And as Many as Touched Him
And as many as touched him were made well. (Mark 6:56b)
There is to Mark’s gospel an element that enjoins us to reach out to Jesus, for all those who do find in him more than they could have hoped for.
Often in reading the Bible, and especially is this true in the gospels, we come to moments that are so holy that the writers simply pause, where even the divinely inspired words of the Spirit seem to be inadequate to express to our minds all that transpired. Here is such a place.
Mark is a fast-moving story, not just the briefest of the four gospels, but the one given less to introspection and reflection. Concise and almost terse, it compacts the life of Christ into as few words as possible, presenting him as the Man of Action. But even in Mark comes moments when the reader must stop and meditate, and it seemed that Mark did so as well.
Mark has been seen through the centuries somewhat as Peter’s gospel that came second-handed through John Mark, who had been Peter’s companion for several years. Mark was written around 66–70 A.D., and if we can believe tradition, Peter would have just recently died by martyrdom at its writing. Mark would have heard Peter reminisce about the life of Christ, his teachings, his miracles, and his impact upon lives.
They were evangelists, spreading the gospel of Christ to Jews and Gentiles in the Mediterranean world. How often Peter must have stopped at these recollections, as the Spirit refreshed his memory, spoke of them to Mark, told him about the people who were sick with all kinds of illnesses coming to Jesus to be healed. What a sight that must have been! The lame, the blind, the leper, the deaf, the sick with all kinds of diseases, making their way to Christ, and Christ freely and graciously dispensing wholeness to the multitudes. Each person, each family had a story to tell at how sickness had affected them, what harm it had done, how they had suffered. And Christ healed them all. The Twelve had marveled at his mastery of the wind and the waves (Mark 6:51), but here we marvel at his mastery over disease, and not only disease but over sin and everything that limits human life.
The Messiah who rises above the misery of the world. For centuries philosophers and idealists have sought to find balance between what is good in man and what is evil. There have been thousands of solutions offered for the human condition — some better than others, some worse than others. But we find in Christ what and who our hearts truly long for.
The apostles had seen this happen in their day on a spiritual level — people from all walks of life coming to Jesus, with hurts and pains, emotional burdens, laden with sins and failures, labeled as failures by others, or blinded by their pride and beauty, but in some way or another lame and weak. It makes no sense to us that this should be so, that in one Person, a Galilean Jew who was born over 2,000 years ago, should be wholeness for everyone. But whether it makes sense or not, it is so.
He is the One who came from God, appointed by the divine plan of the Father, to bear the sins of the world, and to bring salvation and wholeness to the world. He is the One of whom the Spirit bears witness in the world. Wherever he is proclaimed, God shows up in his Spirit to bring conviction and assurance to human hearts. He is the One who rises above the misery of the world because he alone is authorized from God to do so.
The wholeness that Christ brings: we should read the words “made well” as “made whole,” for this is the meaning of the original Greek. Healing in both the Old Testament and the New Testament carried the idea of wholeness — not just to be healed of one condition of sickness while we tolerate others, but to be made perfectly whole.
Christ offers not only forgiveness for sins but wholeness for life. He fits us for eternity. Here is a place that all who have a general belief in God and in heaven commonly show the fact that they have not thought out what eternity must be. Heaven must be more than just a nice place, more than just a perfect place. We must be changed as well in entering in. We humans have already ruined one paradise. What would keep us from ruining another?
Just as Christ healed the bodies of people on earth, so Christ completely will heal the soul in eternity. Christ is the one who “will also confirm you to the end, that you may be blameless in the day of our Lord Jesus Christ. God is faithful…” (1 Cor 1:8–9).
All who turn to Christ in faith — believing in him, believing that he died and rose again, confessing their sins — find that he cleanses and restores. He makes us new.
