Thursday: Third Week in Lent Year B

Lent for Everyone
Mark Year B
WEEK 3:THURSDAY...

...I have a special memory of this passage, going right back to my university days. I had not been a very good pupil in my English Literature lessons at school. I had not really discovered something that any sensible reader of novels and plays learns early on, namely, that a good writer will use one incident to illuminate another one. The writer won’t insult the reader’s intelligence by saying, ‘so, you see, this bit goes well with that bit’, ‘this image explains the meaning of that incident’. Good writers use all kinds of imagery to make their various points. But perhaps the best sort of imagery is that which arises naturally and properly within the story itself.

Anyway, I was in my first year of undergraduate study of the New Testament, and one of the commentaries I was reading pointed out the rather obvious feature of this present passage in Mark. The story of Jesus healing the blind man in Bethsaida follows the same pattern as the story of Jesus asking his followers about who they thought he was. Once you see that, you will not only understand what Mark was doing in this passage; you will discover that most good writers do it quite a lot. And this discovery makes reading itself, not just reading the gospels, an exciting and dramatic journey. It opens your eyes...

Taken from Lent for Everyone Mark Year B by Tom Wright