The Double-Miracle at Bethsaida

You may recall that Zaccheus had to climb a tree to see Jesus over the crowds—and the crowds were growing bigger every day. Why was this? Jesus was preaching a Gospel that resonated with a lot of people, of course, but aside from that, he was also performing miracles. In particular, we are told that he was healing the sick, and there are many instances in the four Gospels where a person was cured—forty-two altogether, along with references to other miracles which were not recorded.

You can see how this would be a huge draw—there was a high mortality rate in Judea; suddenly you hear that this Jesus person is curing the sick, and so you are naturally desperate to see if he can heal your loved one, too. In fact, even his supposed enemies were willing to ask for a miracle, as we will see in the next post.

It is also understandable if you are highly skeptical of the whole premise. Miracles, really? More like lucky coincidences, or the power of persuasion, maybe; very hard to believe someone was walking around performing miracles.

But then again, there’s the blind man of Bethsaida.

The Gospel of Mark tells us that when Jesus arrived at Bethsaida, he was presented with a man who’d been born blind, and was asked to heal him. Jesus drew the man to a private place, and laid hands on his eyes—but then there was some confusion, because the man could see, but he could not see clearly: “I see people looking like trees and walking.”

Jesus then touched the man a second time, and then he could see everything distinctly. (Mark 8:22–26)

Why was this significant? Because in modern times we have learned that the eyes may look, but it is the brain that sees.  For example, think of the “fool the eye” displays that are so popular; if you stare at a moving spiral for 30 seconds then look away, your visual world is now transformed by your brain so that stationary objects seem to bulge and move. But then—very quickly—your brain switches back to a world where objects are once again stationary.

Other examples include: (1) you “see” things in your dreams; (2) you are not aware of your blind spots, even though they are always there (3) some people have visual hallucinations, where they “see” things that are not there.

But more to the point, modern medicine has advanced to the point where in some situations, people who’ve been blind can regain their sight. But we’ve also learned that it is not as simple as it sounds.

An early case was Michael G. May (born 1954) who regained partial vision after a pioneering corneal transplant. But the doctors were surprised to find that he had no intuitive grasp of depth perception—as people walked away from him, he perceived them as literally shrinking in size. May also had trouble differentiating complex shapes, dimension and orientations of objects, and it took a period of adjustment for his brain to comprehend what he was seeing.

Newborn babies must go through this same type of adjustment, but they don’t have the means to tell us about it and so it was an unknown phenomenon—and besides, it seemed so obvious that you see with your eyes; no one knew about the brain’s role.

So; Jesus performed a second miracle for the man born blind, helping his brain to sort it all out so that—we are told—suddenly, the man could see everything clearly.

The Gospel writers at the time had no idea about any of this—they only know that Jesus performed a second miracle because the first one, for reasons unknown, did not “take.”

Which seems a fairly strong argument that it actually happened, doesn’t it?