The healing of the sick was always an essential part of Jesus' ministry. The original Greek text uses the word therapeuo, which means both 'heal' and 'wait upon' or 'serve'. Jesus cared for the whole man. He was a real "therapist".

The Wise understand the healing of the sick as belonging to the Messianic office, when he effects the "reparation" of man's sin- impediment. This tiqun concept signifies that fallen man will be restored, as it were, to the Edenic state, where there was no sin, disease or death. For this reason, the Messiah also "took up our infirmities", as Isaiah 53:4 expresses it.

It is often said incorrectly that illness is the consequence of sin. We even go as far sometimes as to command God to heal all our ailments, and if the unfortunate sufferer is not in fact healed by our prayer, we begin to suspect his walk with God. Sickness and disease are not, however, the consequence of our personal sin but the result of the Fall! Death has been decreed for our race and we are by nature partakers of that sentence. Weakness and ill-health are part of the normal Christian life. Even those of us who "groan inwardly as they wait eagerly for their adoption as sons, the redemption of their bodies" are real Christians. Specifically of them it is said that they have "the firstfruits of the Spirit" (Rom. 8:23). Only in eternity will this "perishable be clothed with imperishable" (1 Cor. 15:54). We misunderstand our human lot if we argue that we ought to be able to control life and death. It would be better always to give thanks for the portion of health which we enjoy today.

Nevertheless, Christ to this day "serves" as a therapist those he encounters. This one aspect took up most of his time in his ministry on this earth. We are often unable to grasp the full scope and nature of his healing office. If we were to collect all the "medical histories" from the gospels, we would count seven separate occasions on which Jesus restored sight to the blind, nine different cases of exorcism, eight times when he loosened the tongue of a deaf-mute and healed a leper, and about 15 other incidences of healing from various complaints. These individual instances are repeated in the gospels up to three times. In addition to those, Jesus raised from the dead the widow of Nain's son (Luke 7:11-17), Lazarus (John 11:1-57) and Jairus's daughter (Matt. 9:18-26, Mark 5:21-43 and Luke 8:40-56).

The "medical histories" of those whom Jesus healed often reveal the duration of the illness. The blind man who was sent to the Pool of Siloam had suffered from his affliction since he was born (John 9:1-38). One woman had for 18 years been unable to straighten up at all (Luke 13:10-17), and the man at the pool called Bethesda had to wait 38 years for his healing (John 5:1-47). Many of these incidences are described in great detail. Sometimes they are related only because it happened to be on the Sabbath that Jesus took pity on the sufferer. The miraculous healings in the New Testament are commented on so extensively and in such detail that their authenticity cannot be impugned. The Jews have never denied that Jesus and his disciples performed miracles. It is worthwhile, then, "being a realist and believing in miracles"

A MAN BLIND FROM BIRTH RECEIVES HIS SIGHT

The whole 9th chapter of John is concerned with a man who was born blind. The main characters in the drama are the Blind Man, his Parents, a Pharisaic Investigatory Committee and Jesus. The setting is the entrance to the Temple and the Pool of Siloam in the lower part of the City. The time is the Sabbath after the Feast of Tabernacles, and people are wearing their festive garments. Despite the fact that begging was forbidden on the Sabbath, as it was not permitted to handle money on that day, a certain blind man has taken up his usual place beside the gate. Perhaps he is begging for sympathy more than anything else, as the whole city has known him for years.

When Jesus walks past the man with his disciples, they ask their master the perennial question as to where does the blame lie for such suffering: "Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?" Jesus' reply is surprising: "Neither this man nor his parents sinned, but this happened so that the work of God might be displayed in his life."

Illness is the great leveller and revealer. Illness teaches us to see health as a gift from God. Sometimes the sufferer ends up being the one who teaches life's permanent values to others. In Aramaic a blind person is called sagi nahôr, which means 'greatly illuminated'. Homer, the assumed author of the classical epic poems "The Iliad" and "The Odyssey", was blind.

Jesus came, however, to do the deeds of his Father, and so he says, "While I am in the world, I am the light of the world." Then he spits on the ground, makes some mud with the saliva, smears it on the man's eyes and says, "Go and wash in the Pool of Siloam". This name means literally 'sent'. Something in the way Jesus spoke makes the man obey. He gropes his way down the steep slope to the pool, washes, and returns seeing.

Now the neighbours and the orthodox critics come forth. Some say, "This is the same man", others, "No, he only looks like him". He himself insists, "I am the man". When he is asked how his eyes were opened, he replies that the man they call Jesus made some mud, put it on his eyes and sent him to the Pool of Siloam.

There was, however, something in Jesus' methods which was at variance with the regulations of the Rabbis'. Healing on the Sabbath was bad enough in itself, but Jesus committed a further infringement of the rules when he took the mud and rubbed it into the man's eyes. Such rubbing was one of the 39 kinds of work which were forbidden on the Sabbath. Some of the others were riding a horse, swimming, dancing, ploughing two furrows or sewing two seams, and even getting engaged, as this involved the handling of money or gifts. For each one of these proscriptions there were either 6 or 39 "subsidiary duties". Thus the regulations for the Sabbath could potentially total 39x39 = 1521. To this day an orthodox Jew may well check that no-one comes into the Synagogue with leather-soled shoes, so that there will be no possibility of a nail causing a spark. All the villages in nearest proximity to Jerusalem have been combined into one common Sabbath area inside which there is no need to measure the 2000 cubits or 880 metres of the Sabbath journey. In practice the Jew takes care not to walk more than 2000 steps of average length outside either his home or the Sabbath area.

The neighbours now ask the blind man where Jesus is, and when he is unable to tell them they take him to the Pharisees where he speaks yet again of how he was miraculously healed. The Pharisees say that Jesus cannot be from God, as he does not keep the Sabbath. Since the blind man's identity is still doubted, his parents are called to the scene, and they assure the religious leaders that the man is their son and that he was born blind. When it comes, however, to his healing they ask the man to speak for himself. The gospel states, "His parents said this because they were afraid of the Jews, for already the Jews had decided that anyone who acknowledged that Jesus was the Christ would be put out of the synagogue".

Excommunication from the synagogue in the religious city of Jerusalem was a fearsome prospect. The Talmud speaks of three degrees of punishment being in use. The mildest form was the neziphâ or 'rebuke', in which the accused was banned from communion with the synagogue for one week. If the sentence was meted out by the president of the Sanhedrin it could last for up to 30 days. With the second degree, niddui or 'expulsion', communion with the synagogue was broken for one month. The most stringent form of punishment was herem, 'curse' or 'ban', which entailed a sentence of unlimited duration. The person punished in this way was considered more or less dead. Even the niddui degree was dreadful, as certain curses went along with it. The repentant had to sit on the ground as if in mourning, forbidden to cut his hair or beard -- forbidden even to wash. He was not allowed to take part in public activities and he was avoided as if he was a leper. Merely undermining the authority of the scribes was in itself considered a grievous crime, and so it is not surprising that the blind man's parents were in no hurry to speak up for their son.

Now the man who has been healed is called in for a cross-examination, but he will not agree to cast aspersions on Jesus' reputation just because he has been commanded to do so: "Whether he is a sinner or not, I don't know. One thing I do know: I was blind but now I see!" When the Pharisees still insist that he give them an explanation for what has happened he replies, "Nobody has ever heard of opening the eyes of a man born blind. If this man were not from God, he could do nothing." At that pandemonium breaks out. The members of the committee fly into a rage. "You were steeped in sin at birth," they shout at him. "How dare you lecture us!" And they drive him out.

The story has an epilogue to it. Jesus gets to hear about the Sanhedrin driving the man out. "Do you believe in the Son of Man?" he asks when he sees him again. "Who is he, sir?" the man asks. "Tell me so that I may believe in him." "You have now seen him," Jesus says, "in fact, he is the one speaking with you." Then the man says, "Lord, I believe," and he worships Jesus. Following this Jesus pronounces words somewhat enigmatic in character: "For judgement I have come into this world, so that the blind will see and those who see will become blind." When some Pharisees standing nearby hear these words, they ask if they too are blind. "If you were blind," Jesus says, "you would not be guilty of sin; but now that you claim you can see, your guilt remains."

Jesus and the leper

For Jesus the healing of the sick was something of an annoyance. "Unless you see signs and wonders," he said, "you will not believe." "This wicked and adulterous generation seeks for signs". "Blessed are they who have not seen and yet have believed." He nevertheless took pity on his suffering neighbours, of whom the most wretched in his time were the lepers, whose affliction was considered a divine punishment which God alone could revoke.

In our Old Testament section, in the discussion of Isaiah chapter 53 we spoke of how the Lord's suffering servant is referred to by the name nagûa, 'stricken with disease'. The Talmud has a special section, Negaim, devoted almost entirely to an extensive treatment of leprosy. On the basis of the Isaiah passage mentioned above, the Messiah received in Aramaic the name Hivra or 'Leper' -- he does indeed sit beside the "poor and afflicted" to care for and identify with them. Bearing this old Jewish Messianic expectation in mind it should not be thought strange that Jesus saw it as one of his duties to help the lepers of his day.¹⁹

Precise guidelines are given in the 13th and 14th chapters of Leviticus on the diagnosis of leprosy, the disinfecting of the leper's clothing and house and on his isolation in quarantine. He was to live alone outside the camp with his hair unkempt and to cry out "Unclean! Unclean!" For all practical purposes he was a living death.

The Rabbinic legal regulations provided a mass of additional prescriptions aimed at preventing the spread of infection. The leper was not allowed to come within arm's length of others; he was forbidden to walk under the same tree as those unafflicted; if the wind came from behind the leper 30 metres distance was not enough; synagogues sometimes had a mehitsâ, a cubicle two metres long by two broad and a metre high, into which the leper might enter before the time of prayer on condition that he wait until all the others had departed before he left. He was forbidden, on the threat of flogging, to come into a walled town. Some Rabbis encouraged driving lepers off with stones, others advised fleeing from the vicinity.

Distinctions were made between two main types of leprosy and 16, 36 or 72 sub-types. There was a smaller incidence of leprosy in Babylon than in Palestine, which some reckoned to be due to the fact that more vegetables were eaten there. The Rabbis understood the disease as primarily the consequence of pride and slander, referring to the account in Numbers 12 where Miriam began to talk against her brother Moses "because of his Cushite wife" (a negro) which he had married and got this disease. There are no racial differences in this sense in the Old Testament.

The Talmud says that "there is no death without sin and no pain without a fall". "No sickness can be healed without the forgiveness of sin". However, "the healing of leprosy is more difficult than raising the dead". Anyone who has seen in southern lands a leper openly walking about with limbs partly eaten away or a face which is no more than a shapeless mass will not wonder at the awful dread people felt about the disease.

Jesus' fame reached into the leper colonies, from whence came the afflicted to him, sometimes even a group of them. His attitude to them was the same as towards those suffering from other infirmities. Generally people tried to "touch" Jesus. Parents too brought their children so that he would "touch" them (Mark 10:13 and Luke 18:15). Luke tells us about a group of ten lepers who met Jesus and "stood at a distance and called out in a loud voice, 'Jesus, Master, have pity on us"' (17:11-13). This is in keeping with the custom of the time.

Luke 5:12-14 gives us a close-up portrait of one leper. This man was "covered with leprosy", which probably meant that he was at the most contagious phase of the disease. On seeing Jesus he fell with his face to the ground and begged him, "Lord, if you are willing, you can make me clean." Perhaps he was ashamed of his appearance, as the disease usually mutilates the pituitary membrane of the nose and ultimately consumes all the flesh from around it. It does not, however, affect the sufferer's mental faculties.

And what does Jesus do? He reaches out his hand, touches him and says, "I am willing. Be clean!" And immediately the leprosy leaves him. The "healing touch" of Jesus in action!

But now there follows a remarkable detail. Jesus forbids the man to speak to anyone of this healing. Instead he tells him to go and show himself to the priests and and to offer the pigeons decreed by Moses for sacrifice "as a testimony to them". There was in the Temple, beside the arched gates in the women's court, a special room in which the priests examined those who had been healed from leprosy and various skin diseases to proclaim them fit for society. When the healed leper had received his official certificate of cleanliness and had released, according to custom, a "live bird in the open fields outside the town" ( Lev. 14:53), he surely felt the symbolic deed as representing his own situation: "Now I am free, FREE!" Jesus loved the Temple and desired that those aspects of the Temple service which were good and beautiful would be able to serve people.

Jesus, victor over death.

When he healed the blind Jesus showed himself to be the light of the world; in cleansing lepers he proved that he acted with the authority of God himself, but in raising the dead he revealed himself as "the resurrection and the life".

The historian Eusebius tells us of a certain Quadratus who "composed a defence of our religion" at the beginning of the second century, dedicated to the Emperor on behalf of the Christians. Eusebius himself had a copy of this little book, which spoke of the miracles of Jesus as follows:

"But the works of our Saviour were always present (for they were genuine): namely, those who were healed, those who rose from the dead; who were not only seen in the act of being healed or raised, but were also always present; and not merely when the Saviour was in earth, but after His departure as well, they lived for a considerable time; insomuch that some of them survived even to our own day."²⁰

In some disjointed fragments there is mention made that the Messiah will "swallow" death and that he will himself rise from the dead. We have shown in our first roots study how the Midrash depicts the world before the Fall, when "there was no angel of death as yet". Through the fall "all the races were corrupted". . .and will be so right up to the coming of the Messiah, "And in his days the Holy One will swallow up death, as it is said, 'He will destroy death for ever"' (Is. 25:8)."²²

The strongest point of contact with the Messiah's resurrection relates, however, to the symbol Jesus gives of the sign of Jonah. In fact he speaks of this several times in the gospels. When his hearers longed to see miracles Jesus promised them only the sign of Jonah:

"As Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of a huge fish, so the Son of Man will be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth" (Matt. 12:38-40). Some remarkable papyrus fragments have been found in Cairo from old Midrashim. They contain a discussion in connection with Gen. 42:18: "On the third day, Joseph said to them, 'Do this and you will live . . ."' The Midrash connects this with Abraham, who prepared to sacrifice Isaac "on the third day". Finally Jonah too receives a mention when it is said that, God acts "on the third day", just as "Jonah was in the belly of the great fish" until that day. The explanation of what follows in these fragments is quite clear: "'On the third day' because of the resurrection, for he will quicken us after two days, on the third day he will awaken us." (Hos. 6:2). Reference is also made to the giving of the law on Sinai "on the third day". What is most remarkable in these papyrus fragments is that they connect the "third day" of Jonah with Hosea 6:2-3. Hosea also says in these verses: "Let us know, let us press on to know the LORD; his rising is as sure as the dawn" (Hebrew trans.).²³ Here the Midrash sees the "third day" as a sign of salvation, whereas Hosea associates the third day with the Lord's resurrection, which is "as sure as the dawn".

Jesus defeated death in this temporal span. Luke 7:11-17 tells us how Jesus meets a funeral procession outside the walls of the little town of Nain, opposite Nazareth. The name of the town means 'pleasant', naîm. Nature, particularly when Spring's lavish display of colour changes into the abundant luxuriance of summer, clothes itself as if in bridal dress:

"Flowers appear on the earth; the season of singing has come, the cooing of doves is heard in our land. The fig-tree forms its early fruit; the blossoming vines spread their fragrance" (Cant. 2:12-13).

In the Galilean fashion, first in the cortège are the women . . .  a certain Rabbi explained the reason for this being that "the sin of a woman brought death into the world". Perhaps the widow is thinking over her own negligence as she escorts her child to the grave. The wails of the mourning women mingle with the plaint of the flutes and the melancholy sound of the cymbals and timbrels. The expression of grief in eastern countries has become an obligatory custom. Even today one may meet a mother who has burst her eardrum while mourning the loss of her child. The Wise had after all decreed, "Weep with those who weep!"

But now Death meets Life. On seeing the woman the Lord has pity on her and says, "Do not weep!" Then he touches the bier. The pallbearers stop, thinking that he too wishes to participate in the mourning by helping to carry the body. This strange Rabbi however only says, "Young man, I say to you, get up!" -- and the dead man sits up and begins to talk. The gospel then states with tender warmth that "Jesus gave him back to his mother". The people, however, are gripped with fear. One of the Messiah's names is after all Morah which means 'the One to be feared' (Ps. 76:12). The people praise God and say, "God has come to help his people.

Jesus rightly said in a corresponding situation, when he raised Lazarus from the dead: "I am the resurrection and the life. He who believes in me will live, even though he dies; and whoever lives and believes in me will never die" (John 11:25-26). This too belonged to his Messianic authority.
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19.     See The Messiah in the Old testament, pp203 and 208
20.    Eusebius IV 3.
21.    Sanhedrin 113a.
22.    Shemoth Rabbah. par. 30,3. See also The Messiah in the Old testament, p41.
23.    Bereshit Rabbah min ha-Geniza, 59,11.