Two-stage healing

S: Mark8:22-26

²² They came to Bethsaida, and some people brought a blind man and begged Jesus to touch him. ²³ He took the blind man by the hand and led him outside the village. When he had spat on the man’s eyes and put his hands on him, Jesus asked, ‘Do you see anything?’

²⁴ He looked up and said, ‘I see people; they look like trees walking around.’

²⁵ Once more Jesus put his hands on the man’s eyes. Then his eyes were opened, his sight was restored, and he saw everything clearly. ²⁶ Jesus sent him home, saying, ‘Don’t even go into the village.’

O: Oddly, Jesus’ healing seemed to be not complete the first time round, and he had to heal again. But this actually makes sense, given modern research.

Neurologist Oliver Sacks documented a case of Shirl Jennings, who was medically healed of blindness, but his brain had difficulty processing the visual information. It took him weeks and months to adapt to vision, and actually never managed to achieve completely normal visual processing. [1]

Others also documented other cases of people who had been healed of blindness needing time to relate objects they saw with what they had only experienced before by touch. [2]

So, perhaps Jesus healed the blind man twice because there were two things that needed fixing – first, the hardware: his physical ability to see, and second, the software: his cognitive ability to process what his eyes were seeing.

During my master's research, I worked a little with machine vision. It gave me a new appreciation for the miracle of sight. Even getting a computer to identify simple lines in engineering drawings was remarkably difficult. (This is now largely a solved problem; my research was decades ago.) If recognising lines is hard, how much more remarkable is the human ability to instantly recognise faces, trees, and people? [3]

A: Sometimes God’s work in my life unfolds in stages. I may pray for help, healing, guidance, or change, and the answer may not seem complete at first. Like the blind man, I may see something, but not yet clearly.

This passage reminds me that Jesus is not limited or struggling. He is Lord over both the miracle and the process. If His work seems gradual, there may be reasons I do not yet understand.

The blind man was honest with Jesus. He did not pretend that everything was clear. He simply said what he saw. I need to learn that kind of honesty in prayer too. Instead of pretending, giving up, or becoming quietly disappointed, I can tell Jesus where things still feel unresolved: “Lord, I can see a little, but not clearly yet.”

I also need to keep trusting Him after the first touch. Partial progress is not failure. It may be part of the process by which Jesus teaches me dependence, patience, and deeper faith. My responsibility is to stay with Him, be honest before Him, and trust Him until He brings clearer sight.

P: Father, when Your answer seems delayed, partial, or different from what I expected, help me not to give up or pretend. Teach me to be honest with You, to trust Your process, and to keep looking to Jesus until I see more clearly. In Jesus’ name, amen.

References

1.     Oliver Sacks, An Anthropologist on Mars: Seven Paradoxical Tales (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995), chap. 2, “To See and Not See.” ISBN 0-679-43785-1

2.     Held, R., Ostrovsky, Y., de Gelder, B. et al. The newly sighted fail to match seen with felt. Nat Neurosci 14, 551–553 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1038/nn.2795

3.     Chai, I., Dori, D. (1992). Orthogonal Zig-Zag: An Efficient Method for Extracting Straight Lines from Engineering Drawings. In: Arcelli, C., Cordella, L.P., di Baja, G.S. (eds) Visual Form. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4899-0715-8_14

Note: The ideas are mine, but I did get some help from AIs to copyedit what I wrote.