The miracle we hear about today is told only by St. Mark; it wasn’t repeated in the Gospels by St. Matthew and St. Luke, even though they relied heavily on St. Mark’s writings. This is also the only miracle that Jesus worked in stages. Jesus’ willingness to live on our human level offers much to encourage us. There’s a sense of thoughtfulness in the way He deals with the needs of the blind man.
He first takes him by the hand and leads him outside the village. Then, far away from the gawking crowd, He puts saliva on his eyes and, touching the blind man’s closed eyelids with his fingers, Jesus bonds with him. This poor man could not see the sadness in Jesus’ eyes at the sight of this disability, but he could feel the grip of His hand and touch of His fingers. Jesus is not just following common ritual practices in this miracle; He is adapting Himself to the very human condition of need.
The two stages of the miracle are interesting: after the first stage, everything the man could see was so vague that people appeared to be walking trees; then, after the second stage, he could see everything clearly. These two stages mirror the stages of our growth in faith: It doesn’t happen all at once.
We should be grateful to St. Mark for preserving the memory of Jesus’ understanding of and respect for the stages of our lives and our gradual growth to holiness. The steps to holiness follow the path of human existence, but we cannot walk the path alone; we must be like Jesus who took the blind man’s hand and led him outside the village. We take the hand of our neighbor in need, and to our surprise, we are not simply helping the hand that we grasp; we find that that needy hand is leading us to our salvation, just as the blind man led Jesus into an event that proclaims redemption to us today.+
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