Miracles of Our Lord

by George MacDonald

But his son would have to work out his belief upon grounds differing from those his father had. In himself he could but recognize the resumption of the natural sway of life. He would not necessarily know that it was God working in him. For the cause of his cure, he would only hear the story of it from his father—good evidence—but he himself had not seen the face of the Holy One as his father had. In one sense or another, he must seek and find him. Every generation must do its own seeking and its own finding. The fault of the fathers often is that they expect their finding to stand in place of their children's seeking—expect the children to receive that which has satisfied the need of their fathers upon their testimony; whereas rightly, their testimony is not ground for their children's belief, only for their children's search. That search is faith in the bud. No man can be sure till he has found for himself. All that is required of the faithful nature is a willingness to seek. He cannot even know the true nature of the thing he wants until he has found it; he has but a dim notion of it, a faint star to guide him eastward to the sunrise. Hopefully, the belief of the father has the heart in it which will satisfy the need of the child; but the doubt of this in the child, is the father's first ground for hoping that the child with his new needs will find for himself the same well of life—to draw from it with a new bucket, it may be, because the old will hold water no longer: its staves may be good, but its hoops are worn asunder; or, rather, it will be but a new rope it needs, which he has to twist from the hemp growing in his own garden. The son who was healed might have many questions to ask which the father could not answer, had never thought of. He had heard of the miracle of Cana; he had heard of many things done since: he believed that the man could cure his son, and he had cured him. "Yes," the son might say, "but I must know more of him; for, if what I hear now be true, I must cast all at his feet. He cannot be a healer only; he must be the very Lord of Life—it may be of the Universe." His simple human presence had in it something against the supposition—contained in it what must have appeared reason for doubting this conclusion from his deeds, especially to one who had not seen his divine countenance. But to one at length enlightened of the great Spirit, his humanity would contain the highest ground for believing in his divinity, for what it meant would come out ever and ever loftier and grander. The Lord who had made the Universe—how should he show it but as the Healer did? He could not make the universe over again in the eyes of every man. If he did, the heart of the man could not hold the sight. He must reveal himself as the curing God—the God who set things which had gone wrong, right again: that could be done in the eyes of each individual man. This man may be he—the Messiah—Immanuel, God with-us.

We can imagine such the further thoughts of the son—possibly of the father first—only he had been so full of the answer to his prayer, of the cure of his son, that he could not all at once follow things towards their grand conclusions.

In this case, as in the two which follow, the Lord heals from a distance. I have not much to remark upon this. There were reasons for it; one perhaps the necessity of an immediate answer to the prayer; another probably lay in its fitness to the faith of the supplicants. For to heal thus, although less of a sign or a wonder to the unbelieving, had in it an element of finer power upon the faith of such as came not for the sign or the wonder, but for the cure of the beloved; for he who loves can believe what he who loves not cannot believe; and he who loves most can believe most. In this respect, these cures were like the healing granted to prayer in all ages—not that God is afar off, for he is closer to every man than his own conscious being is to his unconscious being—but that we receive the aid from the Unseen. Though there be no distance with God, it looks like it to men; and when Jesus cured thus, he cured with the same appearances which attended God's ordinary healing.

The next case I take up is similar. It belongs to another of my classes, but as a case of possession there is little distinctive about it, while as the record of the devotion of a mother to her daughter—a devotion quickening in her faith so rare and lovely as to delight the very heart of Jesus with its humble intensity—it is one of the most beautiful of all the stories of healing.

The woman was a Greek, and had not had the training of the Jew for a belief in the Messiah. Her misconceptions concerning the healer of whom she had heard must have been full of fancies derived from the legends of her race. But she had yet been trained to believe, for her mighty love of her own child was the best power for the development of the child-like in herself.

No woman can understand the possible depths of her own affection for her daughter. I say daughter, not child, because although love is the same everywhere, it is nowhere the same. No two loves of individuals in the same correlation are the same. Much more the love of a woman for her daughter differs from the love of a father for his son—differs as the woman differs from the man. There is in it a peculiar tenderness from the sense of the same womanly consciousness in both of undefendedness and self-accountable modesty—a modesty, in this case, how terribly tortured in the mother by the wild behaviour of the daughter under the impulses of the unclean spirit! Surely if ever there was a misery to drive a woman to the Healer in an agony of rightful claim and prostrate entreaty, it was the misery of a mother whose daughter was thus possessed. The divine nature of her motherhood, of her womanhood, drew her back to its source to find help for one who shared in the same, but in whom its waters were sorely troubled and grievously defiled.

She came crying to him. About him stood his disciples, proud of being Jews. For their sakes this chosen Gentile must be pained a little further, must bear with her Saviour her part of suffering for the redemption even of his chosen apostles. They counted themselves the children, and such as she the dogs. He must show them the divine nature dwelling in her. For the sake of this revelation he must try her sorely, but not for long.

"Have mercy on me," she cried, "O Lord, thou son of David; my daughter is grievously vexed with a devil."

But not a word of reply came from the lips of the Healer. His disciples must speak first. They must supplicate for their Gentile sister. He would arouse in them the disapproval of their own exclusiveness, by putting it on for a moment that they might see it apart from themselves.

Their hearts were moved for the woman.