reflection
BLIND, AT THE SIDE OF THE ROAD
Martí Colom
The three synoptic Gospels tell the story
of the healing of a blind man in the vicinity of Jericho. The stories have
important differences between them, as they respond to the particular literary
project of each evangelist. In Mark, for instance (10:46b-52) the blind man has
a name (Bartimaeus), while the blind in Matthew (20:29-34) and Luke (18:35-43)
are anonymous. On the other hand, in Matthew there are two blind people who ask
Jesus to heal them –not just one as in Mark and Luke. At the same time, there
are some fundamental features of the episode that are repeated in the three Gospel
accounts. Here our purpose is not to make a comparative study of the
differences but to focus on the fact that the three passages describe, at the
start of the section, the blind person (or people in the case of Matthew)
sitting by the roadside; and at the end, after talking with Jesus and having
their eyesight restored, they decide to follow Jesus. Mark specifies “on the
road” (10:52).
Without going into a detailed analysis of
all the nuances and levels of significance of the episode, we want to
concentrate on this simple point: initially seated by the road, when the blind man
has regained his sight he follows Jesus on the road. It seems important to us
to understand that for the blind man being on the edge of the road was the
cause of blindness, not its consequence. In other words, the blind man was not at the edge of the road because he was blind; he
was blind because he was on the edge of the road.
To believe that the blind man was on the
roadside because he was blind would be to assume that the evangelists are
simply giving us the literal and fairly ordinary description of a factual
situation: a beggar who is blind sits next to a road in order not to be
trampled by those walking on it. But we know that the Gospels do not want to be
precise chronicles of merely historical episodes. They are texts full of
symbolism in which every detail is intentionally placed to convey a certain
meaning. If here the intention is to describe (as in many other cases) someone’s
resistance to following Jesus, then we see that the central message of the
passage is probably to understand, as we said, that the man was blind because he was on the edge of the road. This
character describes all those who choose not to walk, not to be involved, not to
take part in Jesus’ journey, those who shy away from becoming too committed,
those who may claim to be mere spectators and not actors ... and who become
blind as a result of this attitude. To
understand a reality (too see it well) we must fully enter into it. By staying
by the road but not on the road (i.e., where according to the parable of the
sower the seed did not bear fruit - Mk 4:4 and 4:15) we lose the ability to see
properly.
Thus, the story of the blind men of Jericho
teaches us that faith involves discipleship, and that only discipleship
nourishes our faith. Even in the midst of doubt, it is better to walk than to sit;
undecided at the edge of the road, we would become blind.
Beyond the application to the subject of
discipleship, which it certainly contains, this passage offers an observation
about life in general: it tells us that anyone trying to stay away from a
situation (whatever it may be) will most likely be unable to understand it. And
turned around in the positive, it tells us that the only way to see and
understand a reality in all its complexity is entering and participating in it.
This is the perennial dilemma of anthropologists, who want to understand distant
cultures knowing full well that they are foreign to them, and often the
distance between the observer and that which is studied, and perhaps the
intentionally dispassionate nature of his view, make the understanding of what
they see an impossible goal: they magnify peripheral details of the culture that
they are studying and overlook some of its essential characteristics. We could
say that those who really achieve their end, the authentic anthropologists, are
those whose field work leads them to actually walk with those studied. Or put
in another way: it is precisely because of the fact that on the roadside we are
blind, that anthropology will never dispense from fieldwork. An anthropologist
seating in his office may never understand the life experience of distant human
groups. Only “walking” in the midst of another culture can he begin to understand
it.
Only when we become involved in the lives
of others we attain the necessary elements to at least begin to understand
their experiences in all their complexity.
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