Jesus was never someone who needed to prove Himself to anyone, but there were a few times He did things to demonstrate who He was and what He was about. Jesus was not going to merely proclaim some hard truths and hard messages. He was going to prove that He was the one who could call those truths, and He backed them with authority.
There are two miracles that happen back-to-back in the Gospels: the healing of a leper and the healing of a paralytic. In the case of the leper, Jesus touched him (something that a leper would never feel again post-diagnosis: human touch) and healed him but told him not to tell anyone because He did not want the attention. But right after that, Jesus was teaching, and a crowd began to gather. They must have heard about Jesus doing miracles either at the wedding at Cana, seeing Jesus heal the leper, or seeing one of Jesus’ general crowd healings because they brought a friend who was a paralytic. The crowd was too thick to get through, though the crowd here may have only been 50-100 people; when surrounding a small home in those days, that can be a lot very quickly. So they went up to the roof, where there would be an opening, made space to lower the man down, and called upon Jesus to heal him.
During the teaching, some Pharisees were there, and they were wondering who this Jesus was, what teacher He had trained under, and how He got His authority to teach. Jesus saw this moment as an opportunity to prove a point. He was going to prove to the Pharisees that He had far more than the authority to teach, and not just any rabbi’s authority either. So He told the man, “Your sins are forgiven.” Jesus was asked to heal this man, and instead, Jesus says, “Your sins are forgiven.” Why? Jesus was proving He was much more than a healer and a preacher. He was declaring Himself to be on the same authority and tier as God the Father. The Pharisees knew He was claiming that, and knowing that was what they were thinking, He called them out. To nail it even further, He gave them another task that was impossible for a man to do: to make a lame man walk. So, without any show, without any psychosomatics or emotional hyping, Jesus simply said, “Get up and walk.” And the man was able to do so. Miracles had not been seen in Israel since Elisha passed 800 years earlier, and Jesus did one not because He was asked for mercy but primarily just to prove a point.
Jesus did the same thing with a man with a paralyzed, withered hand, and on the Sabbath day no less. He walked into the synagogue while teaching was going on and quietly whispered to the man about getting healed, and the Pharisees on staff that day got offended that Jesus would dare heal on the Sabbath. So Jesus proved a point that to give mercy on the Sabbath was greater than keeping the Sabbath by their standards. The Sabbath laws never forbade doing necessary jobs and tasks. Feeding animals needed to happen every day, and getting animals out of a ditch was a task of necessity that no one would object to being done. But help a person on a Sabbath? Help an old lady cross the street from church? You must go to Hell for that sin. It’s that pathetic.
Jesus also did it for the blind man in John 9, who soon got excommunicated just for saying Jesus healed and telling the Pharisees didn’t know what they were talking about. He only knew he had been healed, and only God could have done that. Jesus healed him in part to prove that man’s ailments, while a result of the curse of sin, are not necessarily a result of any person’s actions. Some things like Fetal Alcohol Syndrome are definitely cases where the person’s mental capacity is permanently damaged by the mother’s drinking. But blindness, lameness, deafness, and many other things are not necessarily because they sinned or because their parents sinned. It can also be allowed so that God could receive glory.
My brother had a dramatic hearing loss in his toddler years and could not hear consonants. A church family prayed over him in secret, and he was miraculously healed. The hearing loss was not a punishment for sin; it was something God allowed, and it was for His glory. The same can be said for a young man in my church who has been wheelchair-bound for his whole life. There was no sin for which that was a judgment. Sin nature in general may be partly to blame, but God allowed it and has allowed it for a reason, which we don’t know fully right now.
Jesus was not a for-show person. He was never going to perform a miracle on a whim unless He was in control of the situation. If the Pharisees were not there at the home for the paralytic, Jesus likely still would have healed him, same with the man with the withered hand and the blind man. Jesus took advantage of each of these situations to prove a point about who He was, what authority He held, and why He came to do what He did. It was never an “I told you so” moment, nor was it a “come look at me” show-off moment. It was to prove that He was the Messiah, but it was also to begin antagonizing the Pharisees so they would be riled up to the point of calling for His death. The Pharisees did not like that because they knew if the Messiah did come, their jobs would no longer be needed. (This reminds me of cancer research groups who don’t want cancer cures being found because that would kill their income instead of going on to the next thing.)
Now let me be clear: Jesus is not anti-religion. He was against the Pharisees’ abuse of the system and their hypocrisy for their own gain. He never once chided the Pharisees over doctrine. But He was going to leave them no room to consider Him as just a street preacher with a Messiah complex. He was going to make sure they knew He knew and believed Himself to be the Messiah, and He proved it by performing miracles that had never been done before.
Jesus proved He had the authority to teach, the authority to heal, and the authority to forgive sins. Over the next few weeks, we’ll look at how that authority was showcased as we look at Jesus’ most well-known sermon and the understanding of authority and faith that left Jesus astonished. And that’s just the beginning of Jesus’ ministry; there’s much more to discuss as the series progresses.
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