NOTES for Mar 7:31-37

The impression made on the people by Jesus' healings was unanimous: ‘Everything He does is good.’ What lies behind this ‘good’? The Greek word has many meanings, but Jesus Himself and the people around Him were unlikely to have been speaking Greek. The Jewish crowds in Palestine at that time preferred Aramaic to Greek, while Hebrew, the language of the sacred books, ‘the Torah and the Prophets’, still held undisputed sway in the synagogues. In Hebrew, as in Aramaic, ‘good’ is no less rich in meaning than in Greek: everything created by God is described as ‘good’, and the world He created is ‘wholly good’, or, in the Russian Synodal translation, ‘very good’. And probably everything Jesus does is ‘good’ in just this same sense. For He does not treat; He heals. He does not restore impaired bodily functions; He brings those He heals into the fullness of life in which there is, and can be, no place for any disorder or abnormality. He carries with Him and within Him the fullness of the Kingdom, which is incompatible with both illness and death. And the world around Him becomes as it was before the Fall, when sin and evil did not yet rule over it. Everyone near Him who was able to trust Him and share in this perfect world, to share in the Kingdom, found themselves where there is life, but neither illness nor death. Where everything is ‘wholly good’. And the crowd around Him, perhaps without fully understanding what was happening, sensed this new quality of creation, expressing what they felt with an old word borrowed from the Torah. A word they used in the very sense the sacred writer had given it. And they followed the mysterious Miracle-worker, without fully understanding whom they were following.