In my last chapter I took the healing of Simon’s wife’s mother as a type of these miracles, seen from the healed person’s side. In the many cases of which we have no individual record, the experience must have been similar: the evil thing that opposed their life departed, they knew in themselves they were healed, they saw the face and form from which the healing had gone out, and they believed in the man. What they believed about him beyond that he had healed them and was good, I cannot say; they differed, but they believed in him. The strongest of ties now bound his life to theirs. He was the central thought of their being, their minds lay open to his influence, which worked in time by holy gradations, and endless currents of life began to flow to them from the unsealed fountain. Gratitude woke the conscience, and they began to recoil from evil deeds and thoughts as jarring with the new friendship. Mere acquaintance with a good man is a powerful antidote to evil; knowing such a man as the healed knew him was the mightiest of divine influences.
In these miracles our Lord must have laid one of the largest foundation-stones of his church. The healed knew him henceforth not by comprehension but with their whole being. They went home to recall and love afresh; I wonder what their talk of him was like. Soon they had to be public martyrs, witnesses to what they knew, come what might, and after his departure those who loved him had to gather and testify together. Next to his immediate disciples, those he had cured must have been the very heart of the young church, with personal love for the personal helper at its core. The church had begun in the mother Mary’s first gush of affection, and now “great was the company of those that published” the news. The Father’s works had drawn the children’s hearts, and they spoke of the Elder Brother who brought those works to their doors. The remembrances of those who had heard him, the grateful convictions of those he had healed, the tender memories of those he had blessed in his arms—these were the fine, fibrous roots that gave the church existence, growth and continuance, sucking in the rains of the descending Spirit that was the life of the tree. Individual life is the life of the church.
But why did he not cure all the sick in Judæa? Because not all were ready; many would not have believed in him if cured. Their illness had not yet ripened them to the possibility of faith, and a cure would have left them deeper in evil. “He did not many mighty works there because of their unbelief.” God will cure a man, and he will be the better for it even before he has learned to thank him; but to see the healer and acknowledge the outstretched hand yet not believe in the healer is terrible. I think the Lord kept his personal healing for those it would bring at once into some relation of heart and will with himself; hence his frequent demand of faith, apparently always answered: at the word, flickering belief, the smoking flax, burst into flame. Physical evil is a moral good, a mighty means to a lofty end. Pain is an evil, but also a good that it would be a great injury to take from a man before it had done its work. Then it becomes all evil, and must pass.
I now proceed to a group of cases in which, as far as we can judge, our Lord gave restoration unsolicited. Other instances fall into other groups, gathered for other features.
The first, recorded by St Luke alone, is the woman with “a spirit of infirmity eighteen years,” bowed together and unable to lift herself up. It may belong with demoniacal possession, but I prefer to take it here, doubting that the phrase “a spirit of infirmity,” even with our Lord’s words defending her against the ruler of the synagogue—“whom Satan hath bound”—requires that. It matters little from our present point of view.
Bowed earthward, her eye’s necessary blank the ground and not the horizon, the divine form deformed toward that of the four-footed animals, this woman had been in bondage eighteen years. Faith needs us to believe every trouble fitted to the one who bears it, and every physical evil not merely the result of moral evil but its antidote; yet no one should dare judge the relation between moral condition and suffering in individual cases, and our Lord warned us from it. But as love and truth prevail, physical evil will vanish from the earth; the righteousness of descendants will destroy the disease their ancestor’s unrighteousness transmitted. To destroy physical evil otherwise than by redeeming human nature from moral evil would ruin the world. What made it right that this woman bear these bonds eighteen years, who can tell? Certainly God had not forgotten her. What it may have preserved her from, one may conjecture but hardly has the right to say. Nor can we tell whether she bore it with the patience common among the afflicted or with the natural repining of one made to behold the sun and doomed to regard the ground; patience would be rewarded by the cure, and even repining might be destroyed by the deliverance, gratitude begetting sorrow for vanished impatience. At any rate the right hour had come when the darkness must flee.
Supported, I presume, by a staff that made her yet more like the lower animals, she had crept to the synagogue—a good sign, for the synagogue was not its ruler. Nothing suggests she came to seek Jesus, or saw him before the word of her deliverance; bowed together, she most likely heard him before she saw him.
But he saw her. Our translation says he called her to him; I think the word means simply that he addressed her. Going to her, I think, and saying “Woman, thou art loosed from thy infirmity,” “he laid his hands on her, and immediately she was made straight, and glorified God.” What an uplifting—a type of all God works in his human beings! The head bent with sin, care, sorrow and pain is lifted; the grovelling will looks heavenward; earth is no longer the one object of the aspiring spirit; we no longer even bend to God’s will but raise ourselves toward it, for his will has become ours, and that will is our sanctification.
Although she did not beg the Son to cure her, she may have prayed the Father much. Anyhow she was plainly ready: she glorified God. That is enough. She thanked the man who cured her, no doubt, but she glorified the known Saviour, God, from whom comes every good and perfect gift.
She had her share in the miracle too, as God gives everyone a share in what he does for him: with the given power, she had to lift herself up. Such active faith is the response needed if a man is to be a child of God and not a mere instrument on which his power plays a soulless tune.
In this preventing of prayer, this answering before the call, this bringing of blessing to the door, by which I have grouped this miracle with the next ones, Jesus did as his Father does every day. If men had no deliverance from the ills that come on them, even those they bring on themselves, except at their cry, where would the world be? But God’s help is ever coming, ever setting free those whom Satan has bound, ever giving fresh occasion and impulse to glorify the God of their salvation. With every such recovery the child in the man is new-born, for some precious moments at least: a gentleness of spirit, a wonder at the world, a sense of the blessedness of being, an openness to calm yet rousing influences. These are the descending angels of God. The passion that blotted out the child will revive; strife will renew wrath and hate; ambition and greed will blot out the earth’s beauty; envy will blind him to his own blessedness; self-conceit will revive the prejudices whose strength lies in his weakness. But he has glimpsed the peace he must fight himself to gain, has for one moment felt what he might be if he trusted God, and the memory may return in the hour of temptation. As the commonest things in nature are the loveliest, so the commonest agencies in humanity are the most powerful. Sickness and recovery have a larger share in men’s deliverance than the keenest eyes can see: the facts are isolated in individuals, or too slow and obscure to be remembered when their effects appear. The kingdom cometh not with observation; the working of its leaven must be chiefly unseen. Like creative energy itself, it works “in secret shadow, far from all men’s sight.”
The teaching that follows immediately, on the kingdom’s small beginnings symbolized in the mustard seed and the leaven, may refer directly to this woman’s cure, and show that he regarded her glorifying God for her recovery as one of those beginnings of a mighty growth. The same similes occur in another connection in St Matthew and St Mark; but even without such instances it is reasonable to suppose that the Lord, given the variety of place, audience and occasion, the disciples’ dullness, and the perfection of the similes, would use the same ones again and again.
The second miracle of the group, recorded by all the Evangelists except St John, is the man with the withered hand. Like the preceding, it was done in the synagogue. All of this group except the last, whose circumstances are peculiar, were performed on the Sabbath, and each gave rise to discussion of the deed’s lawfulness. St Mark says they watched to see whether he would heal on the Sabbath; St Luke adds that he knew their thoughts and met them with the question of lawfulness; St Matthew says they challenged him by asking whether it was lawful. The man could hardly have missed seeing that something afoot concerned him. But there is no sign of a request.
Few can have lived half the average human life without at some time feeling the body a burden and a possible deliverance from it an enfranchisement. If man’s spirit were filled with God’s Spirit, the body would be a living house, an obedient servant, a humble mediator by the senses between his thoughts and God’s. But when every breath must be sent for and brought with much labour and small consolation, when pain turns faith into a shadow of hope, when the withered limb hangs lost and cumbersome, an inert simulacrum of power swinging lifeless to and fro, then even the physical man understands his share in the creation’s groaning after the sonship. When at a word from such a mouth as that of Jesus of Nazareth the withered, distorted, contemptible hand obeyed, spread its fingers filled with old human might, and became capable again of friendship’s grasp, love’s caress, and labour for the bread that sustains life, little would the man care that others, even rulers of synagogues, Scribes and Pharisees, questioned the rectitude of his healer. The power that restored God’s gift and completed humanity must be of God. Arguments from old books, customs and learned interpretations might set God’s will against the laws of his world, but the man whose hand was restored whole knew it fitting that his hands should match. Their glosses could not keep his heart from gladness, and being glad whom should he praise but God? Nor could he look on the face of Jesus and doubt that such a man would do only right. It was not Satan but God who had set him free.
Here, plainly by the record, our Lord gave the man his share in the miracle, not of mere acquiescence but of active will. If man is God’s child he must share in the Father’s works, and without the share faith gives, cure will be of little avail. “Stretch forth thine hand,” said the Healer; the man made the effort, and the withered hand obeyed. In the act came the cure; without it the will would never have taken form in the outstretching. So it is in all spiritual redemption.
Think how gladly the man would use his new hand, now God’s hand. But was the other not God’s too, as much? Had God’s power not been present all these years in the left hand that served him, and in his whole frame? Through loss and restoration in one part he would understand possession in the whole.
But as the restored limb is to the man, so is the healed man to his brethren. In every man the power by which he does the commonest things is God’s. The power is not of us: our power does it, but we do not make the power. Plain as this is, it is the hardest lesson to learn with conviction and thanksgiving. God has put us just far enough from himself that we can use the divine thing in us, our own will, in returning toward our source. Then we shall learn that we are infinitely greater and more blessed as the outcome of a perfect self-constituting will than we could be by turning any imagined independence of origin into fact—a truth no man can understand or truly acknowledge except as he becomes one with his origin, the will of God. While opposition exists between maker and made, the creature’s judgment is in confusion and cannot perceive the mighty liberty of holy dependence, where God’s will is the man’s absolutely free choice, or a unity possible not between independent wills but only in unspeakable love between the causing Will and the caused will. Those who cannot see how the human will can be free in dependence on God’s have not realized that God’s will made man’s, that when it most pants for freedom it is the child of God’s will, and so there can be no natural opposition between them. More, God’s whole labour is that man’s will be free as his own is free, by the perfect love of what is true, harmonious, lawful, creative. If a man asks, “Might not God make my will intending to over-ride and enslave it?” I answer that such a Will could not create, could not be God, for it involves the false and contrarious: it would make a will so that it be no will, and to create in order to uncreate is not divine. A free will is not liberty to do whatever one likes but the power to do whatever one sees ought to be done, even against overwhelming impulse. There lies freedom indeed.
I come now to the man paralysed thirty-eight years, a story of great pathos. For many of those years he had haunted the borders of legendary magic; I take the angel troubling the pool as only a current superstition. How different from our Lord’s healing! What he gave was free to all; no cure weakened his hand for the rest; none were poorer that one was enriched. The pool legend fostered the evil passion of emulation in a most selfish form. Nowhere in the divine arrangements is my gain another’s loss. If it is said this was how God chose who should be healed, I answer that the effort required was contrary to all we most admire in humanity: by that rule Sir Philip Sidney ought to have drunk the water he gave the soldier. Does the doctrine of Christ, by which we must interpret God’s ways, countenance a man’s rushing ahead of the rest and winning the boon because, as the ablest to plunge first into the eddies the fantastic angel left, he had the least need of it? Or if the prize went to those helped by friends, surely most in need was one who, like this man, had no friends either to plunge him in the waters of fabled hope or to comfort him in the disappointments that alone divided the months of a life of empty expectation.
But the Master comes near. In him the power of life rests “in its own calm home, its crystal shrine,” and whoever believes in him need not make haste. He knew it was time for this man to be healed and did not wait to be asked, though the man did not know even his name. “Do you want to be made well?” “Sir, I have no one to put me into the pool when the water is troubled; while I am coming, another gets in before me.” “Rise, take up your bed, and walk.”
Our Lord delays the cure with no further speech. The man knows nothing of him, and he asks no faith of him but obedience, giving him something to do at once; he will find him again by and by. The man obeys, takes up his bed, and walks.
He sets an open path before us; we must walk in it, and be willing to believe it is open and that we have strength to walk it. God’s gift glides into man’s choice, and we must follow with our effort in the track of his foregoing power; to refuse is to destroy the gift. His cure is not for those who choose to be invalids; they must be willing to be made whole, even if that means carrying their beds and walking. Some keep to bed who have strength to rise. There is a self-care and self-pity, a laziness and conceit of incapacity, as unhealing for the body as unhealthy for the mind, corrupting dignity and destroying sympathy. Who but invalids need such miracles? Yet some are not cured because they will not be healed: they will not stretch out the hand, rise or walk, and above all will not work, though for their illness the work they hate may be the only cure or at least the best relief. Labour is not in itself an evil like sickness but often a divine, blissful remedy. Nor is the duty only for those who must labour for support: no wealth frees anyone from work in a world whose God is ever working. He who does not work has not discovered what God made him for, and is a false note in the orchestra of the universe. Wealth is prepayment, and obliges one in honour to do corresponding work. He who does not know what to do has never seriously asked himself what he ought to do.
A class the very opposite of these falls, as extremes meet, into a similar fault: they will not be healed either, for they will not take the repose God gives his beloved. Some sicknesses are cured by rest, others by labour.
The right way is to meet the sickness as God would have it met, submitting or resisting according to the conditions of cure. Whatever is not of faith is sin: she who will not go to her couch and rest in the Lord is as much to blame as she who will not rise and go to her work.
There is reason to suppose this man had brought his infirmity on himself—not merely by neglecting physical laws but by doing what he knew was wrong. When the Lord found him afterward, having first let the gladness of deliverance have full sway, he gave him the lesson that all health depends on purity of life: “Behold, thou art made whole: sin no more lest a worse thing come unto thee.” It is the only recorded cure where Jesus gives such a warning, so I think the probability is as I say. That we may be to blame for our sufferings is no reason not to go to God to deliver us; David knew this, and set it out in the 107th Psalm.
In the very next case Jesus will not admit that the man’s blindness from birth was due to the sin of either the man or his parents, who, to judge by their behaviour in the persecution that followed, were people of character, thought and honourable prudence. He was born blind, Jesus said, “that the works of God should be made manifest in him.” What works? The work of creation, for one, rather than healing. The man had suffered nothing by being born blind; God had made him only less blessed than his fellows, meaning him equal faculty and greater enjoyment afterward and the honour of revealing God’s works to men. In him Jesus created sight before men’s eyes. As God said at first “Let there be light,” so his work is still to give light to the world, and Jesus must work it and be the light of the world, in all its degrees and kinds, reaching every corner where work may be done, rousing sleepy hearts and opening blind eyes.
Jesus saw the man, the disciples asked their question, and as soon as he had answered, “he spat on the ground, made clay of the spittle, and anointed the eyes of the blind man with the clay.”—Why the clay, the spittle, the touch?—Because the man who could not see him must yet be brought into sensible contact with him, and know the healing came from the one who touched him. Our Lord took pains because the man was blind. For the man’s share, having as it were blinded him a second time with clay, he sends him to wash it off at the pool, so that clay and blindness depart together by the act of his faith: as if the Lord said, “I blinded thee: now, go and see.” These are the links of the chain binding the man to the Lord: the voice, if he heard it, defending him and his parents from the disciples’ judgment; the claim to be the light of the world, which the blind man knew only as something he lacked; the sound of spitting; the fingers’ touch; the clay; the command to wash; the journey to the pool; the laving water; the astonished sight. “He went his way, therefore, and washed, and came seeing.”
But who can imagine, except in a conception only less dim than the man’s blindness, the glory that burst on him when, as the clay left his eyes, the light of the world invaded his astonished soul? The very idea may make one tremble. Blackness of darkness—not an invading stranger but the companion always at home, the negation never understood because the assertion was unknown, creation not erased and remembered but uncreated to his eyes! Then the glory of the celestial blue, the towers of the great Jerusalem dwelling in the awful space, the room, the life, the tenfold-glorified being! Any wonder might follow such a wonder, and the vision was as fresh as if he had that moment been created, the first of men.
But the best remained. A man had said “I am the light of the world,” and here was the light of the world. The words had been vague as a dark form in darkness; now the thing itself had invaded his soul. He had not yet seen the face of the creator of his vision, but he believed in him, for he defended him against the charge of wickedness as Jesus had defended him: when they said “Give God the praise; we know this man is a sinner,” he replied “God does not hear sinners, and this man has opened my eyes.” No wonder that when Jesus found him and asked “Do you believe in the Son of God?” he answered “Who is he, Lord, that I might believe in him?” He was ready; he had only to know which was he, to worship him. Here at last was the Light of the world, and straightway the world had burst on him in light! Would he ever need further proof that there was a God of men? I suspect he had a grander idea of the Son of God than any disciple yet. The would-be refutations of experience (never since the world began had anyone opened the eyes of one born blind), the authorities’ objection that the man was not of God because he broke the Sabbath, all perplexities of how and why, could not shake his confidence: “One thing I know, that whereas I was blind, now I see.” He could not convince the Jews that Jesus must be a good man, nor could he doubt it himself, whose whole being had been enlightened and glorified by him. With light in the eyes, the brain and the heart, permeating and unifying his physical and moral nature and showing him to himself as one whole, how could he doubt!
The miracles were for the persons they passed on. To spectators they were something, but to their subjects of unspeakable value and endless influence. They reached others truly through the healed themselves, whose lives witnessed to a truth far beyond what their tongues, which could witness only to a fact, could say.
In this miracle as in all the rest Jesus did in little the Father’s great work; for how many more are those to whom God has given the marvel of vision than the blind the Lord enlightened! The remark will sound feeble and far-fetched to the man whose familiar spirit is that Mephistopheles of the commonplace; he who uses vision only to care for his body or indulge his mind can hardly understand the gift of God in its marvel. But the man on whose soul the grandeur of the heavens, earth, sea and fountains of waters has once arisen will understand what a divine invention, what a mighty gift, are these very common eyes, the light that enlightens the world, and the sight that comes of both. He will understand what a believer the man born blind must have become—how the inburst of splendour might make him so able to believe that nothing would be too grand and good for him afterward, not even the doctrine hardest to commonplace humanity though most natural to those who have seen it: that the God of the light is faithful, loving, upright, honest and self-denying, utterly devoted to the uttermost good of those he has made.
Such is the Father of lights who enlightens the world and every man that comes into it. Every pulse of light on every brain is from him, every feeling of law and order, every hint of right, every desire after the true, all aspiration and longing for light, every perception that this is true and that ought to be done. His infinite and varied light, gathered into one point—for how shall we speak of these things except in figures?—and embodied in Jesus, became the light of the world. The light is no longer only diffused: in him man “beholds the light and whence it flows.” Not merely is our chamber lit; we see the lamp. So we turn again to God, the Father of lights, even of The Light of the World, knowing now that all light, wherever diffused, has its centre in God, as the light that enlightened the blind man flowed from its centre in Jesus. In other words, we have a faint human glimmering of the absolute glory: we know what God is in recognizing him as our God.
Jesus did the works of the Father.
The next miracle, recorded by St Luke alone, is the cure of the man with the dropsy, also on the Sabbath, in the house of one of the chief Pharisees. Our Lord had gone there to an apparently large entertainment, for the following parable is spoken “to those which were bidden, when he marked how they chose out the chief rooms.”
[Footnote: 1. Not rooms, but reclining places at the table.] This at least suggests the man may have been a guest; houses were open enough that an uninvited person could easily get in. But I think the word translated before him means opposite to him at the table, and that the man was not too ill to appear as a guest. The translation “took him and healed him and let him go” seems against this, but only because it is indefinite enough to mean he sent him away, which the original does not. It means he took him, went to him and laid hands on him, thus connecting the cure with himself, and then released him and turned at once to the other guests, justifying himself by appeal to their own righteous conduct toward the ass and the ox. I think the man stayed reclining to enjoy the appetite of health at a good meal—unless the gladness of relieved breath, the sense of lightness and strength, the restored obedience of body, and the presence of his healer made him too happy to care about dinner. I come now to the last of the group, exceptional in that it was not the cure of a disease or natural defect but the repair of an injury inflicted by one of his own followers. This too is recorded by St Luke alone; the other evangelists give the occasion but not the miracle, the blow but not the touch. I shall not compare their accounts, which vary but do not conflict, but confine myself to St Luke’s. Peter, doubtless meaning to cleave the head of a servant of the high priest who had come to take Jesus, with an unaccustomed hand perhaps trembling with rage and fear, missed his aim and cut off only the man’s ear. Jesus said, “Suffer ye thus far.” I think there should be a question mark—“Is it thus far ye suffer?” “Is this the limit of your patience?”—but I do not know. Then “he touched his ear and healed him.” Hardly had the wound reached the true sting of its pain before the gentle hand of him the servant had come to drag to torture dismissed the agony as if it had never been. Whether he restored the ear or left its loss as a reminder of the part the man had taken against his Lord and the return the Lord made, we do not know. Nor do we know whether the man turned back ashamed and contrite, having felt in his own person the life in Jesus, or followed the capture to the end. Possibly Peter’s blow was the form God’s favour took, preparing the way, like the blindness from birth, for the glory to be manifested in him. But the Lord would countenance no violence in his defence. They might do to him as they would; if his Father would not defend him, neither would he defend himself.
Within sight of the fearful death awaiting him, his heart was not hardened to another’s pain, nor did it matter that the sufferer was an enemy, one taking him to the cross. There was suffering; here was healing. He came to do the works of him that sent him, and did good to those who hated him, for his Father is the Saviour of men, saving them “out of their distresses.”