raise us up, body and soul, to the fullness of divine life in communion with God and all the redeemed forever. The body therefore has inestimable significance in God’s plan. It will one day be radiant with divine life (1 Cor 15:42–49). Jesus’ healings of bodily sickness and infirmity are a foreshadowing of the glorious destiny of the human body.
Twenty-one percent of the Gospel accounts of Jesus’ public ministry is devoted to reports of his physical healings and exorcisms — a striking percentage when one considers the length and importance of his teachings, not to mention other miracles such as the multiplication of loaves and the calming of the storm. Clearly, Jesus’ healings are not a minor element or peripheral to his real purpose.
When the Synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark, and Luke) summarize Jesus’ activity during his public ministry, they invariably mention healings.
He went about all Galilee, teaching in their synagogues and preaching the gospel of the kingdom and healing every disease and every infirmity among the people. (Matt 4:23)
He healed many who were sick with various diseases, and cast out many demons. (Mark 1:34)
A great multitude of people from all Judea and Jerusalem and the seacoast of Tyre and Sidon … came to hear him and to be healed of their diseases; and those who were troubled with unclean spirits were cured. And all the crowd sought to touch him, for power came forth from him and healed them all. (Luke 6:17–19)
Why such an emphasis on healing? The explanation is provided by Jesus himself in his first sermon, delivered in his hometown of Nazareth soon after his baptism (Luke 4:16–21). The Gospel of Luke highlights this sermon as providing the interpretive key to Jesus’ whole mission:
He came to Nazareth, where he had been brought up; and he went to the synagogue, as was his custom, on the sabbath day. And he stood up to read; and there was given to him the book of the prophet Isaiah. He opened the book and found the place where it was written,
“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,
because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives
and recovering of sight to the blind,
to set at liberty those who are oppressed,
to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord.”
And he closed the book, and gave it back to the attendant, and sat down; and the eyes of all in the synagogue were fixed on him. And he began to say to them, “Today this Scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.”
The sense of anticipation in this scene is palpable. The synagogue attendees seem aware that Jesus is about to say something of immense significance, and indeed he does. Having read from Isaiah 61, a passage that foretells the Messiah, the long-promised and long-awaited deliverer of Israel, Jesus announces that the promise 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
