Death casts a shadow over life and, even before our last hours, its presence is already known to us. When we die, death strikes its great final blow, yet we all experience it in countless lesser ways before this time. Traces of its hand are felt throughout our lives, sometimes in a faint cold touch and other times in a cruel pinch. Death strips us of our faculties, it cuts us off from others, it afflicts us with pain, it terrorizes and menaces us, it closes down our bodies, spreading its entropic grip throughout their limbs and organs. Behind innumerable guises—of sickness, disease, infirmity, frailty, distress, disability, pain, bereavement, or ageing—it is the great dread enemy of Death and of Satan, who once wielded its power—that we encounter.
Jesus came to defeat death and to destroy the one with the power of death, to free those who lived all their lives in death’s thrall, and to harrow the prison of the grave (Hebrews 2:14-15). This deliverance was to be wrought chiefly through his cross—it was by means of death itself that death would be overcome. Throughout his ministry, however, Jesus demonstrated his power over and foreshadowed his coming conquest of death, not merely in his resurrection. If the resurrection is Christ’s climactic and condensed victory over death, in his numerous healings the first shards of liberation pierce the darkness of man’s prison, announcing and anticipating the full release.
In his ministry, Jesus healed a variety of conditions—people with fevers (Matthew 8:14-15; John 4:43-54), lepers (Matthew 8:1-4; Luke 17:11-19), paralytics (Matthew 8:5-13; 9:1-8), a man with a withered hand (Matthew 12:9-14), a woman with an issue of blood (Matthew 9:20-22), blind men (Matthew 9:27-31; John 9:1-12; Matthew 20:29-34), a mute (Matthew 9:32-34), an invalid (John 5:1-15), a deaf and dumb man (Mark 7:31-37), a crippled woman (Luke 13:10-17), a man with dropsy (Luke 14:1-6), and a man with a severed ear (Luke 22:50-51), in addition to delivering the demon oppressed (Matthew 8:28-33; Mark 1:21-27) and raising people from the dead (Matthew 9:18, 23-26; Luke 7:11-17; John 11:1-45).
He healed in many different ways: he touched or laid his hands on some (Mark 8:22-25), others touched him and were healed (Luke 6:19), the woman with the issue of blood was healed instantly upon touching his garment (Matthew 9:20-22), he spoke to some (Matthew 9:1-8; John 5:1-9), in other cases he declared the healing of people from a great distance (Matthew 8:5-13; John 4:46-54). On several occasions, Jesus healed at the request of friends or relatives of the afflicted party (e.g. Luke 5:18-19). Sometimes those seeking healing had to persist in the face of his seeming resistance (e.g. Mark 7:25-29), whereas elsewhere Jesus initiated the healing (e.g. John 5:5-9).
Healing was a sign of the kingdom of God that was coming through Jesus’s ministry (Matthew 11:1-6; Luke 4:18-19). Illness and infirmity represented, among other things, the power of Satan at work (Luke 13:16), binding and afflicting people, cutting them off from others, tearing loved ones from each other, robbing people of their faculties, alienating them from their bodies, spreading disease through them, and holding them in fear.
Death is opposed to life in its many facets and, in his healing ministry, Jesus set himself against its cruel power on many fronts. Even when death’s final blow may tarry, through disease it can gradually remove faculties, slowly taking our loved ones from us into the alienation of pain, impotence, or forgetfulness. Jesus’s healings restored families, relationships, and communities, as he gave people back their loved ones. Where the contagion of illness or impurity cut people off from their neighbours, Jesus brought a contagion of new life, bringing lepers and other impure persons back into community. Where people’s bodies had failed in part, his voice or touch rendered them whole. Where people experienced the oppression of death and Satan in their afflictions, Jesus brought deliverance.
Isaiah 53, with its prophecy of the suffering Servant, is related in the New Testament to the death of Christ (e.g. 1 Peter 2:21-25), as it consistently has been in the later history of the Church. However, in Matthew 8:17, the passage is also related to his healing ministry: as Jesus healed the sick and delivered those oppressed by demons he fulfilled Isaiah’s statement that ‘he took our illnesses and bore our diseases’ (cf. Isaiah 53:4). The import of Isaiah’s statement that the Servant ‘has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows’ can easily be reduced to a spiritualized meaning, narrowly concerned with our redemption from sin and guilt, yet Matthew sees something more expansive here, a salvation that includes bodies, comprehensively overcoming the tyranny of death.
Although it is easy to consider Christ’s healing ministry in detachment from the redemptive work of the cross, perhaps as we perceive the two in a proper correspondence, they will shed light upon each other. And, as we place both within a yet larger frame, we might better appreciate the fulness of life he came to bring.
At the heart of the message of the gospel of John is the claim that Jesus is life come in the flesh, the source of eternal life for all who believe in him—‘In him was life, and the life was the light of men’ (John 1:4, cf. 1 John 1:1-4). All who believe in him receive eternal life (John 3:16). He is the inexhaustible fountain of the water of life (4:13-14). He has life in himself and gives it to whom he will (5:21-29). He is the bread of life (6:27-63). He has the words of eternal life (6:68). He comes to give life in its abundance (10:10). He has the authority to give eternal life (17:1-3). He is the resurrection and the life (11:25-26).
In the presence of the Lord of life, the plight of fallen human existence, plagued by death’s power, appears for what it truly is, in all its insufficiency, weakness, incapacity, corruption, mortality, brokenness, alienation, and pain. And death, as the great final enemy, whose tyranny is so easily naturalized, can finally be disclosed in its invasive character. Jesus, as the fullness of life come in person, exposes death for what it is, endures the assault of its cruellest indignities, swallows it up in victory, and then gives his life to all who believe in him.
Just as Jesus is the Word through which all was created, John wants us to recognize the power of Christ’s recreating word. The signs of John’s gospel, including the healing signs, foreground the way Jesus’s word brings life and restores people to wholeness. He speaks and the official’s son is healed (John 4:46-54). He tells the invalid by the Sheep Pool to take up his bed and walk and he is instantly empowered to rise (5:1-9). He instructs the man born blind to wash in the pool of Siloam and, as he obeys, the man’s sight is restored (9:1-7). The dead Lazarus hears the summons of Jesus in his tomb and comes forth to him (11:38-44).
John’s gospel relates physical healing to spiritual deliverance and the redemption of bodies from death’s predation to the salvation of souls. The healing of the blind man in John 9, for instance, relates to Jesus’s statements about himself as the ‘light of the world’, who gives the ‘light of life’ (8:12; 9:4-5), while Jesus described the failure of those who did not believe in him as a form of blindness (9:35-41). In Jesus’s instruction to the blind man to wash in the pool as the means of his healing, readers of John have long seen an intentional allegory of baptism. Yet this allegory is such that the healing of spiritual perception is not merely substituted for the opening of physical eyes. The blind man in John 9 experiences spiritual illumination beyond the restoration of his bodily sight and, in John’s extended treatment of his story, he functions as a paradigmatic believer, within whom we ought to see ourselves. Like many others healed by Jesus, the blind man’s reception of his healing required some faith in Jesus and commitment to his word. And, while the renewal of our sight may be spiritual in character, much as his healing was also spiritual in nature, ours must also be bodily.
Life is chiefly known in the person of Jesus Christ, but true life is undivided and comprehensive. While its source is found in restored fellowship with God as its giver, every part of our being will be caught up in its outworking. Life ultimately flows from the creator God, rather than from less-than-personal animistic or material potencies inherent in the creation itself. Genuine healing will only truly be found as we are brought back into relation to that source, not in magical, medical, or technological manipulations of a corrupt and fallen nature. The consequence of true communion with God is the resurrection of bodies.
Perhaps embarrassed by the boldness of this claim, especially in a world where death is manifestly still very much at work in our bodies, we might be tempted to describe a salvation that chiefly operates on an incorporeal plane. For such as account, while Jesus’s healings may demonstrate his power over nature, be signs of the truth of his message, or even declare his divinity, they are little more than physical pictures of a spiritual redemption.
Those healed by Jesus during his earthly ministry were still all subject to the power of death. They would go on to experienced illness, pain, old age, the loss of their faculties, and they would die. However, in the healing that Jesus gave them, they experienced a foretaste—a reality-filled promise—of the overwhelming power of life and the utter defeat of death that awaits us all in the new creation. And the meaning of Jesus’s healing was to be found in the Giver. To receive such a healing was to be touched by the One who is the resurrection and the life, properly answered by clinging to him, rather than to a gift that would itself fail in time.
Christian existence is one in which spiritual and physical life are not finally at odds, even though in this present age they exist in tension. Christ’s redemption is the redemption of bodies, not merely of disincarnate souls. The Apostle Paul recognized the body’s relation to the objectivity of the self, the way it connects us to a world, to others, and to a community, its importance as the primary plane of our current existence, its relation to action, our agency, and moral formation, and its significance as a seat of desires, affections, passions, and moral sense. We feel the working of death in our bodies; our bodies are a site of shame, guilt, and brokenness; they are where we live out our existence and our relationships to others. Consequently, resurrection was central to his understanding of salvation and the Christian life, which lives in anticipation of the redemption of our bodies. If Christ does not redeem bodies, he cannot truly save us. As Paul wrote in Romans 8:10-11—
But if Christ is in you, although the body is dead because of sin, the Spirit is life because of righteousness. If the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, he who raised Christ Jesus from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies through his Spirit who dwells in you.
Our bodies are the temple of the Holy Spirit, both corporately and severally (1 Corinthians 3:16; 6:19). They have been bought at a price and we are to glorify God in them (1 Corinthians 6:20). Baptism is also consequently a fundamental orienting practice for Christian existence for Paul. The ritual of baptism subjects our mortal bodies to the sign of Christ’s resurrection, so that our lives in the body may be lived in anticipation of the new life that will be revealed in the Day when our bodies are redeemed. Romans 6:3-13—
Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? We were buried therefore with him by baptism into death, in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life.
For if we have been united with him in a death like his, we shall certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his. We know that our old self was crucified with him in order that the body of sin might be brought to nothing, so that we would no longer be enslaved to sin. For one who has died has been set free from sin. Now if we have died with Christ, we believe that we will also live with him. We know that Christ, being raised from the dead, will never die again; death no longer has dominion over him. For the death he died he died to sin, once for all, but the life he lives he lives to God. So you also must consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus.
Let not sin therefore reign in your mortal body, to make you obey its passions. Do not present your members to sin as instruments for unrighteousness, but present yourselves to God as those who have been brought from death to life, and your members to God as instruments for righteousness.
Bodies subjected to mortality are the stage within which the incipience of resurrection life is perceived. Paul does not shrink back from the paradox. In John 9, Jesus declared that the man’s blindness was not on account of his sin or that of his parents, but that ‘the works of God might be displayed in him’ (verse 3). Paul makes similar claims in 2 Corinthians 12 where he boasts in the ‘weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and calamities’ he experiences, as ‘when I am weak, then I am strong’ (verse 10). The body of the apostle becomes a site where the conflict between death and life is manifest and union with Christ is experienced in both respects—in our suffering and mortality we participate in the death of Christ and, in our spiritual enlivening, we exhibit the firstfruits of Christ’s resurrection life within us. Death will one day be swallowed up in victory and our mortality swallowed up by life (1 Corinthians 15:54; 2 Corinthians 5:4). 2 Corinthians 4:7-10—
But we have this treasure in jars of clay, to show that the surpassing power belongs to God and not to us. We are afflicted in every way, but not crushed; perplexed, but not driven to despair; persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed; always carrying in the body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be manifested in our bodies.
In his healing ministry, Jesus gave foretastes of the comprehensive healing that awaits us all, a healing that will enliven bodies, unite spiritual with renewed corporeal faculties, restore the body as a site of communion with God, deliver us from the fear of death that holds us in bondage, and overcome the alienation and pain that currently afflict us. Death and its indignities are still known in our bodies and, while many may experience healing in part from its afflictions in this age, Christ’s redemption is chiefly known as we look to him as our life. He is the One who has defanged the great adversary of death, so that we might pass through its dread threshold into the joy of life eternal.
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