Authority, Healing and Suffering

Matthew 8:14-17

And when Jesus entered Peter's house, he saw his mother-in-law lying sick with a fever. He touched her hand, and the fever left her, and she rose and began to serve him. That evening they brought to him many who were oppressed by demons, and he cast out the spirits with a word and healed all who were sick. This was to fulfill what was spoken by the prophet Isaiah: “He took our illnesses and bore our diseases.”

Tom Wright, Matthew for Everyone (Vol. 1)

[I]n this sequence we start to see . . . a more rounded view of this authority. Jesus doesn’t have, as it were, absolute power for its own sake. He has authority in order to be the healer. And he is the healer by taking the sickness and pain of all the world on to himself. In verse 17 Matthew quotes from Isaiah 53.4, a passage more often associated in Christian thinking with the meaning of Jesus’ death, bearing our griefs and sorrows on the cross; but for Matthew there is no sharp line between the healing Jesus offered during his life and the healing for sin and death which he offered through his own suffering. The one leads naturally to the other.

. . . authority through healing, healing through suffering. Authority and suffering are strangely concentrated in this one man, who nobody at this stage quite understood, but who everyone found compelling (86-88).

A. Orendorff

Without the cross, Matthew 8:17 is simply incomprehensible. How, we ought to ask, is Jesus’ healings and exorcisms evidence that he “took” our illnesses and “bore” our diseases? Certainly there is power in this story, but substitution . . . where is there substitution?

It is interesting, as Wright points out, to note that for Matthew, no sharp distinction between Jesus as a physical healer and Jesus as a spiritual healer exists. The two flow into one another. They blur and blend so intimately that neither can stand apart from the other. What we see here isn’t Jesus just flexing his “god-muscles” (so to speak); rather, we are given a foretaste, an anticipation, of what Jesus will do for all of us upon the cross. Taking up our illnesses; bearing our diseases . . . absorbing our sin. “Authority through healing, healing through suffering.”