Sight – Where art thou Adam?

March 9, 2016

http://www.christianscienceneworleans.org/WedReadings.html

“Adam, where art thou?” is one of the first questions recorded in our Bible. Different variations of this same question, “Adam, where art thou?”; “Consciousness, where art thou?”; “Where art thou, man?” are repeated seven times in Science and Health.  Our readings this Wednesday apply this question in reference to sight.

The Bible readings include three separate healings of blindness:

1. Jesus touched the eyes of two blindmen.
2. Jesus spit on the eyes of a blindman who saw “men as trees, walking.” Then Jesus put his hands on his eyes.
3. Jesus spat on the ground, made clay, and anointed the eyes of a man born blind, then told him to wash in the pool of Siloam.

Mrs. Eddy explains the second healing as follows: “Jesus’ first effort to realize Truth was not wholly successful; but he rose to the occasion with the second attempt, and the blind saw clearly.” (Mis. 171:3) What a lesson in persistence, and how each healing is unique and individualized!

Today’s readings also include the feeding of the four thousand with seven baskets remaining, not to be confused with feeding the five thousand with twelve leftover baskets. Here is how these two healings of supply are distinguished in the Oxford Annotated Bible Commentary:

As [Jesus] had fed the earlier crowd in the wilderness, implicitly composed of Israelites, now Jesus also feeds the surrounding peoples in the wilderness. Seven is symbolic of the surrounding peoples, as twelve was of Israel. (The New Oxford Annotated Bible, 4th edition, p. 1806)

Mrs. Eddy used the term “geometric altitude,” which does not appear in the Webster’s 1828 online dictionary. Geometric altitude is apparently used to determine airplane height above different terrains, so that was an interesting choice of words for a book published decades before the Wright Brothers’ first flight (which was 1903. Thank you Wikipedia.)