Dave Brisbin 5.28.23 Pentecost
Jesus heals two blind men with spit, and there’s been endless speculation why Jesus would use such a strange way to heal. Passing a man born blind on the Sabbath, Jesus spits on the ground, kneads the dirt into mud, applies it to the man’s eyes, and tells him to go wash. Why the spit and dirt?
To heal with a simple word, would not break the unwritten rules prohibiting work on the Sabbath as taught and enforced by the Pharisees. But kneading the saliva and dirt did. Jesus is going out of his way to put mud in the eye of these rules that had grown exponentially to such a burden on the people as to subvert the intent of the written Law. To imply that God was just about obedience to an inflexible system of ritual justification, obliterated the degreeless love that Jesus represented.
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Jesus was spat upon, had to descend, lose everything it meant to be himself before rising to new life. We all must endure the same loss before rising to the Pentecost moment when we finally see clearly that we’re healed. Jesus’ followers saw him only dimly, clinging to their beliefs about law and justice restored when Jesus and they would rise to power. But Jesus is showing that obedience as a form of control is not enough. Only in the humiliating loss of all sense of personal power can we clearly see the truth of a love that obliterates law.
