Physical and Spiritual Blindness

February 15, Wednesday, 6th Week in Ordinary Time
Genesis 8: 6-13. 20-22; Mark 8: 22-26

Our gospel reading today gives us a strong hint of connection to yesterday’s gospel, the blindness of the disciples. In today’s gospel, we hear of the unique miracle of Jesus, the healing of the blind man. Jesus’ unique power enables him to create strange things without jeopardizing his mission of preaching the Kingdom. In the gospel, we can see that Jesus’ healing of the blind man helped the disciples recover from their own spiritual blindness. That I guess was the reason why Jesus has to take the blind man outside the village and be with his disciples to do the healing.

Like the disciples and the man in the gospel, we are also “blind” in many ways. We have been touched by Jesus, and spittle has been on our eyes and yet blindness still overshadows us most of the time. In the likes of the disciples, Jesus has been with us from the very beginning of our life. Like the disciples, we have surely seen how great God is in our lives. Maybe not in strange and huge ways but I’m sure God showed something so important and wonderful to each of us.

Unfortunately, various reasons and situations or even events in life have caused us to remain blind at times. It might be fear, anger, guilt, temptations, human weakness, and politics, to mention a few. Yet, we have to be keen on the actions of Jesus in our lives. And we have to take seriously where Jesus is heading us. He is heading us to have clear eyes. The truth is we cannot lead others if we are blind.

Some may not be blind yet they only see very dimly. While others want to propagate the blindness towards the truth and keep people away from seeing truth.

Let our eyes be opened! If at first, we see dimly, then maybe we have to try and look again. Hopefully, we can then see clearly.