The healing mission of Jesus.
The excitement produced in the East by the occasional visits of a hakim, or physician, effectively explain the scenes described in our Lord's life, but seem very strange to us, and very difficult to realize. Dean Stanley has the following note: "It was after a walk through the village of Ehden, beneath the mountain of the cedars, that we found the stairs and corridors of the castle of the Maronite chief, Sheikh Joseph, lined with a crowd of eager applicants, 'sick people taken with divers diseases,' who, hearing that there was a medical man in the party, had thronged round him, 'beseeching him that he would heal them.' It was an affecting scene; our kind doctor was distressed to find how many cases there were which, with proper medical appliances, might have been cured." Some have thought that disease in our Lord's time took unusual and severe forms, but we probably need do no more than imagine the condition of a population living in unsanitary conditions, and with no scientific doctoring at command. All forms of disease were then thought of as irritations of evil and malicious spirits, and all healing was really "exorcism." Our Lord's bodily healings seem to have been specially characteristic of the earlier ministry of Jesus; and it should always be treated as illustrative of his work, not as his proper work. The healing mission of Jesus may be set in three forms.
I. TO CALL ATTENTION. It is a singular fact that almost immediately on Christ's beginning his ministry he was followed by crowds. He could not have gathered them as a moral Teacher. Nicodemus shows us what arrested attention. "No man can do these miracles that thou doest except God be with him." So the healings made a sphere for Jesus, in which he could do spiritual work.
II. TO SHOW HIS SPIRIT. Contrast with that of the Pharisees, who despised the people; and with the Eastern physician, who demands ruinous fees. Jesus sought the poor and the sick, and did his best to help them for nothing. It was a revelation of love to man.
III. TO INDICATE HIS MISSION. Which bore relation to the great sin-disease of the soul, and was illustrated in these healings, deliverings, and redeemings, which bore relation to men's bodily disabilities. All disease is fruitage of sin. Christ came to deal with sin, both in root, and branch, and flower, and fruit.—R.T.
Matthew 3
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Matthew 5
Matthew 4 - matthew-4 - worlddic.com