Jesus gives this faith. To those who followed Him into the wilderness and upon the mountains, He distributed material and spiritual bread. He was not willing to transform stones into loaves, but He made the real loaves of bread sufficient for thousands. And the stones which men carry in their breasts He changed into loving hearts.
And He did not reject the sick. Jesus is no self-tormentor, no flagellant. He does not believe that pain is necessary to conquer evil. Evil is evil and must be driven away, but pain also is evil. Sorrow of the soul is enough for salvation: why should the body suffer also, needlessly? The old Jews thought of sickness as a punishment: Christians believe it above all as an aid to conversion.
But Jesus does not believe in vengeance taken on the innocent, and does not expect that true salvation can be won by ulcers or by hair shirts. Render unto the body that which is the body’s due, and unto the soul that which is the soul’s. He likes the friendly supper-table; He does not refuse good old wine; and He does not send away women who pour perfumes on His head and on His feet. Jesus can fast many days; He can be satisfied with a bit of bread, with half of a broiled fish; and He can sleep on the ground with His head on a stone; but till it is unavoidable He does not seek out want, hunger and suffering. Health seems to Him a good thing and the innocent pleasure of dining with friends; a cup of wine drunk in good company, the fragrance of a vase of nard, seem good and acceptable to Him also when such things cause no suffering to others.
If a sick man accosts Him, He cures him. Jesus comes not to deny life, but to affirm it, to institute a happier and more perfect life. He does not purposely seek out the sick. His mission is to drive away spiritual suffering, to bring spiritual joy. But if, by the way, it happens to Him to drive out also suffering of the flesh, to quiet pain, to restore, along with the health of the soul, the health also of the body, He cannot refuse to do it. He shows Himself adverse to it, for the most part, because His aim is higher; and He would not wish to appear in the eyes of the people like a vagabond wizard, or like the worldly Messiah whom most men were expecting. But since He wishes to conquer evil, and there are men who know Him capable of conquering all evils, His love is forced to drive out also those of the body.
When, on the road trodden by men of health, there come towards Him groups of lepers, repellent, disfigured, horrible lepers, and when He sees that swollen lividness, the scaly skin showing through the torn clothes, that scabby, spotted, cracked skin, the withered, wrinkled skin which deforms the mouth, half-closes the eyes, and puffs up the hands; wretched, suffering ghosts, shunned by every one, separated from every one, disgusting to every one, who are thankful if they have a little bread, a saucer for their water, the roof of an old shed for a hiding-place; when painfully bringing out the words through their swollen, ulcerated lips they beg Him, whom they know to be powerful in word and deed, beg Him, their only hope in their despair, for health, for a cure, for a miracle, how could Jesus shun them, as other men did, and ignore their prayer?
And the epileptics, who writhe in the dust, their faces twisted in a set spasm, the froth on their lips; those possessed of devils who howl among the ruined tombs, evil dogs of the night, disconsolate; the paralytics, trunks which have just enough feeling left to suffer, dead bodies inhabited by an imprisoned and suppliant soul; and the blind, the awful blind, shut up from their birth in the night—foretaste of the blackness of the tomb—stumbling in the midst of the fortunate men who go their way freely, the terrified blind, who walk with their heads held high, their eyes staring, as if the light could reach them from the depths of the infinite, the blind, for whom the world is only a series of more or less harsh surfaces, among which they grope; the blind, eternally alone, who know the sun only by its warmth, by the heat on their bodies! How could Jesus answer “No” to such wretchedness?
THE ANSWER TO JOHN
Jesus heals the sick, but He is in no way like a wizard or an exorcist. He has no recourse to incantation, to amulets, to smoke, veils and mystery. He does not call to His aid the powers of Heaven or Hell. For Him a word is enough, a strong cry, a gentle accent, a caress. His will is enough, and the faith of the petitioner. To them all He puts the question, “Dost thou believe I can do this?” and when the cure is accomplished, “Go, thy faith hath made thee whole.” For Jesus the miracle is the union of two wills for good, the living contact between the faith of the healer and the faith of the one healed. “Verily I say unto you, If ye have faith as a grain of mustard seed, ye shall say unto this mountain, Remove hence, to yonder place; and it shall remove; and nothing shall be impossible unto you. If ye had faith as a grain of mustard seed, ye might say unto this sycamine tree, Be thou plucked up by the root and be thou planted in the sea; and it should obey you.” Those who have no faith, not even as much as the thousandth part of a grain of mustard seed, swear that no man has this power, and that Jesus is an impostor.
In the Gospels the miracles are called by three names: “Dunameis”—forces; “Terata”—marvels; “Semeis”—signs. They are signs for those who remember the prophecies of the Messiah; they are “marvels” for those who look for proofs that Christ is the Messiah; but for Jesus and in Jesus there are only “Dunameis,” mighty works, victorious lightning-flashes from a superhuman power. The healings of Jesus are two-fold; they are healings not only of bodies but of souls, and it is soul-sickness which Jesus wishes especially to heal, so that the Kingdom of Heaven may be founded also on the earth.
Most sickness is two-fold, mental and physical, and lends itself with singular exactitude to metaphors and allegory. Jesus cured the maimed, the halt, the fevered, a man with the dropsy, a woman with an issue of blood. He healed also a sword-wound—Malchus’ ear struck off by Peter on the night of Gethsemane—this only in order that His law ... “do good to those who wrong you” ... might be observed to the very last. But Jesus healed more often those possessed by devils, the paralytics, the lepers, the blind, the deaf-mutes. The old name for mental diseases is possession by devils; even Professor Aristotle believed in possession by devils. It was believed that lunatics, epileptics, hysterical patients, were invaded by malign spirits. The contradictory and often merely verbal explanations of the moderns does not invalidate the fact that demoniacs, in many cases, are such in the real sense of the word. This learned and popular explanation lent itself admirably to that allegorical and figurative teaching of which Jesus was so fond. He wished to found the Kingdom of God and supplant that of Satan. It was part of His mission to drive out demons. The difference between bodily disorders and actual malign obsessions was of no importance: between bodily infirmities and spiritual infirmities there is a parallelism of nomenclature, based on real affinity. There is a likeness between the maniac and the epileptic, between the paralytic and the slothful, the vile and the leprous, the blind and he who cannot see the truth, the deaf and he who will not listen to the truth, the cured and the resurrected.