Eyes Open

Today Granda went in for his cataract operation. All seemed to go well, praise God! Though it will be a while until he gets his sight back in that eye - and with macular degeneration, glaucoma and a cataract in the other eye, it will be a while until he can see.

He was pleased about the timing of the sermon on Sunday...about Jesus healing a man who was blind! (Mark 8:22-26)

Which made me think about the other time Jesus healed 2 blind men (in Matthew 9:27-34). And when He did, He told them it was because of their faith that they were healed.

I find faith to be a confusing word. Sometimes I’m not even sure what it means. Especially when my beliefs about what God, and what the world is like, change...and they often do. My faith doesn’t feel very steady!

But this story is a helpful one - because at least from it, I can begin to see what faith is not. It’s not what the Pharisees have - a closed mind. They have already drawn their conclusions about who God is and what the world is like, and since Jesus does not fit inside this box...their only explanation is that He must be evil (“he is empowered by the prince of demons”). Faith is the opposite of thinking that you know everything you need to know.

So then what does it mean to have faith?

Faith in this story is beautiful. It’s not something that we would normally think of as a part of faith...none of us saw it coming. Faith is about openness. A commitment to trusting someone. And when we really trust someone, it means opening ourselves, making ourselves vulnerable. Admitting that we don’t know everything about them.
The blind men hold a hopeful, open-minded view that maybe, Jesus can heal. Following Jesus often sparks negative reactions. Because the perception of Christianity is that it’s a narrow, closed-minded view of the world.
But my experience of following Jesus has been exactly the opposite. If we are really listening to Jesus, our minds cannot remain closed. It requires an open mind to follow Jesus - to see His vision of what it means to be a human being. It means we cannot assume that we already know - instead, we allow Jesus to redefine it.