NOTES for Mat 4:18-23
It is clear that Jesus’ principal work during His earthly ministry was to bear witness to the Kingdom. Miracles and healings are, in essence, only proof that it is near, that it is already entering our world and has entered so fully that everyone can feel its power. This, in fact, is the meaning of the good news that the Saviour brought into the world: He is the Messiah, He has come into the world and brought with Him the very messianic Kingdom of which the prophets spoke. The meaning of Christianity is to accept this Kingdom and to live in it. Of course, for this to become possible, one must also accept the One who brought the Kingdom into the world, trusting Him completely and following Him, as the apostles whom He called followed Him. Miracles and healings are a visible witness to what the Kingdom is and what it is like. A miracle always presupposes the incursion into our world of the laws of another world which, for some reason, has suddenly drawn near. In the same way, when the Kingdom draws near, it enters our world and brings its own laws into it. Those laws completely exclude illness and death, just as they exclude all the evil and sin in which the world lies. That is why healings and resurrections became the principal events accompanying the Saviour’s earthly path: they became signs of the approaching Kingdom. Of course, it was impossible to transform completely the nature of a person who still remained part of the untransformed world. But it was quite possible to give everyone who touched the Kingdom all the fullness of life available within this untransformed world. The sick recovered, and those who had died prematurely returned to life so that they could exhaust all its fullness available to them on earth, a fullness that had remained unfulfilled because of the evil in which the fallen world lies. Everyone who met Jesus on His way was divided into those who were ready to live life to the full and those who rejected that life together with the One who brought it into the world. Thus the path of the Kingdom became for the Saviour the way of the Cross, leading Him through death into the life that He left to the world.