Main news for 19 August 2017

Sending His disciples out to preach, Jesus gives them two commissions: to bear witness to the Kingdom that has drawn near, and to heal the sick. At first glance these seem like two different tasks, but that is only how it appears.

Of course, if the healings mentioned in the Gospels were simply something like supernatural medicine, one could say that different things are involved, that witness to the Kingdom and healings are indeed two different tasks. But the evangelists speak of the healings performed both by Jesus and by His disciples precisely as manifestations of the Kingdom. Of course, a person can be delivered from illness by purely natural means. Here it is no longer essential whether we are speaking of ordinary medicine or so-called alternative medicine: even in the second case, no miracles in the strict sense actually take place; rather, certain mechanisms are engaged that are deeply hidden in human nature and usually, at least in its fallen state, unused.

A true miracle begins where God acts, not where hidden possibilities of human nature act. But God's action too can be different, and much here depends on the measure of a person's involvement in His action and on the fullness of a person's awareness of God's plan for him. After all, it often happens that God heals a person, and then the person becomes ill again, often with the very same illness. Usually such a situation is connected with the fact that, while accepting healing as a gift from God, the healed person does not understand it as a spiritual advance for solving his spiritual problems and fulfilling the spiritual tasks before him.

But when the matter concerns witness to the Kingdom, everything is somewhat different. It is no accident that near Jesus one person is healed and another is not, that in one place He manifests the power of the Kingdom and in another, because of the unbelief and rejection of the local inhabitants, He does not. Here healing, deliverance from illnesses, becomes the consequence of a person's entering the Kingdom and beginning to live its life; and with the life of the Kingdom, illness and death are incompatible. But to be delivered from them, the life of the Kingdom must be received in all the fullness possible for a particular person, and one must live by it alone.

Of course, no one can guarantee that everything will be exactly so for a person who has once come into contact with the Kingdom. But in any case, healing through contact with the Kingdom opens to a person that fullness of life which, if he is persistent and consistent, he will be able to acquire and live by. Such experience was the best witness to the Kingdom, and therefore Jesus commands His disciples to bear witness to the Kingdom precisely through healings, in the form most evident to the inhabitants of the fallen world.