The order in which I take the miracles matters little for my purpose. For this chapter I choose the cure of St Peter’s mother-in-law. Bare as the story is, it could be shaped with artistic effect—the woman tossing in the fever, the entering Life—but that is not the side I care to view it from.
Nor do I want the bystanders’ view, though three of them testify in the three Gospels, and their differences almost show where each stood: one says Jesus stood over her, another that he touched her hand, the third that he lifted her up. They agree that the fever left her and she served them.—Here, as before, I look at the miracle from the point of view of the person healed.
Pain, sickness, delirium and madness, as much infringements of nature’s laws as the miracles, are such real presences in human experience that a God unrelated to them cannot be the God of the human race. Whoever cannot find God in the fog of suffering, like whoever forgets him in the sunshine of health, has learned little from St Paul or St John. A religion that sheds no glow across this evil air is only a dim reflection of the true, and who will mourn to find that out? Some are so anxious about themselves that, rather than say “I do not have it; it is better than anything I have known,” they say “I have it, but it is little use in the hour of trial.” Let us rejoice that the glory is great even if we dare not call it ours; then we shall try harder to lay hold of it.
So long as men must toss through the dark night crying “Would God it were morning,” and find little comfort in the grey dawn, we must see God as one to be believed in, or at least cried to, across the flats of distress and mountains of pain. Those who would help the suffering must sometimes look for him through their eyes and help them think from their own point of vision, not ours. So I write now chiefly for those who know suffering. First, all suffering is against the ideal order of things. No man can love pain; it is ugly and abhorrent, and the finer a person’s bodily and mental constitution, the more it recoils. No one could dislike it as the Saviour must have. God dislikes it, and so is on our side: he knows it is grievous to bear and would cast it out of his universe save for reasons.
But, one will say, how can this help me when agony racks me and weariness lies on me like a gravestone? Is it nothing to be reminded that suffering is by nature transitory, against God’s first and final will, a means and not an end—that it will pass away? Is that not what you want? God made man for lordly skies, sunshine, colours, free winds and sweet odours; however needful the fogs may be to the soul, he gladly sends them away and lets the dayspring from on high visit his children again. While they suffer he broods over them an eternal day, suffering with them but rejoicing in their future. He is the God of the individual man, or he could be no God of the race.
I believe it is possible, and some have done it, so to rest on the immutable Health, and see one’s sickness as a passing aberration, that the soul is sustained, as a man in a weary dream is comforted by telling himself it is only a dream and waking is sure. God would have us reasonable and strong, and is pleased by every effort of his children to rise above evil’s invasion of body or mind. Few attain this; but there is a better thing, easier to many, I trust: to say, Thy will be done.
But now let us look at the miracle as received by the woman.
She had “a great fever.” She tossed from side to side, trying in vain to ease a nameless misery. Her head ached; dreary forms rose in aimless dreams and senseless words repeated themselves until her brain was sick of them. Now she was the centre where innumerable atoms converged, now driven along in an uproar of hideous globes, faces grinning and mocking. Her mind kept trying to recover itself and kept being swept away; and through it all ran a nameless unrest, not an ache or burning or stinging but a bodily grief, dark and drear. How could they have borne such before He had come?
A sudden ceasing of uncontrolled motion; coolness gliding through burning skin; a waking into repose; a sense of all-pervading well-being, of strength conquering weakness, light displacing darkness, life urging at the heart; and behold! she is sitting up, a hand clasping hers, a face looking into hers. He has judged the evil thing and it is gone, her distresses folding away like the cerements of death. She is new-born, and all things with her, and he who makes all things new is there. She knows the healing flowed from him; he gave her of his life. The cloud of her suffering floats away, almost forgotten in grateful joy. She rises. The sun is shining—it had been shining all the time, waiting for her—and the lake of Galilee glitters. That too sets forth the law of life; but the fulfilling of the law is love: she rises and ministers.
I am tempted to remark in passing, though I shall have a better occasion later, that none of those whom our Lord cures wants to keep the privileges of the invalid. The joy of health is labour; the restored must be fellow-workers with God. This woman, lifted out of the whelming sand of the fever, hastens to her ministrations; she is used to hard work, and now that all is well she must be at it again.
But who had lifted her up? She saw a young man by her side. Was it the young Jesus she had heard of—for Capernaum is not far from Nazareth, and report of his wisdom and goodness, for he had grown in favour with man as well as God, must have spread? Was it he, to whom God had given such power, or John, of whom she had also heard? Whether prophet or son of a prophet, Jesus or John, she does not wait to ask; here are guests, and something to be done. Questions will keep; work must be despatched. She rose and ministered to them.
If we ask who he is, he is the Son of God, come to do the works of his Father. Where, then, is the Father’s healing? All the world over, in every man’s life, almost in every man’s experience, though unrecognized. As in moods of selfishness our hearts are insensible to the tenderest love of the families around us, so the degrading spirit of the commonplace lets us live amid ministrations without knowing them, until it is hard to believe the very heart of God would care to do what his hand alone does every moment. I have assumed my reader confesses there is a God, or at least hopes there is. If anyone objects that science now forbids such belief, I am not writing for him; I may be honoured to say a word to him some day. To my chosen reader I say that I see no middle course between believing that every easing of pain, every dawn of hope across the troubled spirit, every recovery, is God’s doing, and believing there is no God at all—none, at least, that I could believe in. Had Christians believed in God better and more grandly, the present phase of unbelief, which is no doubt needful and had to come some time, would not have come in our day. It will vanish when it must, but believers are more to blame for it than unbelievers. The common belief in God is rationally untenable: half to an insensate nature and half to a living God is a worship that cannot stand. God is all in all, or no God at all. The man who goes to church every Sunday and yet trembles before chance is a Christian only because Christ has claimed him, not because he has believed in Him. I would not be hard; there are many degrees in faith, and a man may be on the right track, learning of Christ, yet poor and weak. But there is no standing room between absolute faith and absolute unbelief. Either not a sparrow falls without Him, or there is no God and we are fatherless children. Those who try to live in the limbo between are only driven of the wind and tossed.
Has my reader known the weariness of suffering, the clouding of the inner sky, the haunting of spectral shapes, the misery of disordered laws, when nature is wrong within him and it seems there is no life left in the world but misery—“pain, pain ever, for ever”? Then surely he has known the turn of the tide, when pain abates, sweet sleep falls on soul and body, and a faint hope glimmers across the gloom; or the sudden waking from sleep and fever together, the consciousness that life is the law of things, when the garment of pain that, like Dejanira’s fabled garment, ate into his being folds back and he looks out new-born. It is God, his law of life conquering the law of death. Tell me not of natural laws as if I denied them. The question is whether they wheel on of themselves in a symmetry of mathematical shapes, or whether their perfect order and unbroken certainty express a perfect intellect informed by a perfect heart. Law is truth: has it a soul of thought or not? If not, farewell hope and love and possible perfection; but I will hope on and fight the invading unbelief, for the horror of being the sport of insensate law, the more perfect the more terrible, is hell and perdition. If a man tells me science says God is not a likely being, I answer, probably not, such as you can suppose him, who have given your keen powers to observing outer things only; but you have given me no reason to fear that the God I mean is not the very heart of the lovely order you see so much better than I. My God may be above and beyond and in all that.
In healing, then, as in all the miracles, Jesus does the Father’s works. God is our Saviour: the Son comes healing the sick, doing before our eyes what the Father, for reasons of his own, does from behind the veil of his creation and its laws. The cure comes by law, through the physician who brings the law to bear on us; we awake, and lo! it is God the Saviour. Every recovery is as much his work as the birth of a child, and as much the Father’s as if the Son had wrought it by his word before the multitude.
To combat again the vulgar notion that the essence of miracles lies in their power, need I dwell further on this one? No one who honours the Saviour will imagine him, entering the chamber where the woman lay tormented, saying “Here is a chance to show how mighty my Father is!” There was suffering, and here was healing. What I can imagine him saying is, “Here I can help! Here my Father will let me put forth my healing and give her back to her people.” What should we think of a rich man who, meeting the starving on his own estate, thought “Now I can show how rich I am!” and laid gold on the bare table? The receivers might be grateful, but a poor neighbour’s arm under the dying man’s head would gather deeper gratitude and tenderer love. Heart alone can satisfy heart; only God’s love can gather the love of his children. To believe in an almighty being is hardly to believe in a God at all; to believe in a being who, in weakness and poverty, if such could be, would die for his creatures, would be to believe in a God indeed.