(5) Teaching wrought by signs.
The Signs shew us, not only that the Kingdom is God's, but something also of the nature of that Kingdom as well.
Our Lord speaks of the power displayed in miracles as God's power working through Him. It is “by the finger of God” that He casts out devils and the man who is healed is bidden to tell his friends what God has done for him.[32]
Christ nowhere claims the power as His own. It rests in God's hands; but it is granted to His prayer, because His will and God's are one.
Moreover the Signs set forth God's love and goodness to men, and thereby they tell us something of His nature. All the Signs worked by our Lord before the people at large, and all the works which the Twelve and the Seventy performed in their mission among the cities of Israel, were works of healing; with the exception of the two instances of the feeding of the multitudes, which also were works of Divine beneficence. There are other miracles of a different character, as we shall see presently, but those were witnessed either by the disciples only, or by a circle of private friends as at Cana of Galilee.
The men of Galilee had hitherto known the Lord as the God of Israel, who was especially concerned with the fortunes of their race and nation as a whole; but now they were told that He was the Father of every person in that nation, and was sent especially to the lost sheep among them. It was this declaration—that of the individual relation of each man to God, and of the preciousness of the very hairs of his head in God's eyes—that constituted, in great part, the comforting nature of the “good tidings of God.” The miracles wrought in connection with the preaching could not bring this point very prominently forward: but so far as the miracles bear on the point they are in accord with the teaching. [pg 086] They were worked, not upon masses of men at once, but on individuals, and our Lord addresses Himself personally to each particular sufferer, as though his case was considered by itself. I shall soon, for another purpose, notice two miracles recorded by St Mark which afford good instances of our Lord's sympathetic insight into individual cases. He does not, on entering a village, ordain that all the lepers in it shall be cleansed, or all the palsied restored to the use of their limbs. He condescends to take each case by itself.
There is hardly a case of healing narrated in St Mark, who, of all our authorities, gives the most detailed account, which does not shew traces of special attention on the part of our Lord to the spiritual and physical features of the particular case. We will take for an instance the cure of the sick of the palsy. The connection of what is spiritual with that which is physical is here very strongly marked. Our Lord begins by saying to the man “thy sins be forgiven thee.” It is possible that the man's condition may have been due to imprudence or something worse; the thought of this may have rankled in his mind and the mental trouble may have aggravated the physical infirmity: the great physician cures both together. His restoration seems to come with the sense of pardon, but he does not shew himself aware of his recovery, until our Lord bids him arise.
The shewing that the Divine power worked [pg 087] blessings on men one by one, contained in itself a lesson as to God's infinity; for a finite being would have been incapable of concerning himself for every unit of the world's population. Any supply of energy, short of an infinite one, would have been exhausted. Hence the notion of God's personal care for each soul is bound up with the conception of His infinity.
Christ does not begin with the abstract and say: “God is infinite and therefore He can find room in His heart to love men, every one;” but He begins with the concrete and says, “God does love you and every one else:” and He leaves it to men to arrive at the truth at the other end of the proposition: viz. that if God's strength is not lessened by drawing upon it, this can only be because there is no limit to it. From this infinity of God it also follows that the distinction between what we call great occasions and small ones—between occasions that we think would justify Divine interposition and those which would not—may not exist in God's eyes. In the presence of His infinity, the difference between great and small things may disappear; certainly His measure will be a very different one from ours.
This brings us to another point in the use of miracles to illustrate the ways of God's Kingdom: they exemplify the truth that God is no respecter of persons. Neither the persons on whom they are wrought, or before whom they are wrought, obtain [pg 088] this privilege by any merit or superiority. Men are not healed because they deserve it. As God sends rain on the just and unjust, so Christ cures the sick who come in His way, rich and poor alike—the son of the nobleman, and the blind beggar; for our Lord, worldly distinctions do not seem to exist. A man, as man, was of such transcendent value in the eyes of the Son of Man that, compared to this, little outer differences were but as the hills and dales of the earth, which scarcely roughen the surface of the globe when seen as a whole. Men, too, are not, except for very special purposes, picked out by Christ to witness the miracles; any more than they are in God's world to receive special mercies, or the lessons, or the afflictions of life. Those who were passing by saw the Signs, some profited and some did not: Herod and other great men would gladly have witnessed a miracle, but it was not granted them.