He Used His Hands And Some Spit

He is tired in a way that has nothing to do with sleep.

He prays. He reads. He thinks about it a great deal, in the car and in the queue and at three in the morning. He has more theology in him than most people who preach and he could hold his own in any conversation you cared to start.

And all of it, every last bit of it, happens in about six inches of space behind his eyes.

That is where God is for him. In there. In thought, in intention, in the careful arrangement of belief. He has never said that out loud because it does not sound like a problem, and for a long time it was not one.

But he is forty-four now and he has begun to notice something.

He is exhausted in there. It is the only room he has and he has been in it for twenty years, and the walls have got close. When he is at his worst, the same six inches that hold his faith also hold his worry, and the two of them share the space, and by three in the morning he cannot tell them apart.

Last winter he stood in his own kitchen at about one, not praying, holding a mug because his hands were cold.

And that was the nearest thing to peace he had felt in a month, and it bothered him, because there was nothing spiritual about it at all.

So let me ask you.

When did your faith last involve anything you could feel with your hands?

The one time we are told exactly how

There is a healing in Mark that people find awkward and I find enormously reassuring, and it is the details that do it.

A blind man is brought to Him at Bethsaida. And instead of a word, which He certainly could have used and used constantly elsewhere, we get this.

He took the blind man by the hand and led him outside the village. When He had spit on the man's eyes and put His hands on him, Jesus asked, Do you see anything?Mark 8:23

Took him by the hand. Led him outside. Spit. Hands on him. Asked.

Five physical actions and one question, and not one word of it happens behind anybody's eyes.

Mark 8 shows the Son of God reaching for the plainest material within arm's length, and the Spirit who was on Him without measure did not object to any of it, so you have never been more spiritual for keeping God out of your hands.

And then, famously, it does not entirely work. The man sees people like trees walking, and Jesus puts His hands on him again, and the second time it is clear.

Two goes. With hands.

Now, I want to be careful, and you will understand why, because this is a subject people fight about and I have no intention of joining in.

I am not going to tell you what any physical thing does or does not do. I am not going to adjudicate one word of what anybody believes about that, in any direction, and if you came for a ruling you can keep your evening.

I am telling you something much smaller and much more useful.

Mark 8 records the Lord using hands and spit and a walk out of a village, and the Spirit who rested on Him at the Jordan was fully at work in every ordinary bit of it, which means the material world was never the lower half of anything.

You have been living as though the body were the waiting room and the mind were where God actually receives. That is not in the text. In the text, He reaches out.