In 1812, in a village east of Paris, a three-year-old boy named Louis was imitating his father in the family harness shop, putting an awl to a piece of leather. An awl is not a tool you strike with a hammer. Its power is wielded by leaning on and into it. That was exactly what little Louis watched his dad do as he shamelessly mimicked his father. In a second, his unguided hands lost control, and the point bucked the hide and struck him in the eye. The wound was severe and could not be fully treated, resulting in an infection and eventual spread to the other eye. By five, Louis was completely blind.[1]
Needing skilled educators for the blind, his parents sent him to a school for the blind in Paris at ten, where the books were printed in raised letters that no blind student could write. By fifteen, he had built something better, a cell of six dots small enough to read under one fingertip, punching those dots with the same type of awl that took his eyesight.
The school was not impressed with his ingenuity and banned Louis’ reading code, burned the books, and punished the students caught using it, but they went right on using it in the dark, where no one could see them.[2] Louis Braille died in 1852 at forty-three, having never once seen his system authorized anywhere on earth. France adopted it two years after they buried him, because his blind students would not stop using it, and today it is the worldwide standard.[3]
A man who could not see gave sight to millions he would never meet, over the objection of every sighted authority in the room. That pattern points us to today’s lesson in Matthew 9:27-31
“And as Jesus passed on from there, two blind men followed him, crying aloud, “Have mercy on us, Son of David.” When he entered the house, the blind men came to him, and Jesus said to them, “Do you believe that I am able to do this?” They said to him, “Yes, Lord.” Then he touched their eyes, saying, “According to your faith let it be done to you.” And their eyes were opened. And Jesus sternly warned them, “See that no one knows about it.” But they went away and spread his fame through all that district.” (ESV)
The First Confession in the Book
Blindness in Bible times came slowly, caused by dust and infection, taking painful years to mature. Its victims were often the poor before the affliction, but certainly afterward.[4]
Although constrained by blindness, these two are the first people in Matthew’s Gospel to see Jesus and call Him by His genealogical and authoritative name. Matthew has called Jesus the Son of David since his opening sentence, but here, for the first time in the book, someone in the story says it aloud to Jesus Himself. Two blind beggars make the confession that the scribes and the Pharisees, men with working eyes and front row seats to every miracle in chapters eight and nine, will not make.
That title is more than a compliment about ancestry. It traces back to the covenant God made with David in 2 Samuel 7, and by the first century, it had become a name for the Messiah Israel was waiting for.[5] Isaiah had named open eyes as a mark of the age God would bring, and the Hebrew Scriptures record that nobody ever did so.[6] Opening blind eyes is not a favor the Son of David does simply as charity. It is a mark of credibility that He produced.
They Asked for Mercy, Not for Eyes
The ESV renders the men’s voices as crying aloud, and the Greek carries the force of screaming.[7] They were not waiting patiently for their turn in line, and once their ears had identified Him correctly, they used the only instrument left to them, which was volume. But notice their ask. They do not ask for sight. They ask for mercy.
Spurgeon recognized this in one of his sermons, saying, “He will never win a blessing from God who demands it as if he had a right to it.”[8] A humbling reminder of where our own prayer life can use improvement. We come with a case prepared and a reason we have earned the outcome we want. These men came with nothing but the word mercy.
Do You Believe That I Am Able to Do This
Watch what happens here with Jesus. He does not answer them in the street. He walks into a house, lets them follow Him in, and asks a question He already knows the answer to. Not what do you want, but do you believe that I am able to do this? The issue is clearly not His power and not their worthiness, but their own belief. Their answer comes back in two words. Yes, Lord.
I believe one of the most compelling attributes of Jesus is His compassion. We are just through nine chapters in Matthew, and through every miracle He performs. Jesus’ intention and emotion can be felt in the ink. Matthew continues here by writing out another expression of love for these men that would have held everyone watching captive. Then He touched their eyes, laying His hands on the part of them that everybody else avoided, saying, “According to your faith, let it be done.” His power notwithstanding, their belief was an open invitation for transformative mercy upon their soul and their sight.
The Mailbox With a Backpack
One Christmas morning, our family was up at daybreak around the tree when the front door came open hard and slammed against the wall. We came out of our seats, trying to work out who was forcing their way in, and my brother-in-law, still half-awake, looked into the dark and said he could see her, standing across the street with a backpack on. The thing he was pointing at was a mailbox.
We still laugh about it. He was confident, he was specific, and he was completely wrong about what he thought he saw, blinded by the morning fog in his eyes. Over eight chapters, Matthew has documented religious scholars mocking, questioning but witnessing for themselves the power of Jesus.[9] Yet their own blindness will continue to betray them, keeping them from seeing God in the flesh before them.
The Light He Speaks
The Bible opens with darkness on the face of the deep, with nothing made and nothing visible, until God speaks and light exists because He said so. That is the same voice these two men heard in the street outside Capernaum, and that is the same authority that opened their eyes in a private room.
J. C. Ryle, looking at these two beggars and at the trained men who missed what they saw, put it in four words. “Grace is stronger than circumstances.”[10] Fortunately, for all of us who know Jesus, we know what sight means, and for those dealing with blindness, a reading solution has been created.
Go to an ATM, a park sign, an elevator panel, or a museum placard and run your thumb across the raised dots beside the letters. That is the work of a man who never saw a single one of them, who was fought by his own institution, and who died before anyone in authority admitted he was right. He never got his sight back. But he provided a way for everyone else.
Braille died blind. So do a great many faithful people, and this passage is both a promise of Christ’s power and a warning to those who do not recognize it. It promises that the King who opened two sets of ruined eyes with His hands is the same King who will one day raise the bodies of everyone who trusted Him, and that on that day the affliction you are carrying will turn out to have been temporary the whole time.
The Challenge
Stop asking God to ratify a plan you have already built and start asking Him for mercy. These men had no case to make and, like you and I, had nothing to offer except belief.
Reflection
- What are you allowing to blind you today?
- What affliction has stolen your hope, and what would it look like to ask for mercy before you ask for the outcome?
Stay on Mission
FAQ’s
Two unnamed beggars near Capernaum followed Jesus through the street and into a house, shouting for mercy. Scripture gives no names, no medical cause for their blindness, and no account of what became of them afterward. What Matthew records is that they were the first people in his Gospel to call Jesus the Son of David to His face.
It is a messianic title, not a note about ancestry. It reaches back to 2 Samuel 7, where God promised David an heir whose throne would be established forever, and by the first century it functioned as a name for the Messiah Israel was waiting for. When two beggars shouted it in a public street, they were making a claim that the religious leadership refused to make.
It establishes correspondence, not a ratio. It does not mean that a greater quantity of belief yields a greater miracle, nor is it a formula for achieving a desired outcome. Matthew Henry put it this way in his commentary on the passage: those who apply themselves to Christ are dealt with according to their faith, not according to their fancies and not according to their profession.
Scripture does not state the reason in this verse, so any answer is an inference from the surrounding narrative. The most defensible reading is timing. A popular movement built on healings would have forced a confrontation with Rome and the temple authorities on the wrong terms and ahead of the cross. Mark 1:45 shows how uncontrolled publicity affected the ministry, driving Jesus out of the towns.
No. Bartimaeus was healed outside Jericho late in the ministry, recorded in Mark 10:46-52 and paralleled in Matthew 20:29-34 and Luke 18:35-43. Matthew 9 occurs near Capernaum; the healing takes place indoors; and the men are commanded to be silent, which does not occur in the Jericho accounts. Matthew alone records this event.
Two things that cut in different directions. Position and credentials did not produce sight, and the men with the best view of the evidence were the ones who missed it entirely. And in verse 31, two men who were genuinely healed and genuinely grateful did the exact thing the King told them not to do. Zeal that runs ahead of orders is still out of order.
That the King is recognized by people with nothing to offer and missed by people with everything. The blind men did not ask for sight. They asked for mercy, and they asked the one person who could give it. The gift came second, and it came in private, to men who came with no case to make.
Footnotes
[1]Louis Braille was born in Coupvray, Seine-et-Marne, on 4 January 1809, the youngest of four children of Simon-Rene Braille, the village saddler and harness maker. He was blinded in one eye by a slipped awl at the age of three and lost sight in both eyes by five. Sources disagree on which eye was struck, so none is named here. He entered the Royal Institute for Blind Youth in Paris in February 1819, at ten. His six-dot cell was largely complete by 1824, when he was fifteen, and published in 1829. It built on a raised-point method published by Charles Barbier in 1815, which Braille credited by name in his own book. The widely repeated claim that Barbier’s method was a military night-writing code has been overturned by research in Barbier’s own papers, which show it was designed for blind readers. Encyclopaedia Britannica, “Louis Braille”; Philippa Campsie, “Charles Barbier: A Hidden Story,” Disability Studies Quarterly 41, no. 2 (2021).
[2]Alexandre-Rene Pignier, director of the Royal Institute from 1821 to 1840, permitted the students to use the code unofficially. He was forced out in 1840 and succeeded by Pierre-Armand Dufau, who banned it, burned books, and punished students caught using it. The students continued using it in secret. American Foundation for the Blind, “Recognition of the Braille Code.”
[3]Braille died in Paris on 6 January 1852 at forty-three and was buried in Coupvray. The Royal Institute adopted his system in 1854 through the insistence of its blind pupils, after Dufau’s own assistant Joseph Gaudet publicly endorsed it. A congress meeting in Paris named it the international standard in 1878, and a uniform English code was settled when American and British committees signed the Treaty of London in 1932. Braille Authority of North America, “A Short History of the Braille Authority of North America.”
[4]The leading cause of blindness in the ancient Near East was chronic infectious eye disease, principally trachoma, a conjunctival infection caused by Chlamydia trachomatis. It has been known since pre-Pharaonic times, appears in the Edwin Smith and Ebers papyri, and remains the leading infectious cause of blindness in the world. It spreads through flies, hands, and shared cloth, and it is a disease of crowding, dust, and scarce water. Scripture names no medical cause for the blindness of these two men. Encyclopedia.com, “Trachoma.”
[5]The title reaches back to 2 Samuel 7:12-16, where God promised David an offspring whose throne would be established forever, repeated in 1 Chronicles 17:11-14 and Psalm 89:3-4. By the first century it functioned as a name for the expected Messiah. Matthew 9:27 is the first place in the Gospel where a character in the narrative addresses Jesus by it. The title recurs at 12:23, 15:22, 20:30-31, 21:9, and 21:15.
[6]Isaiah 35:5-6 and 42:6-7 name opened eyes as a mark of the age God would bring, and Psalm 146:8 attributes the act to the LORD Himself. The Hebrew Scriptures record no narrative account of a person receiving sight, apart from the reversal in 2 Kings 6:20 of blindness God had just imposed. In Matthew 11:4-5 Jesus points John the Baptist to this sign as His own answer.
[7]Krazo, Strong’s G2896, to cry out or scream, the same verb used in Matthew 27:23 of the crowd calling for crucifixion. Matthew has it as a present participle, carrying continuous force. Their plea, eleeson, Strong’s G1653, is the standard Septuagint rendering of the cry for covenant mercy and appears throughout the Psalms of David, including Psalm 6:2, 25:16, 51:1, 86:3, and 123:3. Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance; Joseph Henry Thayer, A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament.
[8]C. H. Spurgeon, “Our Lord’s Question to the Blind Men,” sermon on Matthew 9:27-30 delivered at the Metropolitan Tabernacle, Newington, 13 May 1877; Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit, vol. 23. Public domain.
[9]Matthew records the pattern building through these chapters: the scribes charge Jesus with blasphemy in 9:3, the Pharisees question His eating with tax collectors and sinners in 9:11, and immediately after this passage they attribute His power over demons to the prince of demons in 9:34, a charge repeated in 12:24.
[10]J. C. Ryle, Expository Thoughts on the Gospels: St. Matthew (1856), comment on Matthew 9:27-34. Public domain.
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