DYNAMIS!
A publication of St. George Orthodox Christian Cathedral
Wichita, KS
St. Mark 8:22-26
(1/22) For
Tues of the 35th Week after Pentecost (Tues of the 30th
Week)
Cultivating
Faith: St. Mark 8:22-26, especially vss. 24, 25: “And
he looked up and said, ‘I see men like trees, walking.’ Then He put His hands on his eyes again
and made him look up. And he was
restored and saw everyone clearly.”
It is a truism that emotional and spiritual dependency
on tangible signs and wonders destroys the possibility of faith in the
Lord. Today’s Gospel and the
one for tomorrow both touch on different aspects of faith in Christ and are a
help in exploring what it means to have faith in the Lord Jesus.
Today’s
Gospel is the account of a blind man whom the Lord Jesus healed in stages. The man’s relationship with the
Lord reveals growth in faith as an incremental process. At first, the blind man needed only a
tiny bit of trust in Christ - permitting others to bring him near the
Lord. See how being healed from the
grim darkness of sin - against which we all struggle - requires letting the
Lord lead us beyond the secure and familiar to enlarge our faith.
See the
blessing: if we take risks with the Lord’s help, He heals our doubt. He assists us in taking little steps,
for a tiny risk brings greater faith.
How does this happen? The
Lord’s pure light within enables us to see as never before. Still, as the Gospel shows, the sight we
gain is incomplete because we are limited - being both finite and
sinful. The blessing is that the
Lord never ceases to cultivate faith within us. He presses on to establish, purify,
adorn, and enlighten.
Another
miracle occurs when our gracious God illumines the eyes of our hearts: our
vision of others grows increasingly clearer. Such enlightenment may disturb, even
astound us. It may leave us
uncertain. Yet, the Lord thereby
creates a new opportunity for faith in Him. What are we to do with our new insight
into others? Go back to old
relationships that are familiar, spend our time with those who formerly made us
feel at ease, or shall we turn toward “home”? Like the blind man, the Lord tells us to
“go home,” but for us that means to enter into the Holy Community
of the Faithful where men and women “...worship [Him] in spirit and in
truth” (Jn. 4:24).
Faith,
at each step, is a free act on our part.
We agree to come to Him. It
may seem initially to be other humans that we trust: parents, friends, a
spouse, a wise and loving Pastor, the friendship of people in a parish. We do not see clearly at first. In time, however, we discover that truly
it was the Lord Jesus Whom we trusted, shining through the Faithful. Through participation in the life of the
Church, we come face to face with the Lord Jesus Himself.
In this
passage, the Evangelist tells us, “...He took the blind man by the hand
and led him out of the town” (Mk. 8:23). Think of the situation of the blind
man. In town he had a certain
security provided by his senses: familiar smells, sounds, touch, and the words
of others. The Lord, however, led
him out of town so that he had to depend entirely on Him with no familiar
supports. Do you see? Healing and illumination as an Orthodox
Christian means leaving the familiar, abandoning our natural, comfortable ways
of thinking in order to receive new visions of truth and reality. St. Clement of
Finally,
note that Orthodoxy affirms that we are blind and do not see perfectly even
when the Lord heals one or another aspect of our lives. The life in Christ is a process of
continuing growth in faith. We pray, receive the Holy Mysteries, study Scripture and the
Fathers, and His light grows within us.
He continues to take us beyond the familiar, to heal us in small steps
as we are able to bear the Light, and then He sends us back home into our
Church community.
To Thee
I come, O Christ, blinded in my soul’s eyes, crying unto Thee in repentance,
“Thou art the Light of transcendent radiance to those who are in
darkness.”
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to the January Calendar