8:24-26
This is the one incident in the gospels where the healing is not immediately complete. The man can see people, but the image is not perfectly distinct. Jesus then lays His hands on the man’s eyes again, and this time the man’s vision was perfectly restored. Jesus sent the man away to his home, and Jesus did not want people to know about the healing. He was told not to go into the village, for then everyone would know what had happened. Why did Jesus do this? For even if the man did exactly as Jesus told him, he was not going to live as a hermit for the rest of his life, so very soon people would know that something dramatic had happened. Maybe Jesus did not want it to be a distraction from His immediate purpose of being in the region, so He could at least get some useful teaching in before everyone wanted healing.
Sometimes this incident is used as support for gradual healing. It would be better to say that it is misused as grounds for gradual healing. Now that is not to say that there is anything wrong with gradual healing. Our bodies gradually heal themselves most of the time, they are a remarkable creation of God. Often when we pray for people there will be gradual or partial healing, often with the help of doctors (eg praying that operations go well is perfectly legitimate). There is nothing wrong with this, it is part of God’s grace, but it is not miraculous in the same way that the gospel healings were.
So why was there partial healing before complete healing? One suggestion is to note that this comes immediately after the tale of the disciples lack of understanding (8:14-21), and is meant as an encouragement that the disciples would eventually have full understanding. This suggestion is perhaps supported by the fact that the next incident will be Peter’s confession of who Jesus is. So Jesus deliberately healed the man in two stages as a kind of living parable.
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