NOTES for Mat 8:1-17
In the Gospel we can find many accounts of miraculous healings and of demons being cast out from different people. These miracles are usually called “signs,” meaning that they serve to reveal something. In today's accounts, for example, the miracles are meant to illustrate the fulfillment of Isaiah's prophecy about the coming of the Messiah, who was to “take our infirmities and bear our diseases.” For the first readers of the Gospel, who knew these prophecies by heart, the allusion was entirely clear: these healings are only the beginning of the work of saving the world that Christ accomplishes in history through His voluntary suffering (Isaiah 53). Thus the context of this prophecy—and Matthew's reference to it—leads us beyond the particular miracle, which has relatively little to do with us personally, and brings us into the history of the world's salvation. This history includes all the events in which the prophecy has been fulfilled, as well as those moments in our own life when Christ saved our life, healed our illness, and overcame evil around us or within us.