Retelling the Story

Yes, I've heard that one before. Then again, the stories my kids loved were the very ones they already knew by heart. Is there much value in telling them over and over again?

Maybe so. Maybe not. It depends.

See, it depends in part on what story we are telling. It also depends on how we tell it. Then there is the aspect of telling the story differently, instead of always repeating it the same way. Lets try to illustrate it just a little.

There is this story in the gospels of Jesus healing a blind man. Well, actually, there is more than one such story. There is the story of the man Jesus healed in two stages, then there is the story of the blind on the road to Jericho. They are at once different stories, the same story, different takes on the story, and different aspects of a larger story. Both Matthew and Mark tell it, but they tell it differently.

In Mark chapter 8, Jesus was brought a blind man and asked to touch him. Jesus took the man by the hand and led him out of the village. Jesus anointed the man's eyes with saliva and asked if he could see. He reported seeing people moving about like trees. Jesus touched the man's eyes again and he reported seeing well. Jesus then told him not to go into the town, but to return home.

In Mark 10, Jesus heals another blind man, this one named Bartimaus. In his case, Jesus asks him what he wants, then speaks to him, telling him to regain his sight, which he does.

In Matthew 9, we find the same basic story as the story of Bartimaus. In this account, however, there are two blind men. Their request for mercy is granted in the same guise as in Mark 10.

Next, we find the same or a similar story repeated in Matthew 20. This account is closer in many details to Mark 10, down to Jesus asking them the same question from Mark 10, “What do you want me to do for you?” Again, Jesus heals them, this time with a touch.

In John 9 we find another account of Jesus healing a blind man that seems to coincide in many respects to Mark 8, but with an extension of many details. Jesus makes mud, anoints the man's eyes, then tells him to go wash in the pool of Siloam.

It is a little hard to tell how many events are being depicted in these accounts. It could be as little as two or as many as five. There are some other issues, however, that should claim much more of our attention than simply counting how many blind people Jesus healed. Luke does not give us any such stories. He simply tells us that Jesus restored sight to the blind.

For Luke, the story was about verifying for John the Baptist's disciples that Jesus was the fulfillment of Isaiah's prophecy of the suffering servant. Mark has a much more pointed rationale behind the accounts he gives. He uses them as bookends of an issue of the disciples' jockeying for power. Matthew uses them to speak of Jesus as exhibiting the power and mercy of God, as well as demonstrating the lack of spiritual vision among the religious leaders. John uses the story to detail the blindness of the Jews to the import of God's will behind the walls of tradition.

In each case, however, the gospel writers were doing so much more than setting down the details of events that happened in the life and ministry of Jesus. To be honest, they gave us very little detail of what Jesus said and did. I once read the gospel of Mark aloud in recognition of it being a sermon. It took me about 45 minutes from beginning to end. That is a very brief synopsis of three years of life and ministry. Indeed, Mark excels in moving Jesus throughout the land, but his stories are all tiny vignettes of what Jesus said and did. He was not being comprehensive. He was staying on task. He had a specific point to get across, and he selected and arranged his narrative material to accomplish his objective.

Matthew is little different. Sure, Matthew and Luke are longer than Mark, but neither one takes two hours to read aloud. Like Mark, they selected and arranged material to accomplish something much more specific than detailing all that Jesus said and did. They sought instead to take us into the heart and import of Jesus' life and teaching ministry.

Mark uses the blind man in chapter 8 as an object lesson regarding the spiritual blindness of the disciples. They could see, but really, they were simply noticing movement without clarity. Then they went and asked Jesus for positions of power in the coming reign. Jesus asked them, “What do you want me to do for you?” They answered. Then he asked Bartimaus the same question. “Lord, that I might see!” Matthew does something similar with the blind men in chapter 20, though it is the mother and James and John who makes the request in his account.

This is storytelling with a purpose.

It is not history. It is not entertainment. It is theology in a narrative format. In Mark, it is one blind man, for it is one question. In Matthew, they are two blind men, for there are two sons for whom positions of power are being requested. In Matthew 9, the story is part of a series denoting the breadth of Jesus' power for restoration and understanding his identity.

This is why we tell the stories and tell them over and over. As we tell them, they apply to new scenarios in our lives. They take on new meaning as we measure them against different issues in our lives and current events around us. Jesus' words were not simply about the Pharisees of First Century Judaism. They were about the religious leaders of two centuries back, of the Reformation, two decades ago, and of today, as well. The spiritually blind were not simply the Pharisees, but also the disciples. They were not only the disciples of the First Century, but also those of the Twenty-First.

Like Mark and Luke and John, we tells the stories in different ways. We add more details here and subtract others there. We tell all the healing stories at once as did Luke, and we highlight one in particular as did John. We do so not to memorize the events of the past, but to highlight their relevance to situations of the present. We use them to bring ourselves into the presence of Jesus the Christ, asking that our own eyes might be opened. With the disciples of John the Baptist we seek reassurance that Jesus is indeed the one we were all expecting. With them we hear anew that Jesus is and is not the one we expected. He is the One, but he is not as we expected.

This is why we tell the stories. We tell them with a purpose. Perhaps one purpose today and another tomorrow. Yesterday we highlighted one aspect of the story and tomorrow we will highlight another. We tell them again and again, but they are never the same, even when it is the same story. It is never the exact same because we are not the same. We have new questions arising from our life experiences, our understandings of our own histories, our doubts and questions in our relationship with God. We tell the stories to find ourselves reflected in them and thus discover more about ourselves.

If our retellings are simply rehearsals of what has gone before, there is little point to repeating the process over and over. It is when we seek and find our own stories reflected in these stories that they become significant and purposeful. That is where they gain their value.

—©Copyright 2017, Christopher B. Harbin
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