NOTES for Mat 9:18-38

Every time a healing takes place in the Gospel, a miracle occurs. It is not merely a miracle of a medical or psychological nature; rather, it is a miracle of revelation about God, showing that He is not as we imagined Him. In nearly all the healings described, Christ truly acts by destroying existing religious notions: He touches the uncleanness of illness and death, He accepts outcasts and the disabled, and He makes not a person's righteousness but their faith the condition for the miracle... Therefore Jesus' Good News concerns not only what God does, healing, forgiving, and raising the dead, but, more importantly, what He is like. For on the path of faith and hope in God, what most often stands in our way are our distorted notions about Him: that He will not rummage in our earthly filth, that He will not want to deal with people like us, and that if He does, He will act according to our ideas of good and evil. Yet we have Good News: there is hope that He is different.