NOTES for Luk 9:1-2
Sending His disciples to preach, Jesus gives them two assignments: to bear witness to the Kingdom that has drawn near, and to heal the sick. It would seem that these are two different tasks, but that is only how it appears at first glance.
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 about the healings performed both by Jesus and by His disciples precisely as manifestations of the Kingdom. Of course, one can deliver a person from illness by entirely natural means. Here it is no longer essential whether ordinary medicine is meant or so-called alternative medicine: even in the second case, no miracles in the strict sense actually occur; rather, certain mechanisms deeply hidden in human nature and usually not involved, at least in the fallen state, are being engaged.
A true miracle begins where God acts, and not the possibilities hidden in human nature. But God's action too can be different, and here much 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. It often happens that God heals a person, and then the person falls ill again, often with the very same illness. Usually such a situation is connected with the fact that, receiving healing as a gift from God, the one healed does not understand it as a spiritual advance for solving his spiritual problems and carrying out the spiritual tasks before him.
But when witness to the Kingdom is involved, everything is somewhat different. It is no accident that near Jesus some are healed and others are not, that in some places He manifests the power of the Kingdom and in others, because of the unbelief and rejection of the local inhabitants, He does not. Here healing, deliverance from illness, becomes the consequence of a person's entering the Kingdom, beginning to live its life; and illness and death are incompatible with the life of the Kingdom. But in order to be freed from them, one must contain the life of the Kingdom in all the fullness possible for that specific person and live by it alone.
Of course, no one can guarantee to a person who has once come into contact with the Kingdom that everything will be exactly so for him. But in any case, healing at 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 that is why Jesus entrusts His disciples with bearing witness to the Kingdom precisely through healings, in the form most obvious to the inhabitants of the fallen world.