The Gospel of Mark | Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5
βλέπω blepō / ὁράω horaō • the two ordinary Greek verbs for seeing
Blepō is the seeing your eyes do: to look, to watch. Horaō reaches further: to see and to perceive, to take in what a thing means. Greek keeps two verbs where English has one.
Central Question for Part 3
What does it mean to see Jesus?
On our first Sunday, we picked a fight with gMark’s opening.
The “Good News” was lifted from Caesar’s monuments and hung on an executed Jew from the Galilee. Last Sunday, we watched the Kingdom arrive: without manger, cradle, or star. Instead, we saw a man irrupting out of the desert, with an authority one witnessed rather than debated. Because his exousia came from doing: from healing communities and breaking bread with the stranger.
Then came a parable about soils, because the Kingdom, once broken through, must still be received. And not every ground is open to parting with the ways of Caesar — of thrones, and banners, and riches. That lesson ended on a promise: that the gap between hearing and understanding runs all the way down to a blind beggar outside of Jericho who, of everyone in this Gospel, finally sees. This Sunday, we pay him a visit.
Now, if you have been following this series, you may have noticed a curious pattern: every part opens with something strange. If you caught that, I’m glad. I wanted you to notice, actually, because I took that tactic directly from gMark. That is to say, when we read gMark closely and invest ourselves in the text, we begin to notice not just the story itself but the way it’s edited together. This entire Gospel is built out of puzzles. And the deepest ones, the writer refuses to solve until the very end — like bookending the text with the torn (schizō) verb — which we’ll tie off on our last Sunday. This week, however, I want to hand you another Markan puzzle, one that the writer set at the dead center of the Gospel, and then walked away from without a word of explanation.
What it reveals is that this is a Gospel about perception: who sees, who’s blind, who half-sees, and who hears everything and understands none of it. And the puzzle at the center is a story of a man who needed to be healed of blindness, not once but twice.
With this puzzle in mind, today we will wrestle with what it means to see Jesus well.
Lesson One · The Name without the Meaning
So here’s yet another strange thing about gMark.
There is exactly one healing in all four Gospels that happens in two stages. One. Everywhere else, Jesus heals with the grand authority we’re used to witnessing: a word, a touch, and it’s done, usually instantly, and certainly completely.
Except this one time…
Once, in gMark, Jesus takes a blind man by the hand, leads him out of the village, puts saliva on his eyes, lays hands on him, and then does something he does nowhere else. He asks: Can you see anything? As if Jesus is checking. And the man looks up, and I love this line, he says, “I can see people, but they look like trees, walking.”
The man is half-healed. Blurred. He can see shapes moving, but cannot tell a man from a tree. (There’s a Lord of the Rings joke in there, somewhere.) So Jesus lays hands on him a second time, and only then does he see clearly. It is the only healing told this way in the entire Gospel tradition. And the writer didn’t bury this odd occurrence. They set it at the dead center of the Gospel, right at the hinge where the whole story turns. The entire Gospel of Mark frames this healing. So here is the question gMark is daring you to ask: why would Jesus, who heals instantly, need two turns — and why would the writer put that odd healing at the very center of the text?
So, picture that in your mind: a man who sees people as walking trees. Because, to understand why it sits at the center of gMark, you have to look at what sits right next to it — six verses later…
Jesus went on with his disciples to the villages of Caesarea Philippi, and on the way he asked his disciples, “Who do people say that I am?” And they answered him, “John the Baptist; and others, Elijah; and still others, one of the prophets.” He asked them, “But who do you say that I am?” Peter answered him, “You are the Messiah.” And he sternly ordered them not to tell anyone about him.
Then he began to teach them that the Son of Man must undergo great suffering and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes and be killed and after three days rise again. He said all this quite openly. And Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him. But turning and looking at his disciples, he rebuked Peter and said, “Get behind me, Satan! For you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things.”
He called the crowd with his disciples and said to them, “If any wish to come after me, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it. For what will it profit them to gain the whole world and forfeit their life? Indeed, what can they give in return for their life? Those who are ashamed of me and of my words in this adulterous and sinful generation, of them the Son of Man will also be ashamed when he comes in the glory of his Father with the holy angels.”
MARK 8:27-38
Now think about what just happened, because this is the hinge of the entire book.
Jesus asks the disciples the question that the whole Gospel has been circling: “Who do you say that I am?” And Peter, the first called, the Rock, gets it right. “You are the Messiah.” The anointed one. The Christos. After eight chapters of crowds guessing, and demons whispering, and disciples scratching their heads, somebody finally says the word out loud, and he’s correct! Bully for Peter.
But this isn’t the mountaintop. This isn’t the end. Because in the space of three verses, it falls completely apart. How?
Because the moment Peter names the title, Jesus starts explaining what the title actually means — and it’s not at all what Peter is prepared to hear. The Son of Man, Jesus says, must undergo great suffering — be rejected, killed, and after three days rise again. And Peter, who two breaths ago said exactly the right thing, takes Jesus aside and rebukes him!
Peter corrects Jesus!
That’s not what Messiah means, Jesus. And so Jesus turns to Peter and says the hardest thing he ever says to a friend: “Get behind me, Satan!” Why the insult? Jesus explains his harsh words with the next line, “For you, [Peter] are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things.”
Now, I ask you to resist the easy reading here, because it won’t hold up.
The easy reading is that Peter is simply a fool. He’s not. If we put ourselves in Peter’s first-century Jewish sandals for a moment, we’ll quickly see that, for him, “Messiah” did not mean a man on a Roman cross. For first-century Jews, the “Anointed One” was a king — Judean kings’ heads were anointed with oil to proclaim their kingship. To a simple fisherman reading the terrain in front of him, the expectation was that all these Roman soldiers taxing us into starvation and hurting our families would be thrown into the sea by a new Jewish king. This king would then unite the scattered Jewish diaspora and restore the throne of David. Israel had not had independence since Rome’s brutal conquest a century before. Peter and the rest of the disciples are hoping for the return of the good old days of independence and unity.
Peter knew about the Roman cross. The violence of crucifixion had been common for centuries in the region, and would continue there for centuries more. The Jewish Messiah, on the other hand, stood for triumph and glory! How could Jesus combine Messiah, Israel’s great triumph, with crucifixion — the lowest, slowest, and most humiliating death Rome imposed? A crucified messiah was not merely a difficult idea for Peter. For first-century Jews, to talk of a crucified messiah was a logical contradiction in terms. One could call it blasphemy if it actually made any sense! At our next meeting, we will pick up on this thread. For now, let’s say only that Peter has the right name, but the wrong story about what that name Messiah actually means for Jesus.
The Gospel of Mark redefines the Messiah around the very thing that would make a Messianic leader impossible in first-century Judea. And notice (because this is the detail people often skate past) that the very first thing Jesus does after Peter names him is order them to tell no one. We mentioned that last Sunday, so let’s pick it back up here: throughout the Gospel of Mark, the truth gets spoken and Jesus shushes it. The demons knew his name, and he muzzled them. Now Peter knows the title and is told to keep quiet, because, as we all know by the end of the story, the title without the cross is not good news. The Messiah Peter had in mind was a political design in theological clothes. Another war. Another few years of bloodshed. Then peace — the peace that every leader promises, following the death of its country’s youth and promise.
But let’s continue reading where many readers stop. Having told Peter that the Messiah will be killed, Jesus turns from Peter to the whole crowd and makes the cross theirs too: If any of you want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. Let’s think about how strange that comment really is.
Jesus is not only saying I will be crucified. He is saying that following a crucified Messiah willingly invites a certain kind of death — not a hero’s valiant death on a holy battlefield with the wind whipping across your sword and banners, but a martyr’s undignified murder under a gleeful imperial boot. What Peter is hearing, much to his astonishment, is that the shape of following Jesus is the cross. By the end of this lesson, in contradiction to Peter’s response, we will see someone who hears that message and walks the cross-road that Jesus lays before us.
So here is what I want you to carry out of this first lesson: Peter has the right name, but the wrong story. Notice now, who fails to see. It’s not the crowd. It’s not “the Jews” in a corporate accusation as we find in the Gospel of John. The one who cannot see Jesus is in the inner circle. The man with the keys. The Rock. Here, the writer is warning us that those closest to Jesus, by calling and occupation, do not see him. Proximity is not seeing. You can be the Rock and still be staring at trees.
Lesson Two · The Half-Healing & the Woman Who Saw
So Peter can see, but only halfway. Now, at the start of today’s lesson, I invited you to pay close attention to the way the gospel writer puts all of these stories together. Notice now not just the story but the way it’s cut together.
Let’s look again, back at the puzzle six verses before Peter…
Remember the singular healing that takes two touches — the man who looks up mid-miracle and sees people “like trees, walking.” I asked why Jesus, who heals instantly, would need two tries. Here is the answer: he didn’t. The two-stage healing was never about the limits of Jesus’ power. They are about the limits of Peter’s willingness to see.
At first glance, Peter saw real shapes with the wrong focus: a Messiah without a cross. A man like a tree, walking. The writer placed these two scenes together, the strange two-part healing and Peter’s blurred confession, side-by-side at the dead center of the Gospel, so that each could explain the other. Read them apart, and you have a curiosity and a quarrel. Read them together, the way they were actually placed in the text, and the healing becomes a map for understanding Peter’s shortsightedness.
Now look at what sits right before it, because the writer is handing you the caption first. In the boat, the disciples are fretting that they forgot to bring bread, and Jesus rounds on them: Do you have eyes, and fail to see? Do you have ears and fail to hear? Do you not yet understand? He calls out their condition — spiritual blindness — and then, in the very next scene, gMark sets before you a literal blind man.
They came to Bethsaida. Some people brought a blind man to him and begged him to touch him. He took the blind man by the hand and led him out of the village, and when he had put saliva on his eyes and laid his hands on him, he asked him, “Can you see anything?” And the man looked up and said, “I can see people, but they look like trees, walking.” Then Jesus laid his hands on his eyes again, and he looked intently, and his sight was restored, and he saw everything clearly. Then he sent him away to his home, saying, “Do not even go into the village.”
MARK 8:22-26
Let’s look at what the healing actually shows, because it was written with great care.
The first touch is partial. The man sees, but everything’s blurred: people look like trees, there’s motion without clarity. The right shapes in the wrong focus. Then the second touch: wholeness. Fulfilment. Now look again, just six verses later. At first touch, Peter sees. He names Jesus correctly; the shape is right. But it’s blurred. He gets “Messiah” right, but it’s without the cross. Too worldly a viewpoint. The rest of the Gospel is waiting for the second touch, which happens in the Last Week of Jesus’ life.
This is where I want to borrow a line from Marcus Borg, who taught us to take the Bible seriously without taking it literally, and this healing is a perfect case of why that distinction is a gift to gMark’s deeper meaning. Read literally, this healing is a peculiar medical anecdote: a miracle that needed a do-over. Read seriously, in the context of the rest of the Gospel, this healing is gMark’s most carefully constructed metaphor. The two stages of the healing are the two stages of discipleship. Any philosophy professor will tell you: seeing comes in stages. At first read, you have a general direction, maybe a key term, but the point is still a blur. A ‘first-glance’ grasp of the Gospel is not a failed read or a failed miracle. It is the very road St. Peter took to finally see Jesus rightly.
Here, I want to remind you of the Proverb:
The path of the righteous is like the light of dawn, which shines brighter and brighter until full day. Proverb 4:18
That is the mercy found throughout this Gospel’s portrait of the disciples: their initial blindness is the dark before the light of a new day. But gMark also shows us another kind of seeing, even more strange and audacious. In the chapter before Peter’s blurred confession, the text shows us someone who needed no second touch. She (yes, she) sees the whole shape from the beginning! And she is everything someone like Peter would not expect: she’s not a disciple, not a fellow Jew, she’s not even in Israel. Alone in pagan territory, with a sick child and no social standing, she walks straight into the most theologically uncomfortable scene in the Gospel.
I want to give some credit here. When our very own Rev. Dr. Chris Pulliam preached this same scene last year, he was honest about how hard it lands. He said he could not fully tame it, and I trust a preacher who’s willing to tell you that. He has my deep respect, and said something in that sermon that I want to repeat here: we’re not worthy, but ask anyway. What I want to show you now is how far this non-Jewish woman takes her fearless “ask anyway…”
From there he set out and went away to the region of Tyre. He entered a house and did not want anyone to know he was there. Yet he could not escape notice, but a woman whose little daughter had an unclean spirit immediately heard about him, and she came and bowed down at his feet. Now the woman was a gentile, of Syrophoenician origin. She begged him to cast the demon out of her daughter. He said to her, “Let the children be fed first, for it is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.” But she answered him, “Sir, even the dogs under the table eat the children’s crumbs.” Then he said to her, “For saying that, you may go — the demon has left your daughter.” And when she went home, she found the child lying on the bed and the demon gone.
MARK 7:24-30
Let me be honest about how uncomfortable this story is, because the discomfort is part of the point, and the moment you sand it down (and many have tried), you have thrown away the whole story.
The woman’s daughter has an unclean spirit. She comes and falls at Jesus’ feet and begs. And Jesus — and there is no softening this — says no. Worse than no. He says, “Let the children be fed first, for it is not fair to take the children’s bread and throw it to the dogs.” Dogs. Now, I know there is a long theological tradition of trying to rescue Jesus here. St. Augustine in the 5th century points to her humility: “the Lord called her a dog,” he marvels in his 77th Sermon, “and she did not say I am not; she said I am, and was rewarded for it.” The Reformation founder Martin Luther cast the scene as a trial of faith — God's “no” concealing a “yes” for the woman who would not relent. And in the 1950s, William Barclay points out that gMark’s Greek uses the diminutive, little dogs. So, Jesus is really saying puppies, here. Right? He calls her a puppy?
But such a position is special pleading, and it drains the message of its weight. “Dog” or “kalba” was a genuine insult in Israel. In that Aramaic-speaking world, dogs were a sign of being shameless and unclean. Today, in Arabic, dog or “kalb” is still an insult with similar ancient reasoning: if a dog licks you before prayer, most Islamic schools require you to wash its saliva off before kneeling toward God.
So this non-Jewish woman is facing a real insult from Jesus. I’m not going to deny that. The theological wall she faces is real, and her victory over that wall is equally real. In fact, I think it’s the whole point.
The woman does not flinch, does not retreat, and does not weep. She argues.
“Even the dogs under the table eat the children’s crumbs.” She takes Jesus’ metaphor and uses it against him. Dogs need to eat, too, Jesus. And listen to what changes his mind here: because of this argument, “you may go; the demon has left your daughter.” This is the only time in the entire Gospel of Mark that someone changes Jesus’ mind. She does not move him with tears. She moves him with a better argument. She is an agent in her own healing, and Jesus becomes the one who is moved!
My mentor, John Dominic Crossan, reads this scene as the radical openness of the historical Jesus: the brokerless kingdom, the open table, the mercy refusing to stop at the border. It is a beautiful reading, and I honor him for it. But it carries a hidden cost: If the point is that Jesus opens the door, then the unspoken premise is that Jewish life was the thing ending behind it. Amy-Jill Levine supplies the needed correction here: Gentile inclusion is not something Jesus invents against Jewish tradition; it is already written into the scripture. Look where the Gentile woman is from. Tyre and Sidon — Lebanon today — where the prophet Elijah famously fed a widow, another desperate mother with no bread (1 Kings 17:7-16). And that scripture has marvelous company: Ruth the Moabite [from a people the Torah bars from the Assembly] walks into Israel with nothing and becomes the great-grandmother of King David. So a Phoenician woman arguing with a Jewish prophet about bread and crumbs is not breaking through a closed tradition. That reading ignores the Book of Kings. Instead, we see a woman standing where Zarephath's widow and Ruth already stood, invoking one of the Bible’s oldest moral claims: that we are called to wrestle with God.
And the Gentile woman is winning.
So, watch what her argument does in the story, because it’s not some charming detour the writer could have cut. Rather, it sets the scene to come. Immediately, Jesus heals a deaf man in the Decapolis, again in Gentile country. Then he feeds thousands in Gentile territory. Amazingly, the Gentile mission of the Gospel of Mark begins here, at the moment a non-Jewish woman wins an argument over crumbs.
The Gospel is never the same afterward. It is the moment that the door opens to Jesus’ entire Gentile ministry. The disciples are the half-healed man. The last question for today is whether anyone in this Gospel ever fully sees Jesus.
Lesson Three · Bartimaeus, Who Sees and Follows
So the Gentile woman saw, and then went home. She picked up her healed child and walked back into her own life, and we never see her again. So, let’s ask: does anyone who walks the road with Jesus, anyone who’s actually trying to follow, ever get the second, clarifying touch?
As the road Jesus walks is revealed to you, the reader, it does not look promising. Between that blind man at the center of the story and Jerusalem at the end, Jesus tells his friends plainly, on three separate occasions, that he is going to be killed. And every time, they show us they cannot see what he’s talking about.
Count them with me.
First, Peter rebuked him in Mark 8. Then, six days later, three of them are taken up a mountain and shown the clearest vision of who Jesus is in the whole Gospel: in blazing white, Jesus stands next to Moses and Elijah. And Peter's response? He babbles about building three tents, because the text says flatly that he did not know what to say, and was terrified. The disciples see him in glory, the curtain pulled back, and still reach for the wrong thing. Then comes the second prediction, plainer than the first — and the disciples respond by arguing over which of them is the greatest. Then the third, in the most detail yet, and James and John walk up and ask for the two best seats in the kingdom, one at Jesus' right hand and one at his left. When Jesus talks about the cross, his disciples ask for thrones.
All the way to Jericho — men like walking trees... And then, at the very last stop before Jerusalem, sitting at the dusty edge of the road: a blind beggar. The one I pointed out last Sunday.
They came to Jericho. As he and his disciples and a large crowd were leaving Jericho, Bartimaeus son of Timaeus, a blind beggar, was sitting by the roadside. When he heard that it was Jesus of Nazareth, he began to shout out and say, “Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me!” Many sternly ordered him to be quiet, but he cried out even more loudly, “Son of David, have mercy on me!” Jesus stood still and said, “Call him here.” And they called the blind man, saying to him, “Take heart; get up, he is calling you.” So throwing off his cloak, he sprang up and came to Jesus. Then Jesus said to him, “What do you want me to do for you?” The blind man said to him, “My teacher, let me see again.” Jesus said to him, “Go; your faithfulness has made you well.” Immediately he regained his sight and followed him. MARK 10:46-52
Look who gets the last word here:
Not Peter, expecting banners and trumpets.
Not James or John, angling for the thrones and VIP treatment.
A blind beggar.
The Gospel writer rarely names the people Jesus heals, but this one is named: Bartimaeus, son of Timaeus, sitting by the roadside with a cloak spread out for coin. The lowest-status person in the scene. An outsider. And he is the one who sees!
He cries out: “Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me!” Son of David. That’s a messianic title, a royal title, and the beggar shouts it openly in the street. And the difference here is everything: this time, the crowd tries to shut him up. The same instinct that muzzled demons, the same holy order that hushed Peter. Be quiet! But here, for once, watch what does not happen. Jesus does not silence the beggar. The man shouts louder, “Son of David, have mercy,” and Jesus stops the whole procession and calls him over.
The Gospel’s constant shushing is finally broken by a blind man who will not stop proclaiming the truth.
What does the beggar do? He throws off his cloak: his sole possession. It is his bed and his shelter from the heat. It is the table he sets out to catch the alms on which he lives. And he throws it away to come to Jesus empty-handed. By now, you can see that gMark loves to work in contrasts and ironies. Now look a few verses back: the rich man who came to Jesus and could not let go of his wealth, went away grieving. But the beggar has just one thing — and he flings it down without a thought.
Now, focus on the question Jesus asks him, because the writer has rigged it for maximum irony. Jesus asks, “What do you want me to do for you?”
Those are the exact words Jesus said to James and John just a few verses earlier. Word for word. The same question to the inner circle. James and John, with their working eyesight and their three-year theological résumé, heard that question and said: Give us glory, Jesus! Give us the best seats. Make your treasures shower down on me. The blind beggar hears the identical question and says, “My Rabbi, let me see again.” The men who can see ask for thrones. The blind man asks for sight so that he might follow Jesus.
And then: “Go! Your faithfulness has made you well.” And the man receives his sight, and here is the line the whole lesson has been driving toward, the second touch made visible — he followed Jesus on the Way.
En tē hodō. “The Way,” by this point in gMark, it’s not a vague metaphor about life choices. The Way is a road — and the road goes up to Jerusalem, and ends at the cross.
So the blind beggar names Jesus with a royal title and, unlike Peter, turns and walks the cross-bound road behind him. That is exactly what Jesus told the crowd that following him would cost, back at Caesarea Philippi: take up your cross and follow! Peter cannot hear it, while the blind beggar does it. The first and second touch in one motion. The outsider does what the inner circle could not: he sees, and he follows.
So, in closing, let’s think now about how boundaries work in gMark.
We opened with a blind man healed: the two-stage healing at the center of the Gospel. And we finish now with a blind man fully healed: Bartimaeus, at the gate of Jesus’ Last Week. Two healings of blindness frame the disciple’s own road to the cross. Men who, despite their proximity, failed to see. Three predictions, and three times blind to the truth. The Gospel writer wrapped the disciples’ blindness inside two stories about blind men receiving sight, so that we might finally understand that the people who needed their sight healed were not the blind but Jesus’ inner circle.
In gMark, it is the outsiders who see Jesus clearly, the Gentile woman and the blind beggar, while the insiders squint and ask for riches and status.
Seeing Jesus rightly was never about naming names or titles. It wasn’t about text-proofing with chapter and verse what the Messiah means to you, your purse, or the throne you desire. The Gospel of Mark shows us that we know we are seeing Jesus rightly when that sight puts us on the road with him.
The Epistle of James describes this road well.
What good is it, my brothers and sisters, if someone claims to have faith but does not have works? Surely that faith cannot save, can it? If a brother or sister is naked and lacks daily food and one of you says to them, “Go in peace; keep warm and eat your fill,” and yet you do not supply their bodily needs, what is the good of that? So faith by itself, if it has no works, is dead. JAMES 2:14-17
The half-healing in gMark was never a failure. It was an ancient portrait of discipleship. At first, you may get the name right, but you often miss the meaning. You think you’re on the path, but the truth is, you can’t tell the men from the trees. When you’ve hit that moment in life, you need a second touch.
The blind beggar finally sees — and the seeing is the following.
In this way, you will recognize your healing when you find yourself on the road with Jesus — not asking for a throne like John or worldly things like Peter, but feeding the hungry, hearing the holy rebuke of women and strangers, and healing others eager for their place in the Kingdom.
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The Gospel of Mark · 3rd of 5 Sundays: Bread, Boundaries, Misunderstanding & the Way of the Cross. We gather again on August 2: Jerusalem, Temple, Empire & the Last Week.