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Chapter Two

The Kingdom Is at Hand

Surely he has borne our infirmities and carried our diseases; yet we accounted him stricken, struck down by God, and afflicted. But he was wounded for our transgressions, crushed for our iniquities; upon him was the punishment that made us whole, and by his bruises we are healed.

— Isaiah 53:4–5

In the ancient world, leprosy was a deadly and terrifying disease. Besides the disfiguring sores, the oozing pus, and the shame of being considered accursed by God, lepers were social outcasts. They were required by the law of Moses to live apart from human society, and wherever they went they had to rend their garments and shout, “Unclean, unclean” (Lev 13:45). Because their condition caused ritual impurity, they were even barred from participating in the high point of Jewish life: the worship of God in his holy temple in Jerusalem.

As Jesus was traveling from village to village in Galilee, a leper approached him with surprising boldness. This man must have heard the rumors about Jesus, the prophet from Nazareth who was healing the sick, and in his desperation he resolved to act. Braving the disapproval and disgust of others, he came and knelt before Jesus and voiced his plea: “If you will, you can make me clean” (Mark 1:40).

Seeing the man’s wretched condition, Jesus was “moved with compassion.” The Greek word means physically churned up or stirred with gut-wrenching emotion. It was the deeply human reaction of the Son of God. Jesus never looked upon afflicted people with detachment or indifference, but always with the empathy that comes from knowing the human condition from within. We can imagine the love in his eyes as he replied, “I do will it. Be made clean.” Does he will to make a man whole, to undo the ravages of the fall? This is what he came for!

According to the law of Moses, any contact with a leper would render a person unclean. The crowd standing nearby must have gasped in astonishment as they watched Jesus deliberately reach out and touch the man. And before their eyes, the leprosy disappeared. The Old Testament rules of ritual purity had been turned on their head! Instead of the unclean contaminating the clean, the clean had triumphed, as was indisputably proven by the fact that the man was no longer a leper. Jesus’ holiness is invincible. No defilement can contaminate him; rather, he removes defilement from whoever approaches him in faith. It is a powerful message for those who feel unworthy even to approach him.

Jesus instructed the healed man to keep quiet about his healing, to show himself to a priest, and to offer the sacrifice prescribed in the law of Moses for the cleansing of skin disease. The prescribed rite was to take two birds, one to be sacrificed and the other, dipped in the blood of the first, to fly away free (Lev 14:3–7). If the man obeyed these instructions, before his eyes was a vivid symbolic image of what Jesus had just done for him. One is sacrificed; another is set free. Although he could not have understood it then, this man had been set free from leprosy at the cost of Christ’s own blood, soon to be shed on the cross.

Unable to contain his joy, the newly healed man began to spread far and wide the news of what Jesus had done for him — that is, he began to evangelize. The Greek text literally says “he began to talk freely about it, and to spread the news” (Mark 1:45), wording that is clearly suggestive of the Christian proclamation of the gospel after Pentecost.

As a result of this undesired publicity, Jesus was now so mobbed by crowds that he could no longer enter a village. Ironically, the Lord had traded places with the leper. The once-outcast man was now free to enter society, and Jesus had become the outcast. This reversal is another sign of the fact that all Jesus’ healings took place at a cost to himself — ultimately, the cost of his own life. The healing of the leper foreshadows the cross, the source from which all Christ’s works of healing flow.

This healing is thus a kind of real-life parable, an image of what Christ has done for us. Who is the leper? I am. We all are. All have been deformed and debilitated by the devastating consequences of sin — spiritually, emotionally, and often physically. We all experience to some degree the inner shame that comes from sin, the alienation from God and others that it causes. God was moved with such compassion for us that he sent his only Son to become man, to take upon himself sin and all its consequences and bear them in his own body on the cross.

Often people in need of healing are troubled by an underlying doubt: “I’m not worthy to be healed.” But whoever has that thought can settle it easily. It is in fact true: in ourselves we are not worthy. “Lord, I am not worthy to have you come under my roof,” as the centurion said to Jesus (Matt 8:8), and we say before receiving him in the Eucharist. But Jesus has made us worthy by shedding his blood for us. As the letter to the Hebrews says, “we have confidence … by the blood of Jesus”; “Let us then with confidence draw near to the throne of grace, that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need” (Heb 10:19; 4:16). As the leper’s confidence in approaching Jesus was richly rewarded, so will ours be. Jesus wants to take our place — to take away our sickness, our shame, our sin — and restore us to the fullness of life. He will even be the outcast if need be.

Anointed by the Spirit to Heal

The cleansing of the leper, near the beginning of Jesus’ public ministry, presaged the prominent role healings would play in his mission. Many people tend to think of healings as secondary to Jesus’ real purpose, to save souls. But the Gospels tell us otherwise. In the biblical understanding, the human person is an inseparable unity of body and soul. Christ came not just to “save souls” but to save human beings — to raise us up, body and soul, to the fullness of divine life in communion with God and all the redeemed forever. The body therefore has inestimable significance in God’s plan. It will one day be radiant with divine life (1 Cor 15:42–49). Jesus’ healings of bodily sickness and infirmity are a foreshadowing of the glorious destiny of the human body.

Twenty-one percent of the Gospel accounts of Jesus’ public ministry is devoted to reports of his physical healings and exorcisms — a striking percentage when one considers the length and importance of his teachings, not to mention other miracles such as the multiplication of loaves and the calming of the storm. Clearly, Jesus’ healings are not a minor element or peripheral to his real purpose.

When the Synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark, and Luke) summarize Jesus’ activity during his public ministry, they invariably mention healings.

He went about all Galilee, teaching in their synagogues and preaching the gospel of the kingdom and healing every disease and every infirmity among the people. (Matt 4:23)

He healed many who were sick with various diseases, and cast out many demons. (Mark 1:34)

A great multitude of people from all Judea and Jerusalem and the seacoast of Tyre and Sidon … came to hear him and to be healed of their diseases; and those who were troubled with unclean spirits were cured. And all the crowd sought to touch him, for power came forth from him and healed them all. (Luke 6:17–19)

Why such an emphasis on healing? The explanation is provided by Jesus himself in his first sermon, delivered in his hometown of Nazareth soon after his baptism (Luke 4:16–21). The Gospel of Luke highlights this sermon as providing the interpretive key to Jesus’ whole mission:

He came to Nazareth, where he had been brought up; and he went to the synagogue, as was his custom, on the sabbath day. And he stood up to read; and there was given to him the book of the prophet Isaiah. He opened the book and found the place where it was written,

“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,

because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor.

He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives

and recovering of sight to the blind,

to set at liberty those who are oppressed,

to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord.”

And he closed the book, and gave it back to the attendant, and sat down; and the eyes of all in the synagogue were fixed on him. And he began to say to them, “Today this Scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.”

The sense of anticipation in this scene is palpable. The synagogue attendees seem aware that Jesus is about to say something of immense significance, and indeed he does. Having read from Isaiah 61, a passage that foretells the Messiah, the long-promised and long-awaited deliverer of Israel, Jesus announces that the promise is fulfilled in him.¹⁷

Jesus chose precisely this passage to define the essence of his mission. “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me” refers to his baptism in the Jordan River, described just a few verses earlier, when the Holy Spirit descended on him in the form of a dove (Luke 3:22). “He has anointed me” means that on that occasion God the Father filled him with the Holy Spirit, empowering him for his mission as Messiah. His very title, Messiah (or in Greek, Christ), means “Anointed One” and derives from that anointing at his baptism.¹⁸ As Tertullian, a third-century Church Father, explains, “He is called Christ because he was anointed by the Father with the Holy Spirit.”¹⁹ Although Jesus was filled with the Holy Spirit from the moment of his conception, it was with the anointing at his baptism that his human nature was fully endowed with divine power for his messianic mission.

The Isaiah passage also describes the mission itself. The purpose of Jesus’ anointing was so that he could “proclaim good news to the poor” — good news that includes not only hopeful words but the very realities that the words announce: freedom, healing, and release from captivity. The “poor” are both the materially poor and all people, spiritually impoverished by their alienation from God. By applying this Scripture text to himself, Jesus is declaring that he has been anointed by the Holy Spirit in order to go into places of deep human bondage, of blindness, sickness, and oppression, to proclaim the good news of the kingdom and visibly manifest it by setting people free. Healing and deliverance are not peripheral but at the very heart of his mission.

In Acts, when the apostle Peter gives a brief summary of Jesus’ public ministry, he too puts healing and deliverance at its center. Peter tells the crowd gathered in the house of Cornelius, “God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Spirit and with power … he went about doing good and healing all that were oppressed by the devil, for God was with him” (Acts 10:38).

The Lord Your Healer

In response to a complaint from the Pharisees, Jesus gave a further insight into his mission. When he sat at table with tax collectors and sinners, people normally excluded from the company of the pious, the Pharisees were scandalized. Jesus replied to their objections with a kind of proverb: “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick” (Luke 5:31). He thereby identified himself as a physician, and his mission as one of healing.

As Jesus’ hearers probably understood, he was hinting at his divine identity, for Scripture speaks of God as the healer of his people. In Exodus, after leading his people out of slavery and across the Red Sea, God had revealed something new about himself. He gave himself a new name: “I am the LORD, your healer” (Exod 15:26). With this title God indicates that healing springs from his very nature. It belongs to his very character to restore his people to wholeness, because he desires the fullness of life for them.

Jesus’ healings, then, reveal him as the divine Healer present in the midst of his people. His whole mission can be described as a work of healing, a restoration of souls and bodies to the fullness of life that God intended. The word “health,” in fact, comes from the same root as “whole” and “holy.” Healing in the fullest sense is becoming whole in spirit, soul, and body. And because God created us for himself, wholeness is nothing other than holiness — a union of love with the all-holy God.

Saving and Healing

In response to another complaint about his fraternizing with sinners — in this case, Zacchaeus the tax collector — Jesus summed up his mission with a succinct phrase: “the Son of Man came to seek and to save the lost” (Luke 19:10). The Greek verb for “save” (sōzō) can also be translated “heal”; it is the same word used in many of his healings.²⁰ The Gospels do not allow us to create an artificial separation between Jesus’ healing of bodies and his saving of souls, as if only the second really counts; rather, they are two dimensions of his one work of healing-salvation.

As Pope Benedict XVI wrote in his book Jesus of Nazareth, “Healing is an essential dimension of the apostolic mission and of Christian faith in general.” It can even be said that Christianity is a “‘therapeutic religion’ — a religion of healing…. When understood at a sufficiently deep level, this expresses the entire content of ‘redemption.’”²¹ Jesus ultimately came to heal humanity’s deepest wound: the wound of our sin and consequent alienation from God, with all its consequences of spiritual and physical brokenness.

Jesus once again placed healing at the heart of his messianic mission when John the Baptist sent messengers to inquire whether he was truly the Messiah foretold by the prophets. John had been chained up in prison by Herod — a part of God’s plan that he had probably not foreseen at all — and he was tempted to doubt and discouragement. Jesus pointed to his healings as the clue to the answer.

They said, “John the Baptist has sent us to you, saying, ‘Are you he who is to come, or shall we look for another?’” In that hour he cured many of diseases and plagues and evil spirits, and on many that were blind he bestowed sight. And he answered them, “Go and tell John what you have seen and heard: the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, lepers are cleansed, and the deaf hear, the dead are raised up, the poor have good news preached to them.” (Luke 7:20–22)

With this reply Jesus recalls the biblical passages that foretold the messianic age as a time of abundant healings. Isaiah had prophesied:

“Then the eyes of the blind shall be opened,

and the ears of the deaf unstopped;

then shall the lame man leap like a dear,

and the tongue of the mute sing for joy.” (Isa 35:5–6; see Isa 29:18; 42:7)

Before the eyes of John’s messengers, Jesus proceeded to fulfill these very promises by restoring sight to the blind and curing others of disease and demonic oppression. He is indeed “the one who is to come.”

Signs of the Kingdom

Jesus’ healings are inseparable from his preaching of the kingdom of God. He began his public ministry by announcing the arrival of the kingdom (Mark 1:15); then he demonstrated it by his healings and miracles. In Jesus’ very presence, in his words and deeds, the reign of God has been inaugurated on earth. The dominion of Satan has been broken and the restoration of all creation has begun.

As Jesus says in the Gospel of John, “the works which the Father has given me to accomplish, these very works which I am doing, bear me witness that the Father has sent me” (John 5:36).²² This saying does not mean that his works are merely external proofs of his divinity, as if he did them simply to convince people that he is who he says he is. In fact, more often than not his miracles turned the religious authorities against him.²³ Rather, the miracles are the embodiment of the good news itself: that he is the long-awaited Messiah who has come to overthrow every kind of evil and restore God’s people to the fullness of life.

To convey this deeper understanding of Jesus’ works, the Gospel of John prefers to call them signs rather than miracles. Each of the miracles, perceived with the eyes of faith, signifies something. Each reveals an aspect of Jesus’ identity and mission. His turning of water into wine at Cana reveals that he is the bridegroom of the messianic wedding (John 2:1–11; 3:25). His multiplication of loaves reveals that he is the bread of life (John 6:35). His healing of the blind man reveals that he is the light of the world, who brings us out of spiritual darkness (John 9:5). His raising of Lazarus reveals that he is the resurrection and the life (John 11:25). Jesus heals and gives life because it is his very nature, as God, to do so. All his works are meant to lead us into the mystery of his divine identity and messianic mission.

Scripture often uses the phrase “signs and wonders” to speak of the miracles God did through Moses during the exodus.²⁴ In Acts 2:22 Peter uses these same words for Jesus’ miracles to show that Jesus has accomplished the new and greater exodus — the redemption of his people from slavery to sin. Jesus’ healings are signs because they signify his definitive victory over sin and all its consequences, his inauguration of the kingdom, and the beginning of the “last days” (Acts 2:17). They are wonders because they provoke wonder, awe, praise, and gratitude in those who witness them.²⁵

He Healed Them All

Reading the Gospels one gets the strong impression that Jesus was not only willing but eager to heal. The Gospels repeatedly affirm the unlimited scope of his healings.

They brought him all the sick, those afflicted with various diseases and pains, demoniacs, epileptics, and paralytics, and he healed them. (Matt 4:24)

[He] healed all who were sick. (Matt 8:16; cf. Mark 1:32)

Jesus went about all the cities and villages, teaching in their synagogues and preaching the gospel of the kingdom, and healing every disease and every infirmity. (Matt 9:35)

They sent round to all that region and brought to him all that were sick, and begged him that they might only touch the fringe of his garment; and as many as touched it were made well. (Matt 14:35–36; cf. Mark 8:56)

All those who had any that were sick with various diseases brought them to him; and he laid his hands on every one of them and healed them. (Luke 4:40)

All the crowd sought to touch him, for power came forth from him and healed them all. (Luke 6:19)

Everywhere Jesus went he was besieged by the sick and infirm. Nowhere do the Gospels record that he instructed a person simply to bear the suffering assigned to them. In no case does he indicate that a person is asking for too much and should be content with a partial healing or no healing. He invariably treats illness as an evil to be overcome rather than a good to be embraced.²⁶

Jesus does not always respond immediately to the demands of the needy crowds. On a few occasions, he withdraws to be alone with the Father in prayer and then to move on to his next destination (Mark 1:35–38; Luke 5:15–16). It is also reasonable to infer that Jesus did not heal every sick person within reach. At the pool of Bethesda, there lay “a multitude of invalids, blind, lame, paralyzed” (John 5:3), but the Gospel mentions his speaking to and curing only one lame man. In Acts, Peter and John heal a crippled man who was a well-known beggar at the temple gate (Acts 3:1–10); presumably Jesus had passed by him many times at this gate and had not healed him. He left something for his apostles to do! There are also instances in which Jesus initially seems to refuse a request, but then in response to persistent faith does perform a miracle (the Canaanite woman in Matthew 15:20–28, the official with a sick son in John 4:46–53, and Mary at Cana in John 2:1–11).²⁷ However, the Gospels record no instance in which a person asks Jesus for healing and is categorically refused.

This evidence from Scripture ought to challenge our accustomed ideas about the Lord’s will to heal. Have we too easily accepted the idea that sickness should simply be embraced? Do we too easily assume that if a person is ill, God wants her to remain that way for her good? Could our resignation to illness or infirmity even sometimes be a cloak for unbelief? Scripture does not say that the Lord will always heal in response to our prayer if only we have enough faith. Jesus instructs his followers not only to heal the sick but also to “visit” them (Matt 25:36), and Paul’s letters refer to cases where sickness remains, at least for a time, despite his own charism of healing (Gal 4:13; Phil 2:26–27; 1 Tim 5:23; 2 Tim 4:20). However, it is reasonable to conclude that the Lord desires to heal far more often than we think.

Healing on the Sabbath

It is well known that Jesus often healed on the Sabbath, provoking the fury of scribes and Pharisees who regarded healings as work, which was prohibited on the Sabbath (Luke 13:14; John 5:16). A less well-known but striking fact is that every healing that Jesus himself initiated was on the Sabbath. Jesus responded to requests from sick people, or their parents or friends, on any day of the week. But wherever the Gospels record healings he did apart from any request, they are on the Sabbath. On the Sabbath Jesus restored a man’s withered hand, straightened the back of a woman who had been bent over for eighteen years, cured a man with dropsy (water retention), made a crippled man walk, gave sight to a man born blind, and delivered a demon-possessed man.²⁸

This pattern is no mere coincidence. Jesus’ evident preference for healing on the Sabbath is, like the healings themselves, a sign giving insight into who he is. In response to the Jewish leaders who complained that he was breaking the Sabbath, he revealed something else about his identity: “the Son of man is Lord even of the sabbath” (Mark 2:28). This claim does not mean only that he has authority to interpret the Sabbath laws, to decide what does or does not count as work. Rather, Jesus is revealing that he is the Lord who instituted the Sabbath in the first place and who fulfills its deepest meaning.

The book of Genesis records God’s establishment of the Sabbath as a day of rest (Gen 2:2–3), the day when human beings cease from work to enjoy their unique privilege of relating to God. It is also the day when God’s people remember that they were once slaves in Egypt, but the Lord set them free (Deut 5:15). The Sabbath is therefore far more than a time to rest up so as to get back to work with renewed energy. The Sabbath is a sign of our highest dignity — our covenant relationship with God — and of the freedom and joy that come from communion with him. The fact that Jesus chose to heal especially on the Sabbath signifies that he is “lord of the sabbath” (Matt 12:8; Luke 6:5) in the sense that he has come to inaugurate the new creation by which human beings are restored to the fullness of life that God intended from the beginning.

Jesus’ inaugural sermon in the synagogue at Nazareth, quoted earlier (on page 27), reveals the same truth in a different way. The last line of the passage from Isaiah says the Messiah would proclaim “the acceptable year of the Lord,” or in other translations (such as the New International Version), “the year of the Lord’s favor.” As the audience would have well understood, Isaiah was referring to the jubilee year, one of the sacred celebrations decreed by God in the law of Moses (Lev 25). The jubilee was to be held every fiftieth year. During the jubilee, all debts were canceled, all slaves were set free, and all ancestral lands that had been sold off due to debt or impoverishment were returned to their original owner. The jubilee was a time of freedom, joy, and celebration. Isaiah was prophesying that the coming of the Messiah would be the ultimate jubilee — a jubilee that would never end. By saying “This passage has been fulfilled in your hearing,” Jesus proclaims that in him, that never-ending jubilee of the Lord has arrived.

The Gospels thus invite us to understand Jesus’ healings in light of God’s original intention for human beings, created in his image and likeness. Sickness and disability were not part of God’s plan for creation but are outward symptoms of the damage caused by the Fall. God designed human beings with bodies meant to radiate the splendor of divine life present within them. He endowed us with not only the physical senses but also marvelous spiritual capacities to see, hear, and relate to him. Original sin caused our bodies to become corruptible and our interior faculties to be disabled, resulting in a communication block between God and humanity. Jesus’ healings of people who were deaf, blind, lame, and paralyzed are a sign of his restoration of humanity to wholeness and unbroken communion with our Creator. Although that restoration will only be complete at the resurrection of the dead (1 Cor 15:42–53), already by the grace of Christ we are able to hear God’s voice in our hearts, see him with the eyes of faith, walk in friendship with him, sing his praises, and proclaim his mighty deeds.

As St. Irenaeus wrote, “The glory of God is man fully alive.”²⁹

The Cost of Healings

As the story of the leper suggests, Jesus’ works of healing and deliverance came at a cost. Although he healed people for free, those healings were at the cost to himself of his own bodily sacrifice. The Gospel of Matthew explains that this cost was all part of God’s plan, revealed in Scripture:

That evening they brought to him many who were possessed with demons; and he cast out the spirits with a word, and healed all who were sick. This was to fulfill what was spoken by the prophet Isaiah, “He took our infirmities and bore our diseases.” (Matt 8:16–17)³⁰

Matthew is quoting from Isaiah 53, the fourth song of the suffering Servant of the Lord. Early Christian tradition recognized this passage as the most explicit prophecy of Christ’s passion to be found in the Old Testament.³¹ The song speaks of the Servant bearing not only the sins of God’s people (vv. 5–6, 10, 12), but also their infirmities and diseases (v. 4).³² Matthew sees this mention of infirmities and diseases as pointing in a special way to Christ’s healings of the sick and demon-possessed.³³ The Hebrew meaning of the verbs “took” and “bore” is significant. They refer to the Servant not only removing afflictions but taking them on himself. Matthew is, of course, not saying that Jesus became sick or demon-possessed, but that in a mysterious way he bore these afflictions, along with our sins, in his own body on the cross. His power to heal flows from his own vicarious suffering of sin and all its consequences.

Jesus’ healings foreshadow not only his passion; they also point to his resurrection from the dead. The Gospels hint at this link every time they use the word “raised up” or “rose” for those healed by Jesus. When Jesus cured Peter’s mother-in-law of a fever, he took her by the hand and “raised her up” (Mark 1:31). He commanded the paralytic, “Rise, take up your pallet and go home,” and the man “rose” (Mark 2:11–12). He said to Jairus’ dead daughter, “Little girl, I say to you, arise!” and she “got up and walked” (Mark 5:41–42). He took the epileptic boy by the hand, “raised him up,” and the boy “arose” (Mark 9:27). In each case, these are the same verbs used for Jesus’ resurrection (Mark 16:6, 9, 14; 16:9), and for the resurrection of all the dead on the last day.³⁴

Jesus’ healings of physical afflictions, while marvelous for those who receive them, are only a pale shadow of the ultimate healing he will accomplish in the end, when our bodies are transformed to be like his glorified body and the new creation is fully revealed. As St. Paul wrote, “When the perishable puts on the imperishable, and the mortal puts on immortality, then shall come to pass the saying that is written: ‘Death is swallowed up in victory’” (1 Cor 15:54). “For this slight momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison” (2 Cor 4:17; cf. Rom 8:18–19).

Jesus’ Commission to His Followers

Everywhere Jesus went, teaching, healing, and casting out demons, people saw the promises of God being fulfilled before their eyes. The kingdom of God was being manifested in their midst. The Gospels give not the slightest warrant for the idea that these signs of the arrival of the kingdom were to cease after Jesus’ ascension into heaven. Rather, Jesus commissioned his followers to continue his saving mission by doing just as he had done.

During his public ministry, Jesus sent out the twelve apostles on a kind of practice mission. He commanded them, “Preach as you go, saying, ‘The kingdom of heaven is at hand.’ Heal the sick, raise the dead, cleanse lepers, cast out demons” (Matt 10:7–8). They were not to preach the kingdom in word alone, but to demonstrate it with deeds of power. They could accomplish these mighty works not by any ability of their own but by the authority he delegated to them (10:1). Luke records that Jesus later commissioned a larger group of seventy. He gave them the same charge: “Whenever you enter a town and they receive you … heal the sick in it and say to them, ‘The kingdom of God has come near to you’” (Luke 10:8–10).

During Jesus’ earthly life the commission was only for these chosen delegates. But after his resurrection, the risen Lord extended the authority to heal and cast out demons to all believers. Among the signs that would accompany “those who believe,” i.e., Christians, he said, “in my name they will cast out demons;… they will lay their hands on the sick, and they will recover” (Mark 16:17–18).³⁵ He also affirmed that “they will speak in new tongues; they will pick up serpents, and if they drink any deadly thing, it will not hurt them” — that is, they will experience divine protection from evil. Now all believers, filled with the Spirit of the risen Lord, are gifted with supernatural power for their mission to “preach good news to the poor” (Luke 4:18).

The early Christians took Jesus’ words at face value. And the Lord vindicated their faith by doing abundant miracles through them, as the next chapter will describe.