How could a person hear good teaching and be encouraged to do what is right, yet miss the whole point of meaning behind what was being taught? I am certainly guilty of assuming that good moral teaching was for my benefit, to maintain a decent reputation. But, like Rick Warren has said, “life is not about you or me.” Glancing through the Bible, accumulating information, is not seeing what the kingdom is all about. Bartimaeus learned first hand from the presence of Jesus. As the comments suggest, perhaps this was a lesson for the disciples that they would ‘see again’ what their purpose and mission was to be, after the resurrection, after enduring suffering. May you and I have our eyes opened to the unseen reality of what God is doing.
“Personal trust and spiritual maturity were often in direct proportion to the amount of suffering that had been endured for the faith.” - Nik Ripkin
“In Jesus’s arrest and death, their “seeing” would be lost. Their expectations of Jesus as the Messiah would be crushed, their hopes dashed. Jesus’s death would leave them devastated, with no way to make sense of what had happened. Only in the resurrection would they see again. Then they would see clearly. They would understand what Jesus had taught them about the Messiah being the Suffering Servant. They would understand what it meant to follow him as his disciple, i.e., the nature of discipleship.” - Excerpt, Following Jesus: Discipleship in the Gospel of Mark by Steve Langford
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