them, too.

When Jesus says, “beware of the yeast of the Pharisees and the yeast of Herod,” Jesus is not talking about the same thing the disciples are (8:15). While the disciples are literally worried about eating, Jesus tries to tell them there is an even more serious concern—the traditions, attitudes and short-sighted agendas of those who are so obsessed with the sensationalism of signs and wonders that they can’t see the divine agenda being set and met by Jesus’ life and ministry. The disciples’ preoccupation with bread prevents them from recognizing the Bread of Life already in their presence.

Even so, contrasted with the total blindness of the scribes and Pharisees, the disciples possess only partial blindness about who Jesus is. Jesus asks the disciples, “Do you have eyes and fail to see? Do you have ears and fail to hear? Do you not yet understand?” (8:18; 21). The gradual healing of the blind man leaves Mark’s readers with the hope that soon the disciples’ sight will be restored fully to a 20/20 vision of the kingdom of God introduced by Jesus.

Jesus came to train our eyes to see the places where God’s presence is coming into the world. Keeping our eyes peeled for signs of God’s presence involves seeing ordinary things, like water, as revelations of Christ.

A few years ago Marilynne Robinson wrote about the real purpose of water in her novel Gilead, for which she won a Pulitzer Prize. In it the central character, Rev. John Ames, describes a young couple walking down a street in his little Iowa town: “The sun had come up brilliantly after a heavy rain, and the trees were glistening and very wet. On some impulse, plain exuberance, I suppose, the fellow jumped up and caught hold of a branch, and a storm of luminous water came pouring down on the two of them, and they laughed and took off running, the girl sweeping water off her hair and her dress as if she were a little bit disgusted, but she wasn’t. It was a beautiful thing to see, like something from a myth. I don’t know why I thought of that now, except perhaps because it is easy to believe in such moments that water was made primarily for blessing, and only secondarily for growing vegetables or doing the wash. I wish I had paid more attention to it.”

Attention to those places where God’s presence is breaking in to the world is the gift for seeing things like water as blessing before they are used for anything else. To see Christ clearly is to see signs of the grace of God in ordinary things— giving bread to a beggar, listening to the lonely, talking to friends, caring for a child and walking with someone you love down the street.

Signs from heaven are all around us. You can tell who sees Christ clearly. They are the ones walking around barefooted and wondering why everyone else is plucking blackberries.