Spiritual Blindness

As Jesus was leaving from there, two blind men started following behind him, shouting out things like, “Have mercy on us, Son of David!”
    
When Jesus arrived back home, the two blind men followed him inside. So Jesus asked them, “Do you believe that I can do this?”  
    
They answered, “Yes, Sir!”  
    
Then Jesus touched their eyes and said, “It has happened to you according to your faith.” And their eyes were healed. Jesus sternly warned them saying, “Don’t let anyone know how this happened!” But when the two men left the house, they told everyone they saw so that everyone in the entire region heard of it.
    
Check it out! As they were leaving from there, some people brought a man to Jesus that was unable to speak because he was possessed by a demon. When the demon was exorcized from the man, he began to speak. The crowd was amazed and they said, “Nothing like this has ever happened in Israel before!”
    
But the lay-ministers dismissed it saying, “It’s only because he himself is possessed by the devil that he’s able to exorcize lesser demons from others!”

~ As Matthew Tells It

Matthew, for some reason, likes to double things up. For instance, Matthew actually has Jesus riding two donkeys into Jerusalem. I guess he thinks if one is good, two is better. He is like a Hollywood producer making a big budget remake of an older film. It is like in the 1990 remake of Night of the Living Dead, Tom Savini directs it so that two zombies attack Barbara in the opening scene rather than just one as in the original -- yet, in spite of the extra zombie, it is still essentially the same scene and the same story.

Matthew also likes to streamline Mark. It is clear that sometimes Matthew just does not like how Mark tells a story -- Mark sometimes presents Jesus feeling or behaving in a way that Matthew is not comfortable with. Jesus seems to get cranky with His disciples a lot in Mark. Matthew also streamlines in a way that cuts out repetitiveness or awkwardness in telling the story. Matthew, like a good editor, cuts out what is not necessary when he can and “simplifies” the narrative.

So it should be no surprise that Matthew’s retelling of the story of Blind Bartimaeus is streamlined into a story of two unidentified blind men. By making the story generic, and by increasing the number of blind men, Matthew uses the story to say something about the Pharisees -- they are blind!

Yet, we do not get a glimpse of their blindness until the following story -- that of the healing of a mute. The Pharisees credit Jesus’ power to exorcize demons as Jesus being in league with the devil.

The people begin to rightly grasp that God is working miracles through Jesus, but the Pharisees are calling the good that God is doing, evil. They are blind.

The blindness of the Pharisees is a willful blindness -- they do not want to see. They call the good they see evil so that they do not have to look upon the good and see what Jesus is really doing. This may be from a variety of reasons.

Regardless of why the Pharisees were blind to Jesus and willfully kept themselves blind, we cannot just dismiss it because we decide that Pharisees are bad people. They are no better or worse than we are. They have the same fears and motives that we do. So when we read about the Pharisees, we should not be dismissing them as “opponents” but as “us.”

So the questions we must ask ourselves are: “How are we blind?” “What keeps us from seeing Jesus?” “Are we sometimes guilty of calling what is good, bad; or calling what is bad, good?”

It is not helpful when we read the Bible to sit in judgment over the people we encounter in its pages. We should look for places where we identify with the people, even the “opponents” like the Pharisees. What can we learn about ourselves by looking at them?

Reviews

[Emily B]

even as i feel the next storm coming, i know it will be a battle to exorcise all the old and useless stuff that litters my soul, i see myself in your words and i feel bolder, ready to face the struggle and triumph

something in me has opened, maybe i feel loved and forgiven for the first time, maybe i wasn't so bad all along, i just wanted you to know that i appreciate your words