Unsightly People

Moments before he rose from his seat and made his way to the stage, the rafters in that ancient auditorium had been shaken by our singing. Three-hundred of us had been making a joyful noise unto the Lord on a Friday night. I’d like to tell you we were there because of our deeply held faith. That was part of it, I’m sure, but we were also broke college students who couldn’t afford a real date. And even if we’d had money, there was nowhere to spend it in a town that rolled up the sidewalks at 9:00 p.m.

But when the singing stopped, the only sound we could hear was the rhythmic tap, tap, tap of the speaker’s white cane against the old wooden floor. Born blind, Randy was one of the most impressive people I have ever met. He learned the layout of the campus in days. He identified people by their voices. And he walked with God.

Once he successfully navigated the steps up onto the stage and made his way to the lectern, the whole room breathed a relieved sigh. We were all terrified he’d take a four-foot header to the floor. And I think he knew that because his opening line was inspired.

“Well, they picked a real unsightly person to speak to you tonight.”

The edgy silence was shattered by laughter. We exploded. We laughed as loud as we had sung. Not at him, mind you. With him. For him. He knew we needed something to unwind our anxiety. And in making us laugh, the blind man gave us ears to hear.

Then he said something I will never forget.

“I thank God for my blindness. I thank God for it because I know that the first thing I will ever see is the face of my Lord Jesus Christ when I meet him in my new, whole, resurrected body.”

Laughter turned to tears. I do not remember anything else Randy said that night. But in those two lines, he taught us more than we would learn the rest of the semester anyway.

Have you ever noticed how many healing stories in the gospels deal with blindness? Seems like every time you turn a page, Jesus is restoring someone’s sight. Through the centuries, the church has recognized these episodes in Jesus’ ministry as testimony to his power over the physical. They stand as historical witness to his ability to set right what is wrong in the natural world.

But the church has also interpreted these stories as parables illustrating Jesus’ power to heal spiritual blindness, as well. Helen Keller once said, “It is a terrible thing to have sight, but no vision.” Jesus once said, “But if your eyes are bad, your whole body will be full of darkness.” Sometimes, people like Ms. Keller and Randy, though blind, are amazingly perceptive. And those of us with 20/20 vision can be dim-sighted and unseeing.

Perhaps the most unusual sight restoration story is in Mark 8:22 – 26. In the town of Bethsaida, some people bring a blind man to Jesus. In a tender gesture, Jesus takes the man by the hand to lead him out of the crowd to a more private place. Jesus spits – yes, spits – in the man’s eyes, and touches him. Then it gets weird.

Jesus stops halfway through the healing and asks, “Do you see anything?”

“I see people; they look like trees walking around,” the man answers.

So, Jesus touches the man’s eyes a second time. Mark reports the results in triplicate: Then his eyes were opened, his sight was restored, and he saw everything clearly.

This is the only time in the Bible where Jesus asks the patient how things are going in the middle of the mending. He never does it before or after this healing. Which leads me to think this was intended, from the beginning, to be a two-stage miracle. Maybe the question, “Do you see anything,” wasn’t just meant for the blind man.

You and I have trouble seeing clearly, too. It’s not that we see people as trees. But we do sometimes see them as obstacles in our way, objects for our amusement or means to our ends. And there are times when we do not see them at all. Like the man in Mark 8, you and I are in the middle of the miracle. We are always needing another touch from the Master. And he is always asking that diagnostic question: Do you see anything?

Do you see the waitress at the restaurant through twice-touched eyes? How about the bagger at the grocery? That difficult neighbor down the street? That brother or sister in your church you just don’t like. How do you see your spouse, your children, your parents?

In his remarkable (and remarkably accessible) book, Life in Community, Dietrich Bonhoeffer writes about how hard it is to see some people with Godly eyes.

“God did not make this person as I would have made him. God does not will that I should fashion the other person according to the image that seems good to me, that is, in my own image; rather, in his very freedom from me, God has made this person in His image. To me, the sight may seem strange, even ungodly. But God creates every man in the likeness of his Son, the Crucified. After all, even that image certainly looked strange and ungodly to me before I grasped it.”

Jesus can heal the blindness in our hearts. He can teach us how to see people with holy eyes. To love those who look like enemies. To forgive those who appear only as offenders. He can even teach us to see ourselves the way he sees us – forgiven, healed and clean. Until we are touched twice, we are unsightly people, only halfway mended.