Broken vessels

A recording of today’s gospel and blog can be accessed here.

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Today's gospel (Matthew 9: 27-31) sees another healing at the hands of Jesus, son of David. Two blind men follow Him along the path and approach Him when he reaches His destination. They profess their belief that He can cure them and cure them He then does. Finally, He warns them sternly not to tell anyone about this, but they go and of course spread the news throughout the local area.

On one level Jesus’ behaviour in this scene seems hard to understand. These are blind men, and He fully knew they were there. Why did He leave them stumbling after Him in search of their cure, instead of stopping to assist them? Why did He ask them if they believed He could cure them when, surely, only determined believers would have followed Him in the circumstances just described?  And finally, why did He warn them sternly to conceal what must have been a life-transforming joy, a warning He knew full well they would ignore anyway? Truly, Jesus, as St Teresa of Avila said to Him, if this is how you treat your friends, no wonder you don’t have many!

Nevertheless, there are layers within the layers of this story, and undoubtedly unknown factors that Jesus knew full well but about which we could only speculate. More concretely, we have to start from the principle that Jesus’ healing ministry is not to the body alone but to the soul of man. Jesus is not a genie to be summoned by the magic words “Son of David”. These blind men ended in faith, but where did they begin their journey if not perhaps with the equally blind enthusiasm of the crowd with its taste for the spectacular rather than the transcendent? Jesus made them follow Him not to take them on a journey away from Capernaum, but on a journey away from their worse selves to discover something better than they had anticipated. Wherever I am, my servant must be there too. They could not arrive at this destination on the wings of religious fervour; only by following the perhaps stony lakeside path along which Jesus wound His own way to a house that was not identified in this scene but which we may well assume was in various ways the house of the Father.

Why then did Jesus ask them if they believed He could cure them? Once again, this is not so much about seeking reassurance for Himself, as about helping them grow out of their jejune mindset to arrive at something more mature. They had begun by craving the admittedly jackpot-winning prize of the restoration of their sight. While they wanted something miraculous, they crowded about Jesus like a couple of game-show contestants, looking to get their hands on the lucre. Jesus was a wonderworker, was He not?

Indeed, no, He wasn’t, and He isn’t. Jesus is not after an admiring crowd and a grateful audience; He is not a P. T. Barnum in sandals. He walks the earth to call its inhabitants to something better than riches, more real than power, and more far-reaching than self-satisfaction. Do you believe that I am able to do this? He asks the blind men. What is this? We assume He means restore their sight but let us not be dupes of the spectacular also. Jesus is looking beyond the appearances, to a transformation that lies deeper than this mere return to vision. After all, if they eye offend thee, pluck it out. Jesus spent little time demonstrating His power over nature; to demonstrate His conquest over sin, however, He went to the cross. Merely to believe in the spectacular is an exercise in naivety; to believe in redemption, on the other hand, takes something more truthful, humbler, and more mature, a readiness to recognise and accept the fallen condition of man, the need for a redeemer, the incapacity of human beings to work their own passage to heaven, and our utter dependence on Him in every moment of our lives. To say, yes, I believe, to Jesus should not be a profession of belief in His magical powers to deliver whatever our hearts desire, no matter how good that is in itself; it is to admit and confess who He is, and to recognise everything about us that estranges us from Him and from the Father, wrecking His work in us. To say I believe is thus to accept the truth about Him and, by corollary, about us.

For these men – and this is not always the case in those who are healed - the first condition of preserving the fruits of this confession and of persevering in the following of Jesus was to keep it to themselves. Jesus wanted no return to the sensationalism than drove them to follow Him in the first place. He wanted them to spend time reflecting on what He had done for them; to realise its implications; to figure out where to go and what to do next. Instead of which, as the gospel wearily tells us, they went away and spread His fame through all that district.

What was this mistake? It was of course a very human one, but a mistake none the less. They wanted, invoked, and seemed to have obtained a display of the spectacular. What had actually happened was that Jesus had cured them, while calling them to something deeper and more real; and instead of pausing to draw breath, to realise what had just happened, they resorted to their taste for the old razzle dazzle. They were in touching distance of the gold of His love, and they chose the fools’ gold of being legends in their own lunch time.

There will be a moment to spread the word, but it does not come before something more genuine, something deeper, something more radically transformative than a hurriedly muttered profession in Jesus’ power has taken place within us. We must recognise Him but also ourselves for what we truly are: loved but very chipped and broken earthen vessels.