There, again, the three stories diverge, and yet are all one. Matthew
says, 'He touched her'; Luke says, 'He _stood_'-or rather, as the
Greek means, 'He _bent over her_--and rebuked the fever.' Perhaps
Peter was close to the pallet, and saw and remembered that there were
not a standing over and rebuking the fever only, but that there was
the going out of His tender sympathy to the sufferer, and that if
there were stern words as of indignation and authority addressed to
the disease as if to an unlawful intruder, there were also compassion
and tenderness for the victim. For Mark tells that it was not a touch
only, but that 'He took her by the hand and lifted her up,' and the
grasp banished sickness and brought strength.
Now the most precious of the lessons that we can gather from the
variety of Christ's methods of healing is this: that all methods which
He used were in themselves equally powerless, and that the curative
virtue was in neither the word nor the touch, nor the spittle, nor the
clay, nor the bathing in the pool of Siloam, but was purely and simply
in the outgoing of His will. The reasons for the wonderful variety of
ways in which He communicated His healing power are to be sought
partly in the respective moral, and spiritual, and intellectual
condition of the people to be healed, and partly in wider reasons and
considerations. Why did He stoop and touch the woman, and take her by
the hand and gently lift her up? Because His heart went out to her,
because He felt the emotion and sympathy which makes the whole world
kin, and because His heart was a heart of love, and bade Him come into
close contact with the poor fever-ridden woman. Unless we regard that
hand-clasp as being such an instinctive attitude and action of
Christ's sympathetic love, we lose the deepest significance of it. And
then, when we have given full weight to that, the simplest and yet the
most blessed of all the thoughts that cluster round the deed, we can
venture further to say that in that small matter we see mirrored, as a
wide sweep of country in a tiny mirror, or the sun in a bowl of water,
the great truth: 'He took not hold of angels, but He took hold of the
seed of Abraham, wherefore it behoved Him to be made in all things
like unto His brethren.' The touch upon the fevered hand of that old
woman in Capernaum was as a condensation into one act of the very
principle of the Incarnation and of the whole power which Christ
exercises upon a fevered and sick world. For it is by His touch, by
His lifting hand, by His sympathetic grasp, and by our real contact
with Him, that all our sicknesses are banished, and health and
strength come to our souls.
So let us learn a lesson for our own guidance. We can do no man any
real good unless we make ourselves one with him, and benefits that we
bestow will hurt rather than help, if they are flung down upon men as
from a height, or as people cast a bone to a dog. The heart must go
with them; and identification with the sufferer is a condition of
succour. If we would take lepers and blind beggars and poor old women
by the hand--I mean, of course, by giving them our sympathy along with
our help--we should see larger results from, and be more Christ-like
in, our deeds of beneficence.