More than a Miracle!

Although Jesus is the Great Healer, He would have made a poor first-aider. Brad Watson explains.

It seems obvious in this age that first aiders are not medical practitioners and should know their limits. Certainly my instructor would have been appalled at what I was reviewing! Because the injury wasn’t life threatening, it would have been appropriate to make the patient comfortable and call an ambulance.

The manual itself—and commonsense, I’m sure—was plainly ignored. It says that where body fluids are potentially exchanged, we should “wash hands thoroughly and put gloves on. . . .” Finally, a most important rule—“Never put direct pressure on the eyeball”—was blatantly disregarded.

Considering that the eye is among the most delicate, sophisticated organs in the human body, it seems unlikely that the first-aid manual was consulted at all. In fact, Jesus would have failed my first-aid course. He just “spit in the dust, made a clay paste with the saliva, rubbed the paste on the blind man’s eyes, and said, ‘Go, wash at the Pool of Siloam.’”* So having exchanged bodily fluids, Jesus sent the blind man to take an unsupervised bath. And I bet he didn’t have a Lab guide dog or a white stick to fend off the traffic!

But the potion worked! Forget first aid—the blind man “went and washed—and saw.” It is an amazing story, but modern science reveals it as being even more so.

Dr Oliver Sacks, Professor of Neurology at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, explains that we don’t just see, we learn to see. In 1728, William Cheseldon, an English surgeon, removed cataracts from the eyes of a 13-year-old-boy born blind. Initially joyous, he soon experienced profound confusion and had no idea of distance, space and size.

In 1991, Sacks himself leapt at the opportunity to examine an extremely rare phenomenon—a 50-year-old man blind almost from birth, whose sight had been partially restored. Struck with polio, meningitis and catscratch fever at age three, Virgil had only just regained partial vision with the help of cataract removal and insertion of new lenses. When Dr Sacks met Virgil he noted that his behaviour was akin to “one mentally blind . . . able to see, but not to decipher what he was seeing.”

Over time, it became obvious that Virgil needed to first touch things in order to understand what he was seeing. This new vision both elated and depressed him. Like a handful of similar cases documented since 1728, he at first experienced delight, followed by distress and dismay. When Virgil lost his sight again one year later, it was to his relief. He felt more at home in darkness than the confusing light of day.

Jesus understood this phenomenon. The Master Healer knew that a man blind from birth needed more than a miracle, so He did over the course of one day what it takes us years to learn.
With spit and dirt he healed the blind man’s eyes, and with faith, somehow, the patient’s brain was also taught to see.

The Bible says, “That someone opened the eyes of a man born blind has never been heard of—ever.” And just a little later, Jesus explained why He would have made a poor first aider: He wasn’t interested in making his patients comfortable while calling for help; rather, He says, “I came into the world to bring everything into the clear light of day . . . so that those who have never seen will see.”

There’s no way Jesus would have passed my first-aid course! But as I think about it, we wouldn’t want it any other way!

* Bible quotations are from The Message.

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