Trying to be like Jesus - healing the blind

I believe it was because of my interest in John's story of the healing of the man blind from birth that eventually caused me to notice the differences in stories of healing the blind.

There are basically four that I think of, though two of them seem to get mixed together.

The man blind from birth (John 9) - Also notable for being on the Sabbath, Jesus made a mix of clay and spittle and applied it to the man's eyes, then instructed him to go wash in the pool of Siloam.


Blind man healed by stages (Mark 8:22-26) - Jesus spit on his hands before touching the man's eyes, and while partial vision was restored on the first touch, it took two for complete healing.

The two blind men (Matthew 9:27-31) - Jesus asked about their faith and touched their eyes.

Bartimaeus (Matthew 20, Mark 10, and Luke 18) - In some accounts there are two men; Mark's only has one. I suspect that some details got confused with the story of the two blind men in Matthew 9 and this one because of similarities in what happened. Matthew mentions touching, but in Mark and Luke the healing appears to occur simply by a verbal command.

Looking at one more healing from Acts, with the scales falling off of Saul's eyes, I have heard many people say that clearly those were cataracts. I cannot rule out that each of the blind people healed by Jesus had different types of blindness, and that is why there were different healing methods. That was not my first thought.

At some point I got the idea that the methods of healing were for those being healed: to teach them, to reinforce their faith, to make it have spiritual as well as a physical impact.

The man blind from birth had to go do something, and then he was not even sure who had healed him until he encountered Jesus later, after having been cast out for defending Jesus. In the cases of the two blind men and Bartimaeus, they had asked to be healed, and cried mightily for it. They already had faith that healing was possible.

There is no indication that this other man had any idea of that possibility. Perhaps giving him steps to take, and having that period of waiting and uncertainty, did something for him. It is clear that his belief grew quickly.

That's where I started to get the idea of how personalized everything is with Jesus. To heal you have to diagnose, and for the Savior of the World that means more than physical.

The next few posts will give some illustrations of that.