Healing and the Kingdom

Matthew 4:23

And he went throughout all Galilee, teaching in their synagogues and proclaiming the gospel of the kingdom and healing every disease and every affliction among the people.

Tom Wright, Matthew for Everyone (Vol. 1)

But Jesus was never simply a healer pure and simple, vital though that was as part of his work. For him, the healings were sings of the new thing that God was doing through him. God’s kingdom—God’s sovereign, saving rule—as at last being unleashed upon Israel and the world through him (33-4).

N. T. Wright, Simply Christian

[Jesus’] healing was a dramatic sign of the message itself. God, the world’s creator, was at work through him, to do what he had promised, to open blind eyes and deaf ears, to rescue people, to turn everything right side up (101-2).

A. Orendorff

Jesus’ healings, coupled with the proclamation that God’s kingdom had arrived, are not ends in and of themselves. Rather, they are sign-posts, powerful symbols that display what life under God’s coming reign will look like. “In my kingdom,” Jesus is in effect saying, “there is no disease, no affliction, no oppression, no death.” Everything that once marked the world as it lay under the power of sin is now being undone. Everything that once made sense is now being overthrown. Everything that once operated on the principle of death and decay is now being. Here, in this kingdom, everything (and everyone) is made new.