Sermon Snippets’ is an occasional series, taking bitesize chunks from our Sunday sermons. The following excerpt is adapted from a sermon on Mark 8:11-30, preached by Nathan Burley last Sunday. You can listen to the whole sermon here.
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In v18 of our passage, Jesus called His disciples ‘blind.’ They have eyes but can’t see, so spiritually they’re blind.
But then in v29 Peter finally sees! The penny drops and he recognises Jesus, saying, “You are the Christ!”
And slap-bang in the middle of those two events, comes this story. Of a blind man slowly being given his sight.
Jesus wanted us to link the two stories; the blind man eventually seeing, and Peter eventually seeing who Jesus is.
He’s making the point that seeing who Jesus is is supernatural.
Peter could no more work out by himself that Jesus is the Christ, than the blind man could work out yellow from green.
It takes Jesus to open our eyes before we can see.
We saw in chapter 7 how the heart of the human problem is the problem of the human heart.
We all have something deeply wrong with us at the core of who we are. Our hearts are hard to God. That’s what Jesus told His friends was wrong with them.
Our physical eyes might work or they might not, but what the Bible calls “the eyes of our hearts”, those eyes are naturally blind.
We are in a desperate situation and nothing we can do can help.
Try being more religious? That’s just a new pair of glasses for the blind man. It will make no difference.
In fact it might make it worse because it’s an outward show of being clear-sighted which hides the reality. And it might even make others follow you into oncoming traffic thinking you know where you’re going.
Religion and rules won’t help us. It takes a miracle from Jesus to heal us.
Seeing who Jesus is really is supernatural.