Concepts Clouding Everything

Mark 8:22 to 8:26 tells a curious story of a two-part healing by Jesus of a blind man.  I say “curious” because its two-part quality is not explained in the text, and because mainstream commentators are so profoundly incurious about it.

Jesus places spit on the man’s eyes, and then asks the blind man if he can see anything.  The man replies, “I see men as trees, walking” (KJV).  Jesus puts his hands again on the man’s eyes, and it is said of the blind man that “he was restored, and saw every man clearly.”

(Other translations tend to say that the blind man saw “everything”—rather than “every man”—clearly, but the word in the Greek rendered by those other translations as “everything” is also translated in the New Testament as “everyone,” “everybody,” or “all”—in the sense of a complete body of people.  The importance of the textual connection to people is not something to be dismissed.)

So what does it matter that the blind man was not healed all at once?  Of course it would matter to orthodox Christian interpreters; Jesus is not supposed to have to muddle through anything he undertakes.  So the resort is often to non-interpretations.  Moody Press’s The Ryrie Study Bible says of the passage in question, “This miracle was performed in stages,” as though that explained anything.

Either this unique two-part miracle means something, or it doesn’t.  I contend that the miracle demonstrates Jesus’ repeated emphasis on having eyes that really see.  To really see a person (or anything else) is to see without having perception clouded by conception.  A man is only like a tree in a world of conception (and there are innumerable more-or-less benign metaphors we might concoct in such a connection.)

To really see is to see without conception, without concepts.  Inescapably, it is to pull out every prop (to use a metaphor) from under religion and theology.