NOTES for Mat 9:27-31

The blind men took the initiative themselves by appealing to Christ. Nevertheless, He asked them once more whether they believed that He was able to heal them. Apparently, in this episode it was important to Christ that faith not manifest itself as an emotional impulse alone, but be a considered confession, a conscious choice.

By all appearances, the blind men truly made such a choice. Unfortunately, an emotional impulse could not be avoided, and they immediately disobeyed Christ’s request not to spread the word. Well, in human terms this is quite understandable, especially since there were two of them, which under Jewish law made their words lawful testimony...

Nevertheless, even though He knows that people find it difficult to carry out what He tells them and to comprehend what He does, Jesus continues to act in the human world. But the Pharisees’ tendentious prejudice is also increasing. Significantly, the accusation that He used the powers of the prince of demons was voiced after a demon was cast out of a mute man: the Pharisees would like to monopolize the right to speak. But the One who created the world by His Word wants people too to share in word and reason.

So, after all, does a miracle convince? As it turns out, not everyone and not always. Faced with manifestations of God's power, the power of the Kingdom, that Jesus made entirely obvious to everyone, it would seem impossible not to believe in the miracle. But apparently one can bear witness to the Kingdom, yet it is impossible to prove its reality to someone who does not want to believe. The Pharisees, for example, invent ever new explanations for something that, in essence, needs no explanation at all but only needs to be accepted. They have no wish to accept it, and therein lies the whole problem.

One might think that the Pharisees, of all people, since they professed messianic hope, should only have rejoiced at the appearance of the Messiah and the Kingdom in the world. And they probably would have, had Jesus acted as the Messiah was supposed to act according to those same Pharisees' ideas. But the problem was precisely that Jesus did not conform to those ideas and had no intention of doing so.

Then what could not fail to happen did happen: the logic of opposition demands escalation, and eventually escalation came. Previously the leaders of the Pharisaic movement had tried to explain Jesus' miracles and healings in more or less neutral terms. Now they move to direct and very serious accusations, in effect accusing the Savior of paganism and demon worship. The calculation is simple: if you strike, strike with all your strength and without restraint; if you accuse, make the accusation as difficult as possible to answer.

Nor is this merely a desire to rid themselves of Jesus. His accusers, it seems, are trying to convince not only others but themselves that they are right. To do so they need the gravest possible accusations, and it no longer matters how plausible those accusations are. In such a situation the mind will accept any argument as long as it justifies rejecting what cannot reasonably be rejected. They seek to frighten not only others but themselves, and to frighten themselves so thoroughly that there can be no road back and no one will even dare think that this Man might be from God.

Such intimidation requires a taboo that blocks, even at the subconscious level, every attempt to view the situation differently. The accusation of demon worship was just such a taboo—a taboo that became the last refuge of religiosity opposed to the Kingdom.

The healing of the blind men spoken of in today's Gospel reading is, in a certain sense, very typical. As they approach, the blind men call Jesus the Son of David, offering their initial confession. As happens almost always, He asks a question about faith, and then says, according to your faith be it done to you. As in other cases, He asks them not to spread word of the miraculous healing. This is important because, as the Lord performs more and more miracles, people face a growing temptation to make Him an earthly ruler, so this request is entirely clear.

But what does it mean for the blind men themselves, who, incidentally, were not able to fulfill it? What does it mean in the broader context of a person's calling to proclaim and glorify the great works of God? What is it like for a person to become a participant in a miracle of God's mercy and then receive a command to be silent about it? We, of course, do not know the true motives of what happened, but, looking in the mirror, we can guess something. In particular, perhaps the matter is simply ordinary boasting. This is how we take pride in knowing some famous person. We collect completely useless autographs of rather dubious celebrities. Why? To boast. If a celebrity paid attention to me, then there is something in me. And we imagine the Creator as a kind of super-celebrity. Since He healed us of blindness, it means we are good in some way, better than others. How simple. And how foolish. For God is not a celebrity; He is not trying to appear before people's eyes more often, nor is this needed by the One who created heaven and earth. But the main thing, and the hardest thing for us, is that His mercy has no cause in us. He healed the blind men not because they were better than others, but because each of us is unique to Him.

An undisclosed miracle can become the content of deeply personal, secret relations with God. There is something that only You and I know, and by this we become so close. To possess this is vitally important. The day will come when He says to you, as to Nathanael, "...when you were under the fig tree, I saw you," and your very metabolism will become life. But if you publicize the miracle, violating Christ's request, then there are no personal relations, and the miracle becomes the autograph of a celebrity, grows dim, and is forgotten.

Every time a healing takes place in the Gospel, a miracle occurs. It is not merely a miracle of a medical or psychological nature; rather, it is a miracle of revelation about God, showing that He is not as we imagined Him. In nearly all the healings described, Christ truly acts by destroying existing religious notions: He touches the uncleanness of illness and death, He accepts outcasts and the disabled, and He makes not a person's righteousness but their faith the condition for the miracle... Therefore Jesus' Good News concerns not only what God does, healing, forgiving, and raising the dead, but, more importantly, what He is like. For on the path of faith and hope in God, what most often stands in our way are our distorted notions about Him: that He will not rummage in our earthly filth, that He will not want to deal with people like us, and that if He does, He will act according to our ideas of good and evil. Yet we have Good News: there is hope that He is different.

Another "series" of Jesus' miracles. It is striking how different these four healings are. The case of the woman with the flow of blood is especially revealing: Jesus does nothing special here; the healing happens as a result of the meeting between her bold faith (the bleeding makes a person unclean, and she has no right to touch other people) and the power abiding in Jesus, as the Gospel according to Luke tells it, opening for us a glimpse into the mystery of the Lord's miracles.

The description of each of the other healings ends by mentioning how people respond to it. Of course, word about Jesus spreads; of course, those healed by Him prove unable to obey Him even out of gratitude; and of course, Christ's miracles, like His preaching, draw some people to Him and repel others. Jesus will answer the accusations that He is working with the prince of demons later (this will be discussed in chapter 12).