Today’s Gospel lesson almost sounds like St. Matthew had a lot of little things he wanted to write about – kind of like a “to do” list of things he wanted to mention before he moved on to larger topics. Immediately before these verses he writes about Jesus being tempted by Satan during His 40 days in the wilderness, and immediately following these words he begins three entire chapters recounting the Sermon on the Mount. One well-respected pastor analyzed today’s Gospel and identified no fewer than six different sermons that could be preached on these 14 verses. This Gospel lesson appears once every three years, so by my calculation that gives me enough completely different sermons to get me through January of the year 2026, when I’ll be 76 years old and by God’s grace retired and listening to sermons rather than writing them.
As we all know, in recent months we’ve seen a lot of sickness and illness among St. Paul members recently, and it was just a week ago this morning that Pat Marcin was called to her eternal rest. So when I sat down to study the text, I was drawn to verses 23 and 24 of the Gospel, where we read: “23 And he went throughout all Galilee, teaching in their synagogues and proclaiming the gospel of the kingdom and healing every disease and every affliction among the people. 24 So his fame spread throughout all Syria, and they brought him all the sick, those afflicted with various diseases and pains, those oppressed by demons, epileptics, and paralytics, and he healed them.”
The Gospels are filled with all kinds of accounts of Jesus healing people of every possible sort of physical ailment. We read of Him bringing the dead back to life. Jesus used no medicines or medical procedures. Often he healed with a simple touch. Sometimes he healed with a simple word. Demons were driven out with a command. Jesus touched … Jesus spoke … and the healing was complete.
Today vast amounts of money and time are spent researching illnesses and diseases, seeking to determine first the cause and then the cure. Viruses, bacteria, environmental factors, genetic flaws and mutations – all of these and many more are studied with the hope of finding cures and treatments to make us healthy and help us live longer lives. But with all due respect for modern medicine and the medical professionals who work so diligently to care for us, the true, ultimate cause of every human illness and disease and ailment is sin – the sin in which we were born and the sin in which we will die. When God created the heavens and the earth, He repeatedly looked at His creation and judged it to be good. It was intrinsically perfect in every respect. There was no death, nor was there any illness or disease or aging process that leads to death.
But when Adam and Eve sinned, everything – literally everything – changed. Nothing – other than God – was now good. The Hebrew word that we translate as “good” can be defined as “the moral opposite of evil.” So when all of God’s creation was no longer good, it was evil – evil in every sense of the word. And we all know that evil brings nothing good into our lives. Even the vocabulary that God used changed immediately after the fall. God told Eve that she would bear children in pain … He told Adam that the process of growing crops and providing food would be done in pain … and He told both Adam and Eve that they eventually would die. Later they experienced the pain of death when their firstborn son murdered their second born son Abel.
Death has been described as the ultimate illness, and there’s a lot of truth in that statement. No matter how healthy we may be, sooner or later our bodies simply give out. They may be attacked by every sort of illness and disease, by ailments that are common to many and others that afflict only the few. But even without those illnesses and diseases, every human body is subject to an aging process that goes in only one direction and that has only one outcome.
Can God still work miracles of healing? Absolutely. We’ve seen examples of those miracles time and time again. God has worked miracles of healing among some of you sitting here today – and we thank and praise God for that fact. Following Jesus’ ascension into heaven, the remaining books of the New Testament mentions occasions when the Apostles were able to heal people, just as Jesus had healed.
But today? Well, that can be a pretty touchy subject. When I was young I had an aunt who fell and broke her arm. We went to visit, and when we entered the house we found her on her knees, with her broken arm pressed against the small screen of her black and white TV set, listening to a prayer of healing being spoken by Oral Roberts. She fully expected her arm to be healed immediately – and when it wasn’t, she followed his instructions to send money to his ministry, with the idea that her gift would reflect the strength of her faith and she would then be healed. Well, she sent a generous donation. But her arm didn’t heal any faster than the doctor had originally told her.
That incident took place probably 50 years ago, and Oral Roberts died a couple of years ago, and we don’t hear quite so much about faith healing today. But you may have heard about a present-day evangelist and faith-healer by the name of Benny Hinn. While we still lived in Houston, Benny Hinn booked the Toyota Center, and he filled all 16,000 seats every night for something like a week’s worth of healing services. The faithful would pay their price of admission – it costs a lot of money to rent a 16,000-seat basketball arena – and at the appointed time carefully selected people would parade before Benny Hinn, who would place his hands on the sick or crippled person and supposedly heal that person. It was all very emotional, with lots of screams and cries and tears and excitement, but there was always a nagging question about just how many people – if, indeed, any at all – were truly healed. Remember that the people who were brought to Benny Hinn were carefully selected, and many truly sick and crippled people were not allowed to come close to him. There have been quite a few investigations and the consensus is that those so-called healings are not real. But still, the people come. The people believe. And the people pay their money.
The people came to see Jesus, of course, but there were big differences between the healings of Jesus and the so-called healings of men like Oral Roberts and Benny Hinn. First, the healings performed by Jesus were real – were legit – were exactly what they appeared to be. Unlike modern-day faith healers, Jesus never asked for money, never put conditions on His healings, never had His disciples carefully choose who should be healed and who shouldn’t. We repeatedly read in the Gospels that Jesus had compassion, and he showed that compassion over and over again. A large number of miraculous healings by Jesus are specifically recorded in the Gospels, but we know that the true number was far, far greater. It’s just as we read in today’s Gospel lesson, where Matthew tells us that Jesus healed “every disease and affliction among the people.”
The second difference between Jesus and every so-called faith healer who has ever walked the face of this earth is that the mission of Jesus was not just to heal physical maladies – but to heal the sinful condition that had alienated us from our God and had corrupted our world. When Jesus said that He came to make all things new, He was saying that He would make things “good” again in the eyes of God our Father. As long as sin rules us and rules all creation, pain and suffering and every kind of illness and disease will continue to afflict every one of us. Following our deaths, we would be doomed to the eternal pain and suffering of hell.
But in the new, perfect creation, in Heaven where we and all believers will spend all eternity, everything will be different. Everything will be perfect. Everything will be exactly as God intended His creation to be. We will have perfect, glorified, indestructible bodies. As St. John saw in his vision recorded in Revelation chapter 21, “and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away.”
How ironic it is that for us to enjoy this eternal healing of Christ, He must first suffer the pain and agony and shame of the cross. As He hung on the cross, Jesus endured the torments of hell so that we would not have to bear those same torments. We’ve heard them so many times before, but the words of Isaiah 53:5 are so very appropriate for us to hear again today: “But he was wounded for our transgressions; he was crushed for our iniquities; upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace, and with his stripes we are healed.” The Hebrew word that we translate as “healed” means not just the restoration of physical health – but bringing something back to a prior and preferable state. When we have been “healed” by Jesus and his act of perfect love for us, we are brought back to a “prior and preferable state” – the state of holiness and innocence and perfect relationship with God that was present for a time in Eden – the time when everything truly was “good” – the time before sin entered our world.
No matter what types of healing our medical professionals and their truly wonderful array of medicines can work, the ultimate healing – the only healing that matters – is the eternal healing that we have in Christ Jesus. As is so often true, I think St. Paul summarizes this healing in Jesus so very well in his epistles, including words we find in chapter 8 of his letter to the Romans. Paul writes: “18 For I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us. 19 For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the sons of God. 20 For the creation was subjected to futility, not willingly, but because of him who subjected it, in hope 21 that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to corruption and obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God. 22 For we know that the whole creation has been groaning together in the pains of childbirth until now. 23 And not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies. 24 For in this hope we were saved. Now hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what he sees? 25 But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience.”
In our Gospel lesson we read that Jesus “went throughout all Galilee, teaching in their synagogues and proclaiming the gospel of the kingdom and healing every disease and every affliction among the people. 24 So his fame spread throughout all Syria, and they brought him all the sick, those afflicted with various diseases and pains, those oppressed by demons, epileptics, and paralytics, and he healed them.” Not just them, 2,000 years ago. Not just physical healings, but spiritual healings. Healing us. Here. And today.
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