Words on the Word
Give God Time
Genesis 8.6-22: The dove Noah sent out found no place to set her foot.
Mark 8.22-26: He took the blind man by the hand, and led him out of the village.
When, after the flood, the waters receded from the earth, the process took time. God did not pull the plug to drain the planet as if it were a bathtub. He let the waters draw back following a natural rhythm, patiently re-establishing boundaries set on the third day of creation.
He tends to proceed likewise when, from our lives, he drives away chaos and infirmity.
We have heard about Jesus’s encounter with the blind man of Bethsaida. Note the courtesy of the proceedings. Jesus takes the man’s hand, a gentle gesture, and leads him away from the crowd. The intimate process of healing must take place confidentially, away from curious eyes.
The incarnate Word of God, in whose image man was made, applied his life-breath to the man’s eyes in the form of spittle, letting his hands (‘his sacred hands’ as we say in the Roman canon), rest on them a while. Thus the restoration of sight begins. It passes through stages, letting the man get used to engaging with reality afresh.
Is it not often the case that we, healed of an ill that has plagued us, feel, in addition to relief, a kind of bereavement?
We can come to identify ourselves so fully in terms of an infirmity that we do not know, when it goes, who we are. We need time to find out. Perhaps we have then, like the man from Bethsaida, to stay outside the village a while, alone with ourselves before God, in order to rediscover our place in the world, and our task.
For God heals us for a purpose. Having stood before him blind crying, ‘Lord, that I may see’, we must first of all let let him act freely, applying his remedies. Then we must learn to ask, our sight restored, ‘Lord, what would you have me do, where do you have need of me?’
Christ healing the blind man. Statue from the cloisters of the cathedral of Burgos.