The miracles of Jesus - Classical Christian Literature by Athleo.net

OF ONE BLIND AT BETHSAIDA 317
specially, according to their necessities, with the
persons affected—with the friends who brought the
blind man to Him, and with the blind man himself.
We are told that the friends of the blind man who
brought him to Jesus besought Him to touch him.
That in itself was an indication of a wrong state of
mind in which to expect a miracle. They dictated
to Jesus how He was to cure the blind man. They
expected it could be only in a certain way. Like
Naaman, the Syrian leper, in regard to Elisha, they
looked upon Jesus as a great magician who would
employ the prescribed cabalistic method— " Behold, I
thought he will surely come out to me, and stand,
and call on the name of the Lord his God, and
strike his hand over the place, and recover the leper."
The friends of the blind man thought that Jesus had
only to touch him in a particular way, to lay His
hands by some occult hypnotism upon his sightless
orbs, and he would without any further trouble be
made to see. But just as Elisha told Naaman that he
was to be cured by simply going and washing in
the
Jordon seven times, so Jesus acted in regard to the
blind man.
Instead of doing what the friends and the
blind man expected, and pandering to their superstitious
notions, and confirming their credulous prejudices,
which connected the cure with a certain kind
of magical manipulation on the part of the curer, He
wrought the miracle in the simplest and most naturallooking
way, so that it might have the least appearance
of being a supernatural wonder, appealing to
their astonishment and awe.
And what could have been better fitted for the
instruction
and illumination of the blind man's own soul.