Curiously, two blind man trailed behind Jesus asking for a miracle, but he didn’t respond. They refused to give up, going into the house Jesus crashed in, where he finally touched and healed them. It’s in the very stern warning of his next words that we see why he hadn’t healed them before: “Don’t tell anyone about this.”
Don’t tell anyone? Keep it secret that you can see again? For how long? People are eventually bound to notice, right?
This was not the only time Jesus gave this command. The gospels are full of Jesus healing people and telling them to stay silent about it. It’s also full of healed people violating this command! Indeed, these blind men managed to tell the whole district!
Being God-in-flesh, you’d think Jesus would be able to perfectly navigate our free will world via the instructions of the Holy Spirit, but that was not always the case. The divine GPS system of the Heavens would often have to say, “Recalculating.” In cases like these, Jesus’ compassion would win out and he’d take the risk on the poor, even at the risk of himself.
For Jesus, healing people was always a risk. As soon as a healing happened out in public, there was bound to be a crowd. This story even shows us that if a healing happened behind closed doors, there could still be a crowd. And once there’s a crowd, it means Jesus can’t do anything else he intended to do, because there will be too much ruckus. And when there’s too much ruckus, eventually the religious leaders will catch wind and come to scrutinize him. And even though Jesus will win the debate with those religious leaders, their hearts will grow even colder to him and they’ll try even harder to kill him, cutting his time short. Indeed, they never cared more about killing Jesus than they did after he raised Lazarus from the dead.
Jesus’ compassion won out over his desire to stay hidden. He took a risk on the blind men and everything he hoped wouldn’t happen, happened. In other stories, the more Jesus told people to be silent, the more zealously they told everyone. That’s a good God to choose compassion at his own expense.
*This devotional was created out of the themes of Matthew 9:27-35 found in today’s reading at CommonPrayer.net. Below are the various AI-created pictures I typed into existence via Mid Journey to mock up artwork for today’s post.
Jamin Bradley 