Marginal Christianity

Now in Bethsaida, a blind man is brought to Jesus for healing. A number of links to the healing of the blind man in 7:31-37 tie these stories together. They are unique to Mark, allude to the Jubilee/New Exodus promise in Isa.35:5-6, involve touch and spit, and Jesus removes the person to be healed from those who brought him. [1] A story of blindness needing healing just prior to the great revelation of Jesus’ identity to the disciples can hardly be about anything else than their spiritual blindness. Jesus has harped on this theme incessantly leading up to Peter’s moment of insight. In particular, the two feeding stories, one J   ewish, the other Gentile, correlates with the two touches the blind man in our story requires. I suspect the touch and spit have the same allusion to Jesus’ restoration of the healed person to their original status and vocation as God’s image-bearer as we saw in the 7:31-37. In all these ways this episode draws the major thrust on Jesus’ identity...

Herma and Hermeneutics "What impairs our sight are habits of seeing as well as the mental concomitants of seeing. Our sight is suffused with knowing, instead of feeling painfully the lack of knowing what we see. The principle to be kept in mind is to know what we see rather than to see what we know. Rather than blame things for being obscure, we should blame ourselves for being biased and prisoners of self-induced repetitiveness. One must forget many cliches in order to behold a single image. Insight is the beginning of perceptions to come rather than the extension of perceptions gone by. Conventional seeing, operating as it does with patterns and coherences, is a way of seeing the present in the past tense. Insight is an attempt to think in the present. Insight is a breakthrough, requiring much intellectual dismantling and dislocation. It begins with a mental interim, with the cultivation of a feeling for the unfamiliar, unparalleled, incredible. It is in being ...