[ p. 59 ]
WHEN after many days he re-entered Capernaum, the news that he was in the house was quickly spread abroad, and a crowd gathered at the house, so that it was impossible to keep clear a passage to the door. While Jesus was speaking the word of the Kingdom, there appeared a number of men bringing to him a palsied man on a stretcher borne by four bearers. When they found they could not carry their burden into the house to him, because of the press of the people, they climbed on top of the house and dismantled the roof above where he was, and, having made a hole, lowered through it the stretcher with the palsied man upon it.
Jesus, seeing their faith, said to the palsied man:
“My son, your sins are forgiven.”
Among those who were sitting within the house, listening to Jesus, were certain Scribes. When they heard what he said to the palsied man, they murmured in their hearts : “Why does this man say [ p. 60 ] such things? He is blaspheming. Who can forgive sins save One?”
Immediately Jesus knew in his spirit that they were murmuring thus within themselves, and he said to them :
Why do you murmur thus in your hearts? For which is really easier: to say ‘Your sins are forgiven, ’ or to say, “Rise, pick up your stretcher, and walk about? But in order that you may learn that a man has power to forgive sins on earth ———”
He stopped, then turned to the palsied man :
“I say to you, pick up your stretcher, and go to your own house.”
The man rose up, and picked up his stretcher, and walked out before them all.
They were astonished, and praised God and said, “We never saw anything like this.”
That this thing happened, and that it happened in the way that Mark recorded it, we d,o not doubt. Nor is there cause to attempt “an explanation” of it. It is impossible to set limits to the power of faith where there is an active human will to collaborate. We moderns can with difficulty conceive a world wherein faith is active. But faith was one of the prime elements in the world in which Jesus [ p. 61 ] lived. Between that world and ours is all the vast difference which lies between a world which expects “miracles” and a world which does not. And nothing seems to be more certain than that within certain realms true and indubitable expectation can produce a “miracle.”
The history of Jesus of Nazareth is built upon a prodigious act of faith which can never be repeated. Jesus believed himself to be the son of God. Such a belief is scarcely imaginable by our minds ; yet, by an effort, we can imagine it. He believed, moreover, that having come to the knowledge that he was a son of God, it was impossible for him to do anything save the will of his Father. Whatever Jesus willed, God willed. That this belief gave him a scarcely conceivable sense of power and certainty, if we desire to conceive it and we must make the effort, in order to understand him—we must take these two -certain things into our reckoning: that he built his whole life upon this belief, and that his life changed the history of the world. After Jesus lived and died in it, the world was never the same again. A new and unknown spiritual energy entered into the process of human life. It is not exhausted; so far as one can see [ p. 62 ] it never will be exhausted; and we, for our part, believe it is only now entering upon a phase of plenary power. Only when the certainty that Jesus was but a man is freely and fully acknowledged will the full strength of his energy of soul be liberated for mankind.
But let that be. We are concerned with his reality, not with our dreams. This man believed, it was a noonday certainty for him, that what he willed as God’s son, God also willed. But God did not will “miracles.” That is certain. No one who has eyes to read the meanings of the Temptation in the Wilderness, which is Jesus’ own account of his final passing into secure and unshakable knowledge of his immediate relation to God, can doubt that the victory was won by Jesus’ profound realization that it was contrary to the will of God that he should work signs and wonders. To prove that he was what he was, by performing prodigies, this was treachery and blasphemy. “Get thee behind me, Satan.”
It is not, therefore, by any rationalistic assumptions, that we reject prodigies from the historical story of Jesus. Jesus, and God himself, through his son, had rejected them beforehand. He must [ p. 63 ] not put the Eternal to the proof. Therefore, there are no prodigies in the story of Jesus. It is true that there could not be. But to regard his history thus is to be condemned never to see it for what it was. Jesus believed that he could work prodigies ; he believed that he could have convinced men of the truth of his message by signs and tokens ; but he knew that if he were to do so, he would be betraying God and himself. By working prodigies as God’s son, he would once more sever himself from the Father.
And this is no a priori assertion. It is a certainty that leaps forth to meet the eye in the story of the Temptation in the Wilderness.
It is absolutely confirmed by Jesus’ own words: “This generation seeketh after a sign, and no sign shall be given it,” words that were altered from their true and primitive form in Mark to a prophecy of the very prodigies he was renouncing.
But the healings of the sick and the curing of madmen were “miracles.” We may call them that; but we had better call them healings simply in order that we may have clearly before us the fundamental and absolute distinction between them and the prodigies. There is no need to enter [ p. 64 ] upon a learned and abstruse discussion concerning what is “miracle” and what is not. It is altogether irrelevant to the history of Jesus. The distinction is between a sign or a prodigy, which he must not perform, and a healing which many times he suffered himself, not gladly, to accomplish.
Healings were compelled from him, by acts of faith. When Jesus saw in men who cried to be cured, faith that his word and his touch would cure them, he spoke the word and gave the touch. He could not deny them. He could not deny them, because he loved, and more, because faith was what he was asking from men. Therefore, he suffered men to heal themselves by faith in him. Yet even so, as the story of the palsied man shows plainly, the words he preferred to speak were words of healing of the soul. “Your sins are forgiven.” The word of bodily healing was only wrung from him by the protests of the Scribes. He knew how easily, how inevitably, these words of his would cause him to be regarded as a worker of prodigies ; and how fatally his work would be distorted and encumbered. He trod the dangerous path warily. He pacified overwrought minds, he suffered himself [ p. 65 ] to speak the word to those “whose faith had made them whole”; and in more than one crisis when there was no choice for it but to prove the truth of his own spiritual authority he spoke the word of healing before a concourse of people. Where a man’s faith had done the work, there Jesus spoke the word.
These were not prodigies ; neither to Jesus, nor to us, nor to the men of his day. The Gospels tell of many prodigies; but they tell also that after these prodigies had been performed, the religious Jews still asked for a sign, and Jesus still declared that no sign should be given them. It is plain as day that the prodigies were not performed, but invented by a credulous after-generation. And again we need not seek a general definition of prodigy; the sufficient definition arises clearly from the story of Jesus himself. A prodigy was some strange and extraordinary happening that should compel men to believe in him and his message. Jesus performed no sign that could compel men to believe in him. We know that he could not But that is not very important What is important is that he would not.