Here's Mud in Your Eye

 

When he had thus spoken,

he spat on the ground,

and made clay of the spittle,

and he anointed the eyes of the blind man with the clay . . . .

One thing I know,

That, whereas, I was blind, now I see.

                                    -- John 9:6,25

           

 

            The water main broke in our front yard one cold night this past winter. The utility company was right on it, and a crew with heavy equipment worked 'til late, getting it fixed.

 

            I toddled out at midnight in my robe, to see a bunch of hardhats standing around a hole about eight feet wide and eight feet deep. In it, one guy was shoveling cold, dark, icky mud out of the frigid standing water.

 

            Mud! I hate mud. Our kids and dogs tracked it through the house like a flock of thundering mudhens and made a mess every spring. It wrecks your shoes. And when you try to stand on it for spring gardening, it's easy to slip and get a snootful.

 

            So as I watched the utility guys working in that enormous mudhole, I was kind of grossed out. Nothing good could ever come out of mud like that. Right?

 

On the other hand, I had just gotten back from a luxurious spa vacation and had actually paid big bucks to have mud - that's right, I told my Beloved as he contemplated the bill, mud! - rubbed onto me on purpose.

 

So the workmen and I joked that they should leave the mudhole just as it was. Come summer, we would put a privacy fence around it and declare it to be a fancy-pants health spa. For just $100 an hour, you, too, could have a luxurious mudbath! Ha ha! In that worthless mud!

 

But recently I read a commentary on a Bible passage that had always bothered me, and now I'm looking at mud in a whole new light.

 

Who knew: the scene in which Jesus spits, makes a mud ball, and rubs it in the eyes of a blind guy is actually a stroke of powerful political genius. Up 'til now, I've thought it was kind of gross that Jesus would use spit to heal the guy, mixing it with dirt from the ground and putting it in his eyes.

 

Mom always told us never to get anything in our eyes!

 

Spit and dirt both have a lot of germs!

 

And anyway, that mud in his eye had to hurt, bigtime!

 

            But then I found out the incredible, interwoven significance of this one Bible anecdote. There's a reason Jesus didn't just heal the guy by snapping His fingers and saying "POOF! You're healed!" And the significance is just another example among thousands gleaned from the Bible that prove why Jesus had to be God: nobody create sight in a man who'd been born without it, and be so smart as to have done it in "code" that exposed the wickedness of His opponents, and proved He was God.

 

            See, the Pharisees, the political big shots among the Jews, had gradually expanded the relatively simple principles of law that the Israelites were first given into a crazy quilt of countless micromanaging rules and regulations that nobody could possibly follow and stay sane.

 

            Among them:

 

·         Don't care for anyone medically on the Sabbath unless it was a life-threatening condition.

 

·         Don't knead on the Sabbath.

 

·         Don't anoint anybody's eyes on the Sabbath.

 

·         Don't walk more than 1,000 yards on the Sabbath.

 

            So what did Jesus do to heal the blind man? All four!

 

            With one stroke, he made hamburger out of their sacred cows. In the next verse, when he told the guy to go wash in the pool of Siloam, that was "code," too - "Siloam" means "Sent," just as Jesus was sent from the Father.

 

Plus, that pool was well over 1,000 yards from where Jesus was standing, in violation of the Pharisees' injunction on travel. Making a still-blind guy grope all that way before he could receive his sight and his healing goes with all the Old Testament examples of God requiring humans to obey His explicit directions before He could bless them.

 

That's encouragement for any of us who suffers today: first, obey, and then, be blessed.

 

There's more meaning woven into this short story, too. The method Jesus chose, using dirt from the ground to do something miraculous, relates clearly to Genesis 2:7, that God created people out of the dust of the ground. It encourages us that God can use common, ordinary, everyday people - like you and me - to do miraculous things, including helping those who are spiritually blind finally see.

 

And it relates to the repeated verses in the Old and New Testaments that refer to God as the "potter" and we humans as the "clay" (Job 10:9, Isaiah 45:9 and 64:8, Jeremiah 18:6, Romans 9:21). Jesus was demonstrating His endless creativity in making something out of nothing, usefulness out of what seems to be barren and worthless stuff.

 

            The way He healed that guy didn't cost a cent! The best things in life ARE free!

 

Best of all, in producing the miracle that's the climax of the hymn Amazing Grace, Jesus exposed the ridiculousness of the legalistic Pharisees, whose pointless rules were keeping people from knowing the grace and love of God, and finding healing for their suffering in every way, especially spiritual.

 

Even with the guy walking around able to see - hallelujah! - the Pharisee nitwits still tried to say that it was a fake. People saw that, and realized they were a crock of . . . a crock of . . . well, a crock of mud.

 

So mud and spit have come 'way, 'way up on my list of stuff I like.

 

So now, when I see that spring mud out there, or tracked on my floors, I'm going to smile instead of having a hissy fit.

 

And next time I share a drink with a friend, there'll be new understanding as we say that familiar toast: "Here's mud in your eye!" †