Post-Sermon Miracles

Aftermath of the Sermon on the Mount/Plain

Moving on from the Sermon on the Mount/Plain, we see the Four Gospels generally narrate a sequence of miracles that all establish the fulfillment of Jesus’s prophetic words in the Nazareth synagogue: his prediction that his hometown neighbors would eventually say to him, “Physician, heal thyself” and whatever things Jesus had done in Capernaum, he should do also in his hometown. We must remember that it was this prediction that incensed those in the Nazareth synagogue. Jesus had told them how in the days of Elijah, there had been many widows in Israel but Elijah was sent to none of them and went to a widow in Zarephath (non-Israelite); and there had been many lepers in the days of Elisha, but only Naaman the Syrian (non-Israelite) was healed. Village neighbors took offense at Jesus associating his own healing ministry with those of Elijah and Elisha—and then indicating a preference toward non-Israelites. In the series of miracles that follow the Sermon, we see the gospel writers affirming how Jesus’s words proved true. The pericopes in sequence after the Sermon are (#76–83 in our synopsis):

• Healing of a Centurion’s Servant
• Raising of a Widow’s Son at Nain
• On Following Jesus
• Calming a Storm
• Healings of Gadarene/Gergesene Demoniacs
• Healings of Jairus’s Daughter and a Woman with a Hemorrhage
• Healings of Two Blind Men
• Accusations of Colluding with Demons
• On Sin against the Holy Spirit
• On the Great Harvest

The miracles in this sequence include:

• Healing of a centurion’s servant
• Raising of a widow’s son at Nain
• Calming a storm
• Healing of demoniacs (particularly the “Legion” demoniac)
• Healing of a woman with a hemorrhage
• Raising of Jairus’s daughter
• Healings of two blind men

Gentile and Unclean Spirits

These stories together establish an important narrative pattern: how people healed by Jesus at this stage lived with lesser status relative to the Galilean Jewish community—either unclean (based on Torah codes of purity) or Gentile. Together they fulfill precisely what Jesus anticipated in his discussion in the Nazareth synagogue.

Centurion and Servant

A centurion commanded a “century,” a cohort of 100 Roman soldiers within a legion. The King James text refers to a “servant,” but the term was literally “slave.” Romans practiced slavery, and nearly all references we read in the King James New Testament to “servant” really map to the Greek term for “slave,” what amounted to a category of legal status in Roman society.

To make sense of these two figures in the story—a centurion and a slave—we’ll need to understand a little about certain orders within Roman society.

Each person within the Roman Empire carried legal status based on their caput, or legal personality. Caput was defined by three hierarchical components: libertas (freedom), civitas (citizenship), and familia (household). A “citizen” enjoyed all three; a “provincial” only freedom; and a “slave,” none. Libertas distinguished enslaved people from free people and came to mark “slaves” as things, not persons, under Roman law. For a centurion to speak of an enslaved person carried the common designation that this “slave” belonged to the centurion as a piece of property, not as a member of the centurion’s household.

Relative to Galilean Jews in Jesus’s vicinity, a centurion from Capernaum occupied a rather elevated (though not elite) status, yet an “unclean” and Gentile association for living apart from any Jewish law. The enslaved person claimed by this centurion would incur a lesser status than this—someone not recognized as a Roman citizen, nor as free, nor as a part of a household.1

Widow at Nain

Some historical sources describe Nain (or Nein) as a mixed city about 20 miles southwest of Capernaum, meaning its residents came from various ethnē (or ethnic) communities. The fact that this story in Luke 7 describes Jesus approaching the gate of Nain and finding a funeral procession carrying the deceased body of a young man suggests that this particular group was not Jewish. In Jewish funerary customs, the deceased were wrapped in linens and conveyed to tombs or caves, not cemeteries. This episode resembles Jesus’s Nazareth reference to Elijah visiting a widow in Zarephath (a non-Israelite village) and raising her only son from the dead. Narratively, it’s strongly implied that Jesus interacted with someone of non-Jewish status.

The phrasing of Jesus’s action resembles the raising of Jairus’s daughter. To the body of the deceased young man, Jesus reportedly said: “Young man, I say unto thee, Arise.” In fact, the only difference here is between “Young man” and “Damsel” (in the King James Version). Except in the pericope about Jairus’s daughter, we get a Greek transliteration of Aramiac: Ταλιθα κουμ / Talitha koum. This suggests the actual wording was remembered among Aramaic-speaking disciples and transmitted within Greek-speaking communities on its way to being written down in the Gospel of Mark. The likely extrapolation of Aramaic is ṭlīthā qūm, a dative declension of the noun ṭlytˀ (=little girl) and the verb qūm/qwm (=to rise/stand/awaken/get up). If we were to apply this pattern to “Young man, I say unto thee, Arise,” we’d get something like ṭlyōsā qūm or rābyā qūm as the Aramaic words Jesus said to raise the young man from the dead.

Demoniac(s) near Gadarenes/Gergesenes

Mark and Luke describe Jesus encountering a man in the Gadarene/Gergesene countryside “with an unclean spirit.” (Matthew has “two possessed with devils” in this episode.) The gospels make the person’s status overt: he was unclean by Jewish purity standards.

You can see in the map above two locations, Gergesa and Gadara. The references to Gergesene and Gadarene demoniacs indicates that the sources for the gospels were disagreed whether Jesus encountered the “Legion” demoniac in Gergesa or Gadara. The somewhat relative proximity of the two regions makes sense how the two could have been confused in ancient accounts. Gergesa makes better sense than Gadara for the reference to the swine herd drowning in nearby waters; however, the references to mountainous terrain and tomb caves matches Gadara better. Some readers have speculated that the drowning of the swine herd was a separate event that somehow got blended with the exorcism of “Legion,” and so one event occuring in Gergesa merged with the telling of another event in Gadara.

Whatever the true occasion, what does stand out about this particular exorcism is how the main figure in the story, the possessed man, represented the most afflicted of any in the entire four gospels—people had tried to restrain him with chains, which didn’t work, and the man injured himself terribly and frightened everyone nearby. After the healing miracle, eyewitnesses stood aghast at seeing the man in his right mind and conversing with Jesus. What’s more, and a point quite intriguing about the episode: the man asked to follow Jesus as one of his disciples, which Jesus denied, telling him instead to proclaim how the miracle had blessed his life in his own locality. We often emphasize following Jesus with the stories of disciples like Peter, Andrew, James, and John leaving their fishing nets, but we may forget how Jesus’s invitation to follow was situational—for some, yes, they left their nets, but others like the man afflicted with Legion, Jesus insisted they not journey with him. The call to follow apparently depended on the person, the situation, and Jesus’s own designs.

Woman with a Hemorrhage

A woman with “an issue of blood” that lasted twelve years finds Jesus in a moving crowd and touches Jesus’s clothes. It’s a memorable and famous story of healing we are no doubt familiar with. Here, the reference to an issue of blood indicates this woman’s unclean status under Levitical law: a flow of blood made one unclean until they could stop the issue of blood and perform purification. This woman had a perpetual “hemorrhage” according to the Greek, something the Greek therefore associates with feminine health, and for her, within her Galilean context, an unclean status that no doubt troubled her life and complicated her interactions with others.

For this woman in her state of hemorrhage to touch Jesus or Jesus’s clothing meant that under the Torah, Jesus would become unclean and would need to perform purification. In this moment, we have Jesus reply, “Someone touched me, because I know δὐναμιν / dynamin has flowed out from me.” The Greek dynamis referred to power or physical strength of gods. When Zeus was said to hurl lightning, it was by his dynamis that he could do this. The phrasing here implies Jesus describing divine power flowing out of him, a metonymy of the woman’s flow of blood—which, in the ancient Hebrew setting, connoted the same force of power, for blood was “unclean” and forbidden to the touch not because it was dirty but because of its life-force, its dynamis. In the instant of her touching Jesus’s clothes, she felt within herself “the fountain” of her issue “dry up,” and Jesus sensed power flow out. Jesus as Living Waters purified at the touch. One cannot make Jesus unclean; to touch him is to be made clean, the inverse of the Torah purification code.

Jairus’s Daughter

The gospels describe Jairus as one of the synagogue rulers on the opposite side of Lake Gennesaret whose daughter lay ill. By the time Jesus arrives, the girl had died. Under purification laws of the Torah, a corpse was unclean and caused anyone touching it to become unclean as well. The family and household attendants already began outward mourning when Jesus says that the girl hadn’t died but was asleep. In narrative context, this element resembles what other folklores existed at the time and region about Jewish physicians—a patient said to be sleeping indicated sickness, not death. I think the gospels present such dialogue with this intent, that Jesus emphasized the girl’s sickness rather than pretending she hadn’t actually died. Consider the possibility, then, that the girl had not, in fact, died, but that the household thought she had. For Jesus to say, “she’s not dead but sleepeth” would be akin to a physician of the time saying, “she’s ill, not dead.” Perhaps Jesus spoke truthfully, not dramatically. In any event, the household took offense at Jesus saying that, but the parents nevertheless allowed Jesus, Peter/Simon, James/Jacob, and John into the room where their daughter lay.

Jesus took the girl by the hand and said ṭlīthā qūm. And straightaway the girl arose and walked.

(Sidenote: I’ve heard people recently revise the translation here into “Little lamb, I say to thee, arise.” This is a translation error. It comes from an old Hebrew-Aramaic-Syriac lexicon that listed “little lamb” next to the lemma for ṭlīthā. Some readers not versed in semitics didn’t understand how to consult this lexicon and started creating a kind of sensationalized version of the story, for some reason thinking “little lamb” was more tender of a thing to say or something. If Jesus had said “little lamb,” we’d have something closer to nəqēʾ‏ not ṭlīthā. We don’t need to sensationalize or dramatize Jesus’s miracles; the simplicity in the words is plenty powerful. He said, quite plainly in the preserved Aramaic, “little girl.”)

Again, the living waters that Jesus was superseded any purification rituals. Jesus could take the hand of dead or dying girl and not be defiled by it, but rather bring life and health.

Two Blind Men

Mark, Matthew, and Luke disagree over whether this episode involved one blind man or two blind men; either way, the person(s) associated with this miracle was/were conspicuously mentioned as begging outside the city. We know from other sources how beggars outside cities tended to be outcast on account of their status as unclean. (We could explore a whole lot more the culture of “retributive justice” that many, including Jesus’s immediate followers, believed in, that basically amounted to many people treating illness like blindness as a consequence of misbehavior rather than an accident of nature or an injury.) Suffice it to say, the narratives treat the blind who beg for food or money as carrying this same unclean status.

So, before Jesus commissioned the Twelve and dispatched them on a parallel ministry, he initiated his own ministry. And to this point, his ministry began with reading scripture and teaching in synagogues, performing healings among lakeside villagers, exorcising daemons, and delivering a sermon on the kingdom of the heavens. And now, just after the sermon, Jesus performs healing and exorcism miracles among categorically non-Israelite or “unclean” people.

Fidelity to God and Jesus

If we look closely at each of these pericopes, we’ll see Jesus invoking pistis, what gets translated in King James English as “faith,” but which functioned first as a personal name for a Greek deity. In Greco-Roman mythology, four sisters were divinities one could appeal to for specific blessings: Pistis, Elpis, Charites, and Sophrosyne. Pistis was the personification of reliability, trustworthiness, fidelity. Elpis, the personification of hope. Charites, the personification of charity, almsgiving, beneficence. And Sophrosyne, the personification of prudence, good judgment. Over time, one could demonstrate such virtues in their own behavior, so one could be said to practice pistis, or trust; elpis, or hope; charites, or generosity; sophrosyne, or thrift.

Paul, an adept Greek-speaking, Hellenized Jewish man from a highly Hellenized area of modern-day Turkey, wrote a letter to previously non-Jewish residents of Korinthos, a Greek city 40 miles west of Athens. In this letter, he mentioned three of those mythological sisters, Pistis, Elpis, and Charites, and said Charites was the greatest of the three. Without the blessing of generosity, all trust and hope amount to nothing. This becomes “faith, hope, and charity” in our King James Bible, and because of Paul’s other writings and preaching about pistis as itself the defining characteristic of a true follower of Jesus, Christians over the centuries have developed a notion of “faith” quite distant and different than what Jesus offered in his own teachings that mention pistis. Put simply, whereas Paul described pistis in terms of beliving in Christ with or without proof (i.e., a test of credulity/incredulity), Jesus described pistis in terms closer to its common meaning, trust and fidelity.

If you can trust God, Jesus taught, even barely—as barely as a mustard seed—all things become possible. To the drowning Peter, Jesus said in effect, “Why didn’t you trust me?” To skeptical disciples, Jesus replied, “How long will you go on not trusting me?”

It’s in this context that the gospels describe Jesus telling those witnesses of this round of miracles that among the supposed “unclean” and gentile beneficiaries of Jesus’s healing, Jesus had not seen such pistis, such trust, in all of Israel. Jesus manifestly ministered among non-Israelites and unclean Jewish people, a fact that remained controversial among the first generation of his followers who debated whether the gospel ought first to go to Jews and to Gentiles second, or even to Gentiles at all. Jesus never installed such a division, but responded with equal compassion and readiness wherever he was and among whomever he interacted. This Jew/Gentile ethnic ordering and prioritization belongs to Christian followers, not Jesus himself, and brought its own consequences for the initial expansion of Christianity.