I Want To See - Mark 10:46-52 Series

Mark 10:46 Then they came to Jericho. As Jesus was leaving the city with his disciples and a large crowd, a blind man, Bartimaeus (that is, the Son of Timaeus), was sitting by the roadside begging. 47 When he heard that it was Jesus of Nazareth, he began to shout, "Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me!" 48 Many rebuked him and told him to be quiet, but he shouted all the more, "Son of David, have mercy on me!" 49 Jesus stopped and said, "Call him." So they called to the blind man, "Take courage! On your feet! He's calling you." 50 Throwing his cloak aside, he jumped to his feet and came to Jesus. 51 "What do you want me to do for you?" Jesus asked him. The blind man said, "Rabbi, I want to see." 52 "Go," said Jesus, "your faith has healed you." Immediately he received his sight and followed Jesus along the road.

Introduction: Act 2 (Greatness and Insight)

Context of Act 2

On a scale from one to ten, how insightful would you say you are? How clearly do you see the world? And when I say, “the world,” I mean the whole world—not just the physical realm. When you consider the whole scope of reality—physical, tangible things, thoughts, spirits, truth, error, right and wrong, angels, demons, God, the meaning of events that take place, the relative value of things—how clearly do you perceive all that?

It’s not an easy question to answer, because one thing about poor vision—you never know how poor it is until you get glasses. I remember when I first got my glasses. The day I got them, I went on a long road trip and they were pinching my head, so I took them off. And when I did, it was so blurry that I thought, This isn’t safe! and put them right back on. But prior to that day I had driven every day without glasses and didn’t have any idea how unsafe it was. It’s hard to know how bad your vision is until it gets corrected.

The question of how much insight you have is an important one—so important that it dominates Act 2 of Jesus’ life. Mark divides Jesus’ life into three parts. Act 1 is the first half of the book, which is all about who Jesus is. Act 3 is the passion week in Jerusalem. In between those is Act 2, which starts at that midpoint (chapter 8), and covers that long journey that begins way up north of Israel and ends at Jerusalem. The focus of that journey is for Jesus to train the Twelve. That’s Act 2, and it’s easy to spot in the book of Mark because it begins and ends exactly the same way—with Jesus healing a blind man. It’s a section all about Jesus giving insight to his disciples, and it starts and ends with the only two blind men in the book of Mark, and they both get healed.

Healing a blind man is a big deal. For one thing it was considered the most impossible of all healing miracles. Never in the history of the world, prior to Jesus’ time, is there any record of any blind person being healed. None of the OT miracle workers ever did it, and yet the OT prophets said that in the messianic age, it would happen.

Isaiah 29:18 In that day the deaf will hear … and out of gloom and darkness the eyes of the blind will see.

That will be the mark of the coming of Messiah. And sure enough, Jesus comes and heals blind people routinely. And two of them are recorded in Mark. And Mark strategically places them as bookends to this whole section about spiritual insight.

And if you doubt whether it’s about spiritual insight—when Jesus heals a blind man and you wonder, Is that meant to teach us something about Jesus providing spiritual insight? Or is it just Jesus showing compassion to someone who needs physical healing?—Jesus answers that question unequivocally when he heals the first blind man. Right before healing him, Jesus teaches his disciples something and they don’t understand. And Jesus gets on them about it. He says, “Do you still not understand? Do you have eyes but fail to see?” Then he immediately takes a blind man and heals him in two stages. First he heals his eyes but not his understanding, so he saw men like trees walking around—he could see but couldn’t understand what he was seeing. Then Jesus did a second miracle and healed his understanding, so he could properly interpret what he saw. That healing was a parable of what Jesus meant in spiritual terms when he said the disciples had eyes but couldn’t understand. So yes—no question about it—when Jesus healed the blind, he did it in ways designed to teach us about gaining spiritual insight from him. So that’s what we should be getting from this passage.