The Lord did these activities: Preaching the Kingdom of God and healing illnesses. Healing, for Jesus, was a sign of the coming of the Kingdom because the Kingdom is the health of the soul and the coming back of the person to his full safety.
Today’s Gospel talks about an ill person that falls in panic attacks in his youth years. He falls into the fire and water, and these are symptoms of epilepsy.
The parents presented the boy to the disciples but they couldn’t heal him, so Jesus said that his disciples are an unbelieving and perverse generation and ordered them to get the ill boy to him. The Lord rebuked the evil spirit that was controlling the boy, i.e. he ordered the spirit to get out of him and therefore the child was healed from that moment. This boy was healed through a word from Jesus. In addition to health, the Lord heals the heart from its sin if the person repented.
When the disciples failed, they asked the Lord why they couldn’t get the evil spirit out. Then, the Master told them “if you have faith as small as a mustard seed, you can say to this mountain, ‘Move from here to there,’ and it will move”. The meaning is clear here: No difficulty could stand in front of the faithful because he can overcome it. After that, he talked about the evil spirit saying: “This kind can go out by nothing, but by prayer and fasting”. When the flaming prayer is built on trusting God – whether it was from the church prayers in the meeting of the faithful or an individual prayer – it shall heal the praying person, the sick or the sinner. It has an efficiency coming from God himself that is a partner with the believer as he gives him his grace that “completes the incomplete and heals the ill”. God sends his healing and you feel it. This is why the Church organized, based on St. James’ Epistle, the Anointing of the Sick which is exercised once a year in the Holy Week or in the house of the sick.
Fasting, being and orientation towards the Lord, is exactly as prayer. It is the power of the Lord in us and not only a diet. Fasting is not only an abstinence from food but, in the first place, from sin. When the person is fortified with prayer and fasting, Christ’s power shall descend on him. The prayers of the church and of the saints, that are the victorious church, are together the power of healing and of repentance.
After these words, Jesus said to his disciples: “The Son of Man is going to be delivered into the hands of men. They will kill him, and on the third day he will be raised to life”. All the good things that the Savior did were to prepare us to see his passions and Resurrection. The core of the Christian faith is the passions of the Lord and his emergence from the dead. This is the aim of his journey. Therefore, we shall live with Lord Jesus if we accepted his suffering and resurrection with the joy of the victory over sin. We are Paschal people that overcome the sin that consoles us and ascend from it, because it is death, into Christ’s visage.
Translated by Mark Najjar
Original Text: “يسوع الشافي” –Raiati 34- 21.08.2011
