When he had said these things, he spat on the ground, and made clay of the spittle, and with the £ clay thereof anointed his (the) eyes (of the blind man). The precise meaning and motive of the process here described has been a source of great perplexity to the commentators.
We see that, on other occasions, our Lord used his own saliva as a means of cure. Theme finds in the spittle the symbol of the impurity of the man thus dealt with (Isaiah 1:5, Isaiah 1:6), but somewhat inconsistently compares the "clay" with the "collyrium" of Revelation 3:17-19, and the "ausfiuss des Logos."
On some occasions Jesus touched the diseased or deficient organ, put his hand on the leper, and his fingers in the ears of the deaf mute. On other occasions, again, he healed with his word only, and even from a distance, those who.
in the freeness and royalty of his love, he elected to relieve from their sufferings. He was moved, doubtless, in every case by the 'special condition and temperament of the objects of his compassion.
The use of these means was probably intended to evoke the nascent faith that predisposed him to receive healing, to stir the mind of the sufferer into some conscious relation will himself through those other powers of tactile sensitiveness which were in all similar cases singularly acute.
Moreover, the virtue of saliva in cases of blindness was well understood. Lightfoot gives some curious proof of this, and Tacitus ('Hist.,' 4:81) and Suetonius ('Vesp.,' John 7:1-53.) both record the healing of a blind man by the Emperor vespasian by the use of jejuna saliva.
Pliny (' Hist. Nat.,' 28:7) speaks of the same remedy for the diseases of the eye. "Clay" also is spoken of as being sanative by a physician by name Serenus Samonicus (see Tholuck, Wetistein, Lange, in loc.
). These ideas may have had some truth in them, and for the blind man to find the process described, applied to himself by One who spoke of the Divine operations being wrought in him, would work some powerful effect on his moral, physical, and spiritual nature.
Such result our Lord intended to produce. But this was only part of the healing process.