The disciples are in the first stage of spiritual sight, seeing but not fully. Jesus is indeed the Christ, but they don’t understand what the Christ has come to do: be rejected, suffer, and die. Peter’s rebuke confirms his partial sight. He thinks he’s seeing better than he actually is.

Stories have turning points, and Peter’s confession—“You are the Christ”—is a turning point in Mark’s Gospel. Many New Testament scholars divide Mark’s Gospel in a way that outlines sections before this confession and after it. Peter’s confession is a threshold.
In Mark’s Gospel, the confession, “You are the Christ” (Mark 8:29), occurs after Jesus healed a blind man at Bethsaida. Reading this miracle alongside Peter’s confession can be interpretively helpful, especially since Mark’s Gospel is the only book that records this miracle. What can we notice by reflecting on this miracle and then on Peter’s confession?
The Blind Man’s Partial Sight

The miracle didn’t seem complete, as if Jesus’s first attempt fell short of the mark. Jesus laid hands on the man’s eyes, and then his sight was restored: “he saw everything clearly” (Mark 8:25). Success!
We’re not used to seeing miracles take place in stages. We’re used to something more immediate. When Jesus tells the leper, “Be clean,” the leper is healed instantly (Mark 1:41–42). When he tells the paralytic, “Rise, pick up your bed, and go home,” the paralytic immediately rises (2:11–12). When he tells the man with the withered hand, “Stretch out your hand,” the man stretches out his now-restored hand (3:5).
Mark 8:22–26 reports a miracle in two stages. But this was not a record of dwindling power. The stages are the point.
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Alexander Lang sees himself not as a an undershepherd called to comfort his sheep with the message of Christ crucified but as a Christendom-scented psychologist charged with fixing his patients. For pastors, the compassion fatigue problem is easy to solve. Yes, it can be exhausting to carry the sorrows of your people. But that exhaustion fades with every word of Scripture reminding me that I don’t have to keep that weight. I get to transfer it into the pierced hands of Christ whenever I point my sheep to their Good Shepherd who has killed their every sin and promised to dry their every tear. Lang doesn’t want to hand that load over to Jesus. No wonder he’s exhausted.

In a recent post on his blog, Alexander Lang wrote a detailed explanation for why he chose to step down as pastor of First Presbyterian Church in Arlington Heights, Ill. Like so many other modern pastors, Lang laments, he could no longer endure the typical shepherd-sapping burdens of the ministry, burdens such as “the immense stress of the job” and “feeling lonely and isolated.”
Initially, many of the personal challenges Lang describes lined up with my own experiences as a parish pastor for 15 years. However, the more Lang described these particular challenges, the less convinced I was that we were sharing the same afflictions. I know what it’s like to feel momentarily exhausted at the end of the day after praying with a member in his darkest hour. I don’t know what it’s like to feel as though I have nowhere to unload the weight of my parishioner’s burdens. While I’ve been frustrated by the unclear desires or unreasonable demands of idiosyncratic members, I’ve never felt as though my “boss” is “every person who walks through the door of [my] community.” I only worry about one boss, the Triune God.
Why have our experiences been so different? I don’t think it’s because I’m a better pastor than Lang. I think it’s because I’m a pastor and he is something else entirely. Read through Lang’s essay and you’ll notice he doesn’t mention Jesus a single time. Look at his website’s “about” page and you’ll see this is hardly an oversight. “Restorative Faith is a progressive Christian movement designed to rescue the Christian faith from antiquated doctrine and recast Christianity in a new light,” he tells us. “We are here to break down the Christian faith one piece at a time so we can rebuild it into something that is actually worth believing.”
The stated aim of his deconstructionist charge makes it easy to pinpoint why Lang found the pastoral ministry so much more exhausting than I do.
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Empowered by the truth that God keeps me as “the apple of [his] eye” (Psalm 17:8), I made the commitment to be a man who takes literally the command that “each of you look not only to his own interests, but also to the interests of others” (Philippians 2:4). Over the years, I have landed on three practices that promote a marriage culture that sees: stop, scribe, and speak.

The scene was reminiscent of a scary movie. Julia walked out to the church parking lot and found an ominous note taped to her car window: “I SEE YOU!”
Though she thought I was hundreds of miles away, I was actually nearby, watching the entire scene unfold. When she began to nervously look around, I took that as my cue and drove up next to her. As she stared in shock, I asked in the smoothest way possible, “Wanna take a ride?” (Yes, I had rehearsed it many times.) She joyfully got in the car, and a few hours later, I got down on one knee and asked if she would marry me. She said yes.
The cryptic three-word message was actually not the way I intended to start the morning. I had crafted the perfect poem to start our engagement day, but it got lost somewhere between my hotel and the church. With only a few seconds to write something, “I SEE YOU!” was all I could come up with.
We used to think our engagement was perfect except for those hastily written three words. Ironically, after 22 years of marriage, that note has become one of our favorite parts of the day. In fact, one of our marriage goals is to regularly and intentionally communicate what first happened on accident: “I see you.” While many fantasize about falling in love at first sight, we’ve discovered a better dream: a marriage that furthers love with each additional sight.
God Saw
It took a few years of marriage before I realized the power of sight as a way to pursue Julia. Up to that point, I was focused on developing my listening skills. Then, right when I began to make progress on that, God revealed (in perfect Godlike fashion) a new need for development: looking skills. We get a glimpse of the power of sight in the way God describes Israel’s suffering in Egypt:
God heard their groaning, and God remembered his covenant with Abraham, with Isaac, and with Jacob. God saw the people of Israel — and God knew. (Exodus 2:24–25)
By developing our listening and looking skills, we unlock a powerful combination in our marriages. When we listen, we communicate that our wife has been heard. When we look, we communicate that she is known and understood.
Unfortunately, far too many wives are overwhelmed with a sense of loneliness. Day after day, they feel invisible to the man they love. When I reflect on my own marriage and the real reasons why I don’t actively bless my wife as God intends, I admit that one of my main obstacles is optical. I don’t actually see what’s happening around me because I’m not really looking.
Savior with Wide Eyes
My breakthrough started with a study on all that Jesus noticed. Our Savior walked through life with eyes wide open. Jesus noticed Nathaniel under a tree (John 1:48) and Zacchaeus up in a tree (Luke 19:5). He noticed John’s disciples following at a distance (John 1:38) and the touch of one desperate woman while the masses pressed around him (Luke 8:45).
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