I am using the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.

Today, I am reading and commenting on Mark 8-9.

    Once again Jesus is teaching a crowd in a remote area and He is concerned that they are hungry. This happens not that long after the feeding of the 5,000, yet the disciples are worried about where they would get the food to feed this many people. It is so easy to look at the disciples and think that they should have learned from the first time. Yet, we often do the same thing. Well, at least I do. God has miraculously provided for our, or someone else’s, needs, yet when the same, or similar, needs arise again, we worry about how we will meet those needs this time. No sooner had Jesus crossed over the Sea of Galilee after this feeding than some of the Pharisees asked Him for a miraculous sign of His authority. The driving out of demon’s, the curing of the sick, restoring hearing to the deaf, and the feeding of thousands on two occasions were not sufficient for them. They wanted a sign performed just for the sake of proving Jesus’ power. Just as our faith can act as yeast to change the world around us, so can such “skepticism” act to change the Church. The first makes a positive change, the latter a change for the worse.

    In this passage is a story of Jesus healing a blind man that I have always been slightly puzzled by. Why did Jesus have to place His hands on the man’s eyes a second time for the man to be able to see clearly? Today for some reason I thought of the story of the man born blind in the Gospel of John. In that story when the Pharisees were questioned the healed man, they told him, “We know that Jesus is a sinner, so what really happened?” To which the man replied, “I don’t know if He is a sinner or not. What I do know is that I was blind, but now I see.” By saying that the former blind man was telling the Pharisees, “I was blind and Jesus gave me sight. Since you cannot see that He is from God, you are clearly still blind.” Which brings me back to this story, sometimes it takes being touched by Jesus more than once for the spiritually blind to gain their sight. All of us were born spiritually blind. It is only when we are touched by God that we can gain our sight. Some of us need to be touched more than once. This is the lesson from the beginning of today’s passage as well. The disciples needed to see Jesus feed the masses twice before they understood. But some will choose to never understand, no matter how often Jesus touches their lives.