Healing. Mary Healy
is fulfilled in him.17
Jesus chose precisely this passage to define the essence of his mission. “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me” refers to his baptism in the Jordan River, described just a few verses earlier, when the Holy Spirit descended on him in the form of a dove (Luke 3:22). “He has anointed me” means that on that occasion God the Father filled him with the Holy Spirit, empowering him for his mission as Messiah. His very title, Messiah (or in Greek, Christ), means “Anointed One” and derives from that anointing at his baptism.18 As Tertullian, a third-century Church Father, explains, “He is called Christ because he was anointed by the Father with the Holy Spirit.”19 Although Jesus was filled with the Holy Spirit from the moment of his conception, it was with the anointing at his baptism that his human nature was fully endowed with divine power for his messianic mission.
The Isaiah passage also describes the mission itself. The purpose of Jesus’ anointing was so that he could “proclaim good news to the poor” — good news that includes not only hopeful words but the very realities that the words announce: freedom, healing, and release from captivity. The “poor” are both the materially poor and all people, spiritually impoverished by their alienation from God. By applying this Scripture text to himself, Jesus is declaring that he has been anointed by the Holy Spirit in order to go into places of deep human bondage, of blindness, sickness, and oppression, to proclaim the good news of the kingdom and visibly manifest it by setting people free. Healing and deliverance are not peripheral but at the very heart of his mission.
In Acts, when the apostle Peter gives a brief summary of Jesus’ public ministry, he too puts healing and deliverance at its center. Peter tells the crowd gathered in the house of Cornelius, “God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Spirit and with power … he went about doing good and healing all that were oppressed by the devil, for God was with him” (Acts 10:38).
The Lord Your Healer
In response to a complaint from the Pharisees, Jesus gave a further insight into his mission. When he sat at table with tax collectors and sinners, people normally excluded from the company of the pious, the Pharisees were scandalized. Jesus replied to their objections with a kind of proverb: “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick” (Luke 5:31). He thereby identified himself as a physician, and his mission as one of healing.
As Jesus’ hearers probably understood, he was hinting at his divine identity, for Scripture speaks of God as the healer of his people. In Exodus, after leading his people out of slavery and across the Red Sea, God had revealed something new about himself. He gave himself a new name: “I am the LORD, your healer” (Exod 15:26). With this title God indicates that healing springs from his very nature. It belongs to his very character to restore his people to wholeness, because he desires the fullness of life for them.
Jesus’ healings, then, reveal him as the divine Healer present in the midst of his people. His whole mission can be described as a work of healing, a restoration of souls and bodies to the fullness of life that God intended. The word “health,” in fact, comes from the same root as “whole” and “holy.” Healing in the fullest sense is becoming whole in spirit, soul, and body. And because God created us for himself, wholeness is nothing other than holiness — a union of love with the all-holy God.
Saving and Healing
In response to another complaint about his fraternizing with sinners — in this case, Zacchaeus the tax collector — Jesus summed up his mission with a succinct phrase: “the Son of Man came to seek and to save the lost” (Luke 19:10). The Greek verb for “save” (sōzō) can also be translated “heal”; it is the same word used in many of his healings.20 The Gospels do not allow us to create an artificial separation between Jesus’ healing of bodies and his saving of souls, as if only the second really counts; rather, they are two dimensions of his one work of healing-salvation.
As Pope Benedict XVI wrote in his book Jesus of Nazareth, “Healing is an essential dimension of the apostolic mission and of Christian faith in general.” It can even be said that Christianity is a “‘therapeutic religion’ — a religion of healing…. When understood at a sufficiently deep level, this expresses the entire content of ‘redemption.’”21 Jesus ultimately came to heal humanity’s deepest wound: the wound of our sin and consequent alienation from God, with all its consequences of spiritual and physical brokenness.
Jesus once again placed healing at the heart of his messianic mission when John the Baptist sent messengers to inquire whether he was truly the Messiah foretold by the prophets. John had been chained up in prison by Herod — a part of God’s plan that he had probably not foreseen at all — and he was tempted to doubt and discouragement. Jesus pointed to his healings as the clue to the answer.
They said, “John the Baptist has sent us to you, saying, ‘Are you he who is to come, or shall we look for another?’” In that hour he cured many of diseases and plagues and evil spirits, and on many that were blind he bestowed sight. And he answered them, “Go and tell John what you have seen and heard: the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, lepers are cleansed, and the deaf hear, the dead are raised up, the poor have good news preached to them.” (Luke 7:20–22)
With this reply Jesus recalls the biblical passages that foretold the messianic age as a time of abundant healings. Isaiah had prophesied:
“Then the eyes of the blind shall be opened,
and the ears of the deaf unstopped;
then shall the lame man leap like a dear,
and the tongue of the mute sing for joy.” (Isa 35:5–6; see Isa 29:18; 42:7)
Before the eyes of John’s messengers, Jesus proceeded to fulfill these very promises by restoring sight to the blind and curing others of disease and demonic oppression. He is indeed “the one who is to come.”
Signs of the Kingdom
Jesus’ healings are inseparable from his preaching of the kingdom of God. He began his public ministry by announcing the arrival of the kingdom (Mark 1:15); then he demonstrated it by his healings and miracles. In Jesus’ very presence, in his words and deeds, the reign of God has been inaugurated on earth. The dominion of Satan has been broken and the restoration of all creation has begun.
As Jesus says in the Gospel of John, “the works which the Father has given me to accomplish, these very works which I am doing, bear me witness that the Father has sent me” (John 5:36).22 This saying does not mean that his works are merely external proofs of his divinity, as if he did them simply to convince people that he is who he says he is. In fact, more often than not his miracles turned the religious authorities against him.23 Rather, the miracles are the embodiment of the good news itself: that he is the long-awaited Messiah who has come to overthrow every kind of evil and restore God’s people to the fullness of life.
To convey this deeper understanding of Jesus’ works, the Gospel of John prefers to call them signs rather than miracles. Each of the miracles, perceived with the eyes of faith, signifies something. Each reveals an aspect of Jesus’ identity and mission. His turning of water into wine at Cana reveals that he is the bridegroom of the messianic wedding (John 2:1–11; 3:25). His multiplication of loaves reveals that he is the bread of life (John 6:35). His healing of the blind man reveals that he is the light of the world, who brings us out of spiritual darkness (John 9:5). His raising of Lazarus reveals that he is the resurrection and the life (John 11:25). Jesus heals and gives life because it is his very nature, as God, to do so. All his works are meant to lead us into the mystery of his divine identity and messianic mission.
Scripture often uses the phrase “signs and wonders” to speak of the miracles God did through Moses during the exodus.24 In Acts 2:22 Peter uses these same words for Jesus’ miracles to show that Jesus has accomplished the new and greater exodus — the redemption of his people from slavery to sin. Jesus’ healings are signs because they signify his definitive victory over sin and all its consequences, his inauguration of the kingdom, and the beginning