I often wonder how other people see the world. I assume that people see trees the same way I see them, that green looks green and brown looks brown. But I don’t really know. How do you really know what other people are seeing? I know that we can see the same things, but end up giving them different labels. The famous Rorschach inkblot test proves that people place their own interpretation on what they see. Those messy blotches of ink made by putting ink on the paper and folding it, creating mirror images, are used to discover some personality profiles. But they are just inkblots, not pictures of anything.
I know that our available language helps to determine how we describe and categorize what we see. An example of this is pretty evident in our culture. Men often don’t have the same depth of vocabulary to describe paint colors. I tend to keep to the basics: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple, brown, black, white. I don’t even know what chartreuse is, let alone mauve or fuchsia. So when I describe a color I see I have to use the vocabulary I have to label my experience. If I knew more words for the subtle differences in colors, my descriptions would be more accurate for someone who also possessed the full vocabulary of color. They would know what fuchsia looks like and how it is different from blue. Not me!
The blind man in our text has spent a lifetime in the dark. He has experienced the world through the ends of his fingers. You could hand him and object and he would tell you what it was by rubbing his hands all over it and ‘seeing’ it with his fingers. He would weigh it, find the openings, determine the materials, and then be able to guess at its use. He did this by comparing what he had experienced in the past through his fingers with the object now placed there. He would take the known and guess about the unknown.
Jesus enters his life and brings him sight, but his interpretation of what he sees is skewed. He needs a link to google images files so that he identifies what he sees correctly. He sees people and he labels them walking trees.
But think about it for a moment. Apart from hearing someone’s voice, blind people identify others by touching their faces. The subtle differences are picked up by finely tuned fingertips, and each person can be identified correctly. Blind folks don’t usually explore other parts of the body to determine who they are interacting with. That could be embarrassing.
So this man is healed, but the healing only restores his ability to see, not his ability to understand what he is seeing. He takes what he knows and now adds visual images. There isn’t an accurate connection between what he has ‘seen’ with his hands and all this new visual information.
The disciples were used to seeing things on a physical level and Jesus introduces a whole new depth of conversation. Jesus speaks about yeast, but He is talking about teaching content. The disciples only pick up on the bread. They don’t yet know how to incorporate Jesus’ insights into their lives.
The Arnold Journey 