OUR LORD’S ATTITUDE TOWARDS SICKNESS
By W. Yorke Fausset, M.A.
(1) Men are commonly influenced by actions and personal example much more powerfully than by abstract teaching; and the Christian tradition conforms to this principle in placing the three Synoptic Gospels in the forefront of the New Testament. For they set before us the mind of Christ in the words and acts of Jesus. Thus when the thoughtful Christian is asked, ‘What is the Gospel view of disease?’ he will be inclined to reply, ‘The question is a difficult one, but we may say with some confidence that our Lord answered it by His miracles of healing.’ A study of these and of their underlying principles may help us towards the definition we seek.
The records are fragmentary. Yet they are warm with living realism. The great facts of our Faith stand out before us in the moving drama of the Synoptic Gospels,[14] just as truly as they are interpreted for us in the spiritual Gospel, the Fourth. Jesus Christ is portrayed as the Son of Man: and whatever else that most significant title denotes, it speaks to us of His human activity, His practical and energetic sympathy with the sins and sorrows of men. And this activity found its exercise in two directions: teaching and healing. The association of the two things is noteworthy, as indicating a great principle. The sins of mankind are not unconnected with their sicknesses; spiritual restoration with bodily relief. A calm of soul may bring rest to the body. He who fulfilled in His earthly ministry the prophetic office was also a ‘Physician of extraordinary achievement.’[15] To render Professor Bousset’s words, though we cannot reproduce their eloquence:
‘How the simple populace must have hailed this Deliverer in every time of need! With what unspeakable confidence they must have thronged him! At his coming, despair lifted its head, dull eyes glistened, weary hands and arms reached forth towards him. They trusted him for everything, all things became possible. Body and soul with all their needs they brought to him for healing. The cries of need and anguish, the confidence which knew no limitations, the craving for help, the faltering prayer, the shouts or sobs of joy, the tears of gratitude—daily he moved in the midst of it all.’
Are we then to conclude that our Lord attached no less importance to the cure of bodily ailment than to the spiritual redemption of men? Much has been written of late years which might seem to imply this. But the whole trend of Christ’s teaching forbids us to emphasise the value of physical well-being at the expense of the master claims of the spirit: witness His words in the Sermon on the Mount about taking thought for the life or the body.[16] And therefore we must avoid mere rhetoric and special pleading.
(i) It is plain, at the outset, that our Lord set certain limits to the exercise of His healing activity. What has often been said of miracles in general[17] may be said of the miracles of healing. There is a severe economy in the exercise of such supernatural, or extranatural, powers. This is illustrated by our Lord’s apparent reluctance to work miracles when it is not certain that a true faith asks for it.[18] In other words, the receptivity of men is necessary to the Divine transaction with the sufferer.
Again, He is slow to exercise His power outside the boundaries of Israel, within which He was pleased to confine His work of preaching and healing. Possibly He knew that there He would be welcomed as a mere wonder-working magician. He makes it a condition of His action that the atmosphere should be one of real faith.[19] He could there do no mighty works because of their unbelief.[20] Was it because of the waning faith of the multitudes that, towards the end of His work on earth, the Healing Ministry almost ceases?[21] Whether on this account, or in the desire to escape the demonstrations of popular interest which the miracles evoked, or because the full evidential effect of these ‘signs’ was now almost attained, He restricts His healing, life-giving power to some four cases, one of them the raising of Lazarus. For each and all a special reason can be found.[22]
(ii) Christ’s healing activity was therefore strictly limited in scope. It may be asked, Was it a ‘unique manifestation of a unique Personality’[23] or did it differ in degree rather than in kind from the wonderful works of human healers, or, at all events, of healers who have wrought ‘in the name of Jesus Christ’? The latter view by no means commits its advocates to a ‘humanitarian’ view of the Person of Jesus Christ: while it amply satisfies the facts. Again, it is not necessary, for the purpose of the present discussion, to digress into the field of New Testament criticism. Renan, in his ‘Vie de Jésus,’ feels himself constrained to apologise for the miraculous action of Christ, on the ground that ‘the rôle of thaumaturge was unwelcome to him, but was imposed upon him by his contemporaries.’[24] To Loisy, a critic of profounder learning and far more reverent temper, it appears that the miracles were in reality ‘works of mercy . . . and not a direct argument in favour of the Messiahship of the Saviour,’ a complexion which was afterwards put upon them more or less unconsciously by the Evangelists.[25] But it is quite consistent with a reverent acknowledgment of the Divinity of our Lord, and an acceptance of the Gospel records in substance as they stand, to hold that the miracles of healing—with the nature-miracles we are not here concerned—were the simple outcome of that all-embracing human pity which, in itself, betokened the expected Messiah; rather than an immediate exercise of Almighty power, and the utterance, within the physical order, of the Eternal Word. We find our Lord proclaiming Himself, in the synagogue of Nazareth, the Fulfiller of that great prophecy of Isaiah in his sixty-first chapter, in which the Messianic mission is set forth in language in which a spiritual and a physical deliverance are inseparably intertwined.[26] Similarly, in answer to the Baptist’s message, the same blending of evangelical teaching and spiritual healing is to be noticed; and, once again, sin and disease stand out as the dominant factors in the condition of this present world.
(iii) But if the source of the miracles is thus to be sought in the Sacred Humanity, that Humanity is, after all, the perfect ideal and norm of all humanity. Whatever exceptional powers of genius, whatever special faculties and latent gifts of mind and will have appeared at rare intervals among men, these we should expect to find exemplified, one and all, in the Life of Christ, had that Life come down to us in a complete form. Now, it cannot be questioned that in every age a few individuals have been found, who were endowed with a preternatural therapeutic power, connected generally with a very subtle power of sympathy, but, in some instances, if we may believe what we are told, inherent in a person who had no wish whatever to exercise it.[27] That some such virtue resided in Christ, and accounts for some part of His healing work, need not be questioned. The records may be said to imply it in two passages,[28] that which relates to the act of the woman who touched the hem of His garment in the crowd, and that which speaks of this method of cure as ofttimes repeated. They besought Him that they might touch if it were but the border of his garment—and as many as touched were made whole.