The Healings

Words to Know

Unclean — not dirty. A legal status that decided where you were allowed to go and who could touch you.

Leprosy — in the Bible, a word covering many skin conditions, most of them not the modern disease.

Mechanism — how something works. I can describe what happened. I cannot tell you how.

I am not going to use the word “miracle.”

It is not a word I ever used. It comes out of an argument that started long after I died.

The phrase laws of nature, meaning a fixed set of rules the whole universe runs on, belongs to Europe in the sixteen hundreds. And the definition of a miracle that you are carrying around in your head — a violation of the laws of nature — was put into those exact words by a Scottish philosopher named David Hume, in an essay published in 1748. ¹

So the fight you think you are in is about three hundred years old. Nobody in my village had a notion of laws of nature, and nobody there was arguing about whether they could be broken.

So put the word down. Look at what happened.

Go deeperWhy the word miracle starts a fight

When you say miracle, you have already stepped into somebody else’s fight, with two sides and a scoreboard, and you have to pick one before you have looked at anything.

That I was known as a healer is not in dispute.

It is one of the best-attested things about me. It is in all four accounts. It is also in two sources that had no reason to be kind to me. Josephus, writing in Rome about AD 93, calls me a doer of startling deeds, though Christian hands later added lines to that paragraph. ² The Talmud, written down centuries later and hostile on purpose, charges me with sorcery, which concedes that something happened. ³ Neither proves anything I did. What they show is two sets of people with no motive to help me, agreeing that there were deeds to argue about.

And look at what my own opponents said. They did not say nothing happened. They said I was doing it by the power of the devil (Mark 3:22). That is an argument about where the power came from. It is not a denial.

Go deeperThe two hostile sources and what is wrong with each

Neither source is clean, and you deserve to know why. Josephus, the Jewish historian from Lesson 6, mentions me in a short paragraph and calls me a doer of startling deeds (Antiquities 18.63); no Jewish historian would have written some of the lines that now surround that sentence, which is how scholars spot the later additions and reconstruct the original notice underneath them. The Talmud is the collected Jewish legal tradition, and its passage charges me with sorcery and with leading Israel astray (b. Sanhedrin 43a). That is not a witness to what happened; it is a witness to what the accusation was. When the people who most wanted to discredit me reached for their best attack, the attack still admitted the event.

You need to know what was actually wrong with these people.

In my country, a sick person was not just somebody who felt unwell. Certain conditions made you unclean. Unclean is not a word about dirt. It is a word about where you are allowed to stand.

Read the law as it was written. A man with a skin disease, the thing your Bible may call leprosy, had to wear torn clothes, leave his hair a mess, cover his mouth, and call out unclean, unclean as he walked. He lived alone, outside the camp (Leviticus 13:45–46). He lived away from his wife, his children, his work, his table, and the worship of his own people.

Other conditions kept you out of the Temple and away from your family’s food, and anyone who touched you, or sat where you had sat, became unclean with you (Leviticus 15). And you could not declare yourself clean again. Only a priest could do that, and then came days of washing, shaving, and offerings (Leviticus 14:1–20).

It was not a feeling. It was an address, a diet, an arrangement in your own house, and a fee at the end. Ten years of that, and you start to believe it is what you are rather than what happened to you.

Go deeperWhat unclean cost, and for how long

The disease was half of it. The other half was that nobody came near you: nobody handed you anything, nobody ate with you, nobody hugged you at a funeral, and children were pulled away from you in the road.

The clock on it depended on what you had. A discharge of blood made you unclean as long as the flow lasted, then seven more days, and then you brought two birds to a priest as an offering (Leviticus 15:28–30). A skin disease was worse: outside the settlement for as long as it lasted (Leviticus 13:45–46), and inside your own house, people either kept their distance from you or joined you in the status.

The way back took longer than most people realize. The washing, shaving and offerings ran for eight days before a person was fully restored (Leviticus 14:1–20).

And the first thing I did was touch them.

In your world, touching a sick person is ordinary kindness. In mine it broke the rules. And the rules ran one way. If you touched an unclean man, he did not become clean. You became unclean. That is why nobody touched them. It was not cruelty. It was the arithmetic everybody had been taught.

A man with a skin disease knelt in front of me. Your own Bible says what happened: moved with compassion, he stretched out his hand and touched him (Mark 1:41).

One honest note. A few old copies of Mark say anger there instead of compassion, which is why some Bibles print indignant, and nobody can settle which one was written first. ⁴ Either way, the hand goes out.

I touched him. No sentence in the whole record tells you more about what I was doing. I could have spoken from where I stood. Instead I put my hand on a man nobody had touched in years.

Go deeperCompassion or anger in Mark 1:41

The manuscripts themselves do not agree on my mood that day. One early Greek copy of Mark, and a few old Latin ones, say anger instead of compassion; the oldest copies we have say compassion, which is why most study Bibles carry a note about it at the bottom of the page. It changes the feeling, not the act. And if it was anger, I am not going to talk you out of it. That arrangement gave plenty of reasons for anger.

If you read only one of these, read the woman in the crowd.

Everything is in it (Mark 5:25–34).

A woman had been bleeding for twelve years. Under the law, a discharge of blood made her unclean for as long as it lasted, and passed that status to her bed, her seat, and anybody who touched either one (Leviticus 15:25–27). So she went twelve years without being touched.

And here is the line your church skips: she had spent everything she had on doctors, suffered a lot under them, and gotten worse instead of better. That is in the earliest account. It is about money. It is there on purpose.

She comes up behind me in a crowd, behind because she is not supposed to be in that crowd at all, and touches the edge of my clothes. The bleeding stops.

Now watch what I do next.

She could have slipped away. Instead I stopped the whole procession and asked who touched me. I kept looking until she came forward, frightened, and said it out loud in front of everyone.

Why would I do that to a terrified woman? Because she could have gone home healed and still been the woman nobody spoke to. What she needed was for the village to hear it.

And the last word I said to her was daughter.

Go deeperHer household costs, and my friends' reaction

Even inside her own house, twelve years meant everyone arranging themselves around her, and paying doctors until the money simply ran out. When I stopped the procession to ask who had touched me, my own friends told me that was a ridiculous question to ask in a crowd that size.

I asked a blind man by the road the same kind of thing: what do you want me to do for you? (Mark 10:51). Everybody could see what he wanted. But nobody had asked him anything in years. Some of what I did was not power at all. Some of it was plain attention that nobody else was willing to give.

Go deeperHow he'd been treated, before I asked

He had been begging by that road, and people kept telling him to be quiet. He would not be quiet, so I waved him over to where I stood. Until I came along, he had been discussed, stepped over, tossed a coin, and shushed, but never asked. When I finally did ask, he answered for himself, out loud, in front of the very people who had been telling him to hush.

I cannot tell you the mechanism, and I am not going to pretend to.

Some of what happened is what happens to a person when the exile ends. And some of it, the people involved experienced as more than that. I will not talk them out of it. What I will not do is hand you a certainty here that I refused you everywhere else in this book.

But I will settle three things, because they are being used against you.

One: I never charged. Not once. When I sent my followers out to do the same work, the instruction was: you received without payment; give without payment (Matthew 10:8). In a country where that woman had already been drained dry by professionals, that was most of the point.

Two: I told people to keep quiet about it (Mark 1:44, Mark 5:43, Mark 7:36). Whatever I was doing, I was not building an audience with it. And read the second half of Mark 1:44: go, show yourself to the priest, and offer for your cleansing what Moses commanded. I could stop a man being sick. I could not sign the paper. Only a priest could put him officially back in the room, so I sent him to get it done.

Three: I said, more than once, your faith has made you well.

You have heard that sentence used to explain why somebody was not healed: that they did not believe hard enough. Here is every place I say it: Mark 5:34. Mark 10:52. Matthew 9:22. Luke 8:48. Luke 17:19. Luke 18:42. Luke 7:50. Every single time, the healing has already happened. It is said afterward. It is praise, not a condition. In Luke 7:50 I say it to a woman who had never been ill at all.

It was never a diagnosis, and it was never an explanation for failure.

Go deeperMore on the three things

The first point goes further than fees. When I sent my followers out, they carried no bread, no bag and no money in their belts (Mark 6:8).

The second point is the exact reverse of every healing ministry you have ever seen. The verse most people cut in half opens with a flat command to say nothing to anyone, before it ever gets to the priest.

The third point matters because I have watched that sentence said to dying women by people who thought they were helping. What it actually means is that I am telling a frightened person the nerve it took was hers. The woman in Luke 7:50 is worth a second look: she had never been ill, and she had a reputation the room had already dismissed. The sentence was never meant for somebody who is still sick.

There is one hard verse, and I will give you all of it.

About my own hometown, the earliest gospel says: he could do no deed of power there, except that he laid his hands on a few sick people and cured them. And he was amazed at their unbelief (Mark 6:5–6).

Somebody will tell you that proves the opposite of what I just said: that it failed because the town did not believe. That is a fair thing to raise. But notice that what the verse reports is that I could not, and the unbelief is the writer’s explanation, reached for afterward. And even his reason blames a whole town’s mood, not one sick person’s faith. Nobody in the Bible is told they stayed sick because they did not believe hard enough. That sentence was added later, by people standing next to hospital beds.

And now the part that is yours.

Look again at what actually happened. Somebody was outside. Somebody was untouched. Somebody had been talked over so long they stopped expecting a question. Somebody had spent everything on people who did not help.

And what I did was go to them, put a hand on them, ask what they wanted, say their name where it could be heard, and put them back in the room. Nearly all of that is available to you this week, at no cost, with no power you do not already have.

In your world, putting your hands on a stranger is not a simple thing, and I am not telling you to. But there is somebody near you that people have quietly agreed to leave outside. You know who.

Be seen with them in daylight, where it costs you something. Say their name in rooms they are not in. Ask them what they actually want, instead of deciding for them.

That was the method. It was never a power. It was a willingness to be counted with the wrong person in public.

Go deeperWhat touching someone actually cost

You have been taught that the healings are the part of the story you can only stand and watch. But the touch came first, and I cannot tell you how much of the rest followed from it. One honest note about the touching: in my country, a hand on a person was a public act done in front of witnesses, and it cost the man who did it. There is always a who.

Check It Yourself

Look up: Mark 5:25–34, the woman in the crowd.

You will find: that she had spent everything she had on doctors and gotten worse — and that the last word I say to her is daughter.

Then look up: Mark 6:5. Read it twice.

The Short Version

• Even hostile sources agree I was known as a healer. The argument was over the source of the power.
• Sickness in my country also meant exile — nobody touched you, sometimes for years.
• The first thing I did was touch people, which broke the rules and cost me something.
• “Your faith has made you well” was always said to somebody already healed. It was praise, never blame.

Think About It

1. Who is the person in your town that everyone has quietly agreed to leave outside?
2. Why would a ministry want you to believe healing depends on how hard you believe?