Thoughts

Matthew’s skill in structuring his account of Jesus’s ministry is again apparent in this section of the gospel as he alternates the groups of miracles with teaching on discipleship, so that the accounts of Jesus’s ‘acts of power’ convey multi-layered teaching on God’s love for his creation and the nature of life in the Kingdom of God and discipleship.

In the ten[1] miracles reported in this section, Jesus apparently effects the act in a variety of ways, by touching or being touched (8:3, 8:15, 9:21-22, 9:25 and 9:29), by his announcement of it (8:13), by a rebuke (8:26) and by a simple command (8:32 and 9:5-6). In some of these cases, the faith of the recipient of the healing power was also specifically noted as a contributing feature, and in 9:5-6, the command seems to be in order to evidence a healing that has already taken place due to the forgiveness of sins (although John Chrysostom interprets this almost as two healings, one of the soul and one of the body[2]). Though touch seems to be the most common form of healing, the first instance of Jesus’s touching to heal here deserves particular attention.

Green writes what is surely true, that Jesus’s willingness to touch the leper speaks volumes of God’s love for sinners. John Chrysostom suggests that in making this touch, Jesus also shows himself above the Jewish law of purity, contrasting his action with Elisha in 2 Ki 5:1-14 and suggesting that the reason Elisha did not go out to meet Naaman before he was cleansed was because of the purity laws. There is no doubt that the touch was a loving gesture, but was it more than a gesture? To some degree it was a touch that conveyed healing. John Chrysostom suggests that, rather than the uncleanness of the disease transferring from its carrier to Jesus through the touch – as might have been expected, in this case the purity of Jesus overwhelms the disease, healing the sufferer – an active example of the comment in Titus ‘to the pure all things are pure’ (Tit 1:15). This latter explanation could apply in all of these cases of Jesus’s healing, not only by touch: when combined with the faith of the person seeking healing, even this degree of communion with God can be a partaking in God’s healing power against the corruption of the physical world.

Yet we also see people of faith seeking healing and not receiving it. How are we to understand this? John Chrysostom refers also to this issue[3] of times and places such as his own, where miracles do not seem to be part of the life of the faithful. Green also mentions that he used to doubt miracles would still happen in our own days (p116). He also says that “in Israel in Jesus’s day there was not too much of that living trust in God’s power to heal.” (p115) Although Green no longer doubts that miracles still happen, he writes that why they happen sometimes and not others is a “mystery”[4]. John Chrysostom points out that “if we all lived as we ought, workers of miracles would not be admired so much as we by the children of the heathen” – that if the Church really looked like the description of Jesus in the Beatitudes and the Sermon on the Mount, that would be a greater testament to the miraculous power of God than healings and miracles of nature, and that healing the soul is harder than to heal the body: “if thou wouldest work miracles also, be rid of transgressions, and thou hast quite accomplished it.” (XXXII₁₁).

He also gives two reasons why miracles may not be in their own experience. First, that having been given the faith, miracles are unnecessary in terms of signs. This is a possible explanation, and plausible especially in terms of miracles such as the walking on water, but it is harder to apply it to miracles of healing, which, while they may also be signs, surely emerge because of God’s love for humanity in our pain and sufferings: this love, joined with our reaching out to him in faith and hope, enables us, like the woman with the issue of blood (9:21-22) to receive healing. His second reason is that we are already so proud of our piety and teaching that if we were also able to perform miracles, we would be unable to maintain our communion. Perhaps increased humility would permit more miracles to take place.

[1] Green prefers to see them as nine miracles. There are clearly 10 miracles, though equally clearly they are presented as nine miracle accounts, with the woman with the issue of blood and Jairus’s daughter (unnamed in Matthew) presented together in one account.

[2] Homily XXIX, p196

[3] Particularly in Homilies XXIV₂ (p168), XXVII₂ (p185) and XXXII₁₁ (p218)

[4] Also relevant here is exactly what we mean by ‘miracles’ and how we perceive them. In general, I take both John Chrysostom and Green in this discussion to be referring to those miracles comparable to Jesus’s ‘acts of power’ in Matthew’s Gospel and to those miracles wrought by Paul’s clothing referred to in Acts 19:11-12. The subsequent verses (Acts 19:13-19) indicate how complex a matter this is in terms of the precise relationships and contrasts between mediating the power of God, personal and community faith, and magic and the use of demonic powers. There is clearly a continuum taking into account everything from the miracle of the sun’s predictable rising and setting, through the miracle of my wife’s continuing love for me, through the mystery of faith, through public healings, to the overwhelming experience and example of God’s power given to Moses when he had to hide in a cleft in the rock (Ex 33:18-23) – the kind of experience that Jesus refused the temptation to provide in Mt.4:1-11, the kind of absolute proof of God some seek, but which would make faith and freedom impossible if given to those still seeking God. In the end, as Green says, the issue of what miracles, when and for whom is a ‘mystery’ and, it seems, necessarily so.

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