“The Blind See and the Lame Walk”

Taking some notes from Jesus' approach to apologetics

Photo by Jean-Daniel Francoeur: https://www.pexels.com/photo/close-up-photo-of-right-hand-1999323/

(A four-minute read.)

^“And when John had heard in prison about the works of Christ, he sent two of his disciples and said to Him, ‘Are You the Coming One, or do we look for another?’

“Jesus answered and said to them, ‘Go and tell John the things which you hear and see: The blind see and the lame walk; the lepers are cleansed and the deaf hear; the dead are raised up and the poor have the gospel preached to them’” (Matthew 11:2-5).

This isn’t Part 3 of my “What Is Truth” series, but it probably could be.

I was struck by my reading of this brief story a couple months ago, overwhelmed with the embodied—and perhaps even a little ambiguous—nature of Jesus’ answer to John’s disciples.

When they ask Jesus whether he is the Messiah or not, eager to pass along his answer to John the Baptist, Jesus doesn’t respond with a syllogism. He doesn’t respond with propositional facts or proof texts.

He responds by pointing to his embodied actions.

In other words, he responds with The Truth.

He also leaves room for interpretation. He doesn’t say an unequivocal and simple “yes,” overwhelming them with “absolute truth” that forces them into a particular conclusion. He wants John’s disciples to decide for themselves the nature of his actions. He wants them to wrestle with whether his fruit is good or not.

At the risk of sounding like a broken record, there aren’t many religious thinkers today—at least in my religious circles—who would be comfortable with the level of ambiguity Jesus includes in his answer. It’s our job, the thinking goes, to provide such airtight arguments that people are left only with certainty.

At the same time, the road to modern evangelistic success goes through propositional argumentation. We insist on our syllogisms and systematic schemes. We love our proof texts and prophetic charts.

But Jesus instead points to his embodied actions.

To draw an equivalent from my faith community, it would be like someone approaching an Adventist evangelist and saying, “My wife wants to know if Saturday is the Sabbath,” and the evangelist responds by saying, “Go tell your wife what you see and hear: The overworked are refreshed and the weary experience rest; the burdened lay down their loads, the exploited are given dignity, families gather in peace, and even the land breathes again.”

No mention of Genesis 2:2-3, Exodus 20:8-11, or Luke 4:16?

This isn’t to imply that we can’t or shouldn’t provide biblical support for our religious convictions and practices. We do want to ground ourselves in the narrative of Scripture.

After all, there are a number of stories where Jesus essentially takes people through a “Bible study” to validate his identity and practices.

I’m thinking, for example, of his experience on the road to Emmaus, after his resurrection, when he walked with two disciples, ultimately taking them through the story of Scripture to point to the truth about his mission.

But it’s rather interesting, even in this story, that these disciples still didn’t understand who they were talking to even after the “Bible study.” Indeed, it was only after Jesus broke bread with them—he shared a meal with them—that they finally recognized who he was and understood what his mission was about.

At the same time, I gather that Jesus wasn’t stitching a series of proof texts together for them. My suspicion is that he showed them a sweeping panorama of the story of Scripture—“beginning at Moses and all the Prophets,” Luke recounts—and explained to them how his mission fit into the whole story.

Even in his encounter with John’s disciples, when he pointed to his healing actions as evidence of his Messiahship, it seems that he wasn’t only pointing to his actions as evidence, but also implicitly pointing to how those actions were a part of the story of Scripture. So it was a sort of a quick “Bible study” as well.

But, again, he didn’t give them proof texts or Scriptural syllogisms. He didn’t say to them, “Isaiah 43 says that when the Messiah comes, he will do A, B, and C, and I’ve done A, B, and C. Ergo, I’m the Messiah.”

With some level of ambiguity, he merely pointed to his actions and invited them to draw their own conclusions as to whether his actions were the fulfillment of the promises given through the ancient prophets.

As always, it seems that we could learn a lot from Jesus.

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Shawn is a pastor and church planter in Portland, Maine, whose life, ministry, and writing focus on incarnational and embodied expressions of faith. The author of four books and a columnist for Adventist Review, he is also a DPhil (PhD) candidate at the University of Oxford, focusing on nineteenth-century American Christianity. You can follow him on Instagram, and listen to his podcast Mission Lab.