'Himself took our infirmities, and bare our sicknesses.'--MATT.
viii. 17.
You will remember, probably, that in our Old Testament translation of
these words they are made to refer to man's mental and spiritual evils:
'He bare our griefs and carried our sorrows.' Our evangelist takes them
to refer, certainly not exclusively, but in part, to men's corporeal
evils--'our infirmities' (bodily weaknesses, that is) 'and our
sicknesses.' He was distinctly justified in so doing, both by the
meaning of the original words, which are perfectly general and capable
of either application, and by the true and deep view of the
comprehensiveness of our Lord's mission and purpose. Christ is the
antagonist of all the evils that affect man's life, whether his
corporeal or his spiritual; and no less true is it that, in His deep
sympathy, 'He bare our sicknesses' than that, in the mystery of His
atoning death, 'He was wounded for our transgressions.'
It is, therefore, this point of view of Christ, as the Healer, which I
desire to bring before you now.
I. First, I ask you to look at the plain facts as to our Lord's ministry
which are contained in these words:--'Himself took our infirmities, and
bare our sicknesses.'
Now, there are two points that I desire to emphasise very briefly. One
is the prominence in Christ's life which is given to His healing energy.
We are accustomed to think of His cures as miracles. We are accustomed
to think of them in that aspect as evidences of His mission, or as
difficulties and stumbling-blocks, as the case may be. But I ask you to
put away all such thoughts for a minute, and think about the miracles
simply as being cures. Remember how enormous a proportion of our Lord's
time and pains and sympathy and thoughts was directed to that one
purpose of healing people of their bodily infirmities. We may almost say
that to an outsider He would look a great deal liker a man who, as the
Apostle Peter painted Him in one of his earliest addresses, 'went about
doing good and healing,' than as a teacher of divine wisdom, to say
nothing of an incarnation of the divine nature. His miracles of healing
were certainly the most conspicuous part of His life's work.
And then, remember, that whilst the great proportion of our Lord's
miracles are miracles of healing, we are sure that the whole of the
recorded miraculous works of our Lord are the smallest fraction of what
He really did. You remember how there crop up, here and there, in the
Gospels, general _résumés_ of our Lord's work, of such a kind as
this:--'And Jesus went about all Galilee, teaching in their synagogues,
and preaching the Gospel of the Kingdom, and healing all manner of
sickness and all manner of disease among the people. And they brought
unto Him all sick people that were taken with divers diseases and
torments, and those which were possessed with devils, and those which
were lunatic, and those that had the palsy and He healed them.' Or,
again:--'And Jesus departed from thence, and came nigh unto the sea of
Galilee, and went up into a mountain, and sat down there. And great
multitudes came unto Him, having those that were lame, blind, dumb,
maimed, and many others, and cast them down at Jesus' feet, and He
healed them.' Now these are but specimens of the occasional
generalisations which we find in the Gospels, which warrant us in saying
that, according to the New Testament record, Christ's works of healing
were to be numbered, not by tens, but by hundreds, and perhaps by
thousands.
That is the first fact calling for notice. The words of our text suggest
a second thought as to the cost at which these cures were wrought.
'Himself took and bare' does not mean only 'took away.' It includes
that, as a consequence, but it points to something before the removal of
the sicknesses. It points to the fact that Christ in some real sense
endured the loads which He removed. Of course, His cross is the highest
exemplification of the great law which runs through His whole life, that
He identifies Himself with all the evil which He takes away, and is able
to take it away only because He identifies Himself with it. But whilst
the cross is the highest exemplification of this, every miracle of mercy
which He wrought is an illustration of the same principle in its
appropriate fashion, and upon a lower level. And although we cannot say
that the physical sufferings which He alleviated were physically laid
upon Him, yet we can say that He so identified Himself with all
sufferers by His swift sympathy as that He bore, and therefore bore
away, the diseases as well as the sins of the men for whose healing He
lived, and for whose redemption He died.
The proof of this crops up now and then. What did it mean that, when He
stood beside one poor sufferer, before He could utter from His
authoritative lips the divine word of power, 'Ephphatha, be opened,' the
same lips had to shape themselves for the utterance of an altogether
human and brotherly sigh? Did it not mean that the condition of His
healing power was sympathy, that He must bring Himself to feel the
burden that He will roll away? That sigh proves that His cures were the
works, not without cost to the doer, of a sympathising heart, and not
the mere passionless acts of a miracle-monger.
In like manner, what meant that strange tempest of agitation that swept
across the pacific ocean of His nature ere He stood by the grave of
Lazarus? Why that being 'troubled in Himself' before He raised him?
Wherefore the tears that heralded the restoration of the man to life?
They could not be shed for the loss that was so soon to be repaired.
They can only have been the emotion and tears of One who saw, as massed
in one black whole, the entire sorrows that affected physical humanity,
and rose in a holy passion of indignation and of sorrow at the sight of
that enemy, Death, with whose beginnings He had wrestled in many a
miracle of restoration, and whose sceptre He was now about to pluck from
his bony clutch. Therefore I say that Christ the healer bore, and
thereby bore away, the sicknesses and the infirmities of men.
Amidst mountains of rubbish and chaff, the Rabbis have a grain of wheat
in their legend which tells us that Messias is to come as a leper, and
to be found sitting amongst the lepers at the city's gate; which is a
picturesque and symbolical way of declaring the same truth that I am now
insisting upon, the participation by the Redeemer in all burdens and
sorrows of body and of spirit which He takes away.
II. And now with these facts--for I take them to be such--for the basis
of our thoughts, let me ask you to turn, in the second place, to some
plain practical conclusions that come from them.
The first of these that I would suggest is the lesson as to the proper
sweep and sphere of Christian beneficence. As I said in my introductory
remarks, we do not rightly measure the whole circumference of Christ's
work unless we regard it as covering and including all forms of human
evil. He is the antagonist of everything that is antagonistic to
man--pain, misery, sickness, death itself. All these are excrescences on
the divine design, transient accompaniments of disordered relations
between God and man. And this great physician of souls fights the
disease and does not neglect the symptoms; deals with the central evil
and is not so absorbed with that as to omit from His view or His
treatment the merely superficial manifestations of it.
So that if Christian people, individually and as Churches, are justly
exposed, in any measure, to the sarcasm which is freely cast upon them,
that they neglect the temporal well-being of men in order to attend
exclusively to their spiritual wants, they have not learned the example
of such partial treatment from their Master; nor have they taken in the
significance and the power of His life in its relation to human sorrow.
All that makes the heart bleed Christ comes to take away. 'All the ills
that _flesh_ is heir to,' as well as those which each spirit, by
rebellion, brings upon itself--are the foes with whom Christ has left
His Church in the world in order to wage incessant warfare. If we
Christians, oppressed with the sense of the depth and central nature of
the evil of man's sin, have so devoted ourselves to preaching and
evangelising, that we are, in any measure, rightly chargeable with
neglecting hospitals and infirmaries and other forms of relief for
temporal necessities, just in that proportion have we departed from our
Master's spirit. But I do not, for my part, much believe, either in the
good faith of the accusers or in the applicability of the charge which
men, who never do anything for the religious improvement of their
fellows, are apt to bring against us. My little experience, I think,
teaches me that the folk who say to us 'Do not waste your money on
Bibles and missionaries, give it to hospitals and schools,' are not
usually the people that 'waste their money' on either; and that the
largest portion of all the work that is done in England to-day, for the
temporal well-being of men, comes from the Christians who also do work
for their spiritual well-being.
But let us learn the lesson, if we need it, from our enemies and our
critics; and see to it that the more we feel the lofty and transcendent
importance of carrying Christ's salvation to men's souls, the more we
endeavour, likewise, to live amongst them as He did, the embodiment of
pity, wide-eyed and comprehensive, for every evil that racks their
hearts and every pain that tortures their nerves. As a fact, hospitals
are found within the limits of Christianity, and not outside it; and so
far, Christendom, though it is largely professing Christendom only, has
learned that it follows a Christ who is the Saviour of the body and the
Physician of the soul.
In the next place, another practical lesson which I would draw from this
is, as to the sole conditions upon which any form of Christian help can
be rendered. The condition for the elevation of men is that the lever
which lifts them must have its point below them. That is to say, you
have to go down if you would heave up. You have to go amongst if you
would deliver; you have to make your own, by a sympathy which you have
learned of your Master, the sorrows and the sins of humanity, if you
would effectually remedy them. A guinea to an hospital is not your
contribution to the Christ-like relief of human suffering. It wants, and
He wants, your heart, your sympathy. Think for a moment of the universe
of anguish that may lie within the narrow limits of one human body--that
awful mystery of pain which holds in its red-hot pincers hundreds and
thousands of men and women in this city at this moment. Try to imagine
the mass of bodily agony, an enormous percentage of which is utterly
innocent, and a still larger percentage of it perfectly remediable,
which at this hour, whilst we sit here, is torturing mankind. And oh!
brethren, do not let any thought of the transcendent importance of
Christ's gospel, and what it does to men's hearts, make us careless
about these real, though lesser, evils which lie beside us, and which we
can remedy and help.
Only, remember the condition of help for them all. The newspapers went
into raptures some years since, and wisely, over a Roman Catholic priest
who shut himself up in a little island with a colony of lepers. Some
Protestant martyrs have done the same before him, without any chorus of
newspaper praise. Whoever did it had penetrated to the secret of
Christian help--identification with the evil. If we would take away any
misery or sin, we must act like that doctor who shut himself up in the
wards of an hospital, and kept a diary of the symptoms of his disease,
till the pen dropped from his fingers and the film came over his eyes.
Are we ready to do anything like that for our brethren? Until we are, we
have yet to learn and to practise the pattern which He has set, 'Who,
though He was rich, for our sins became poor': and who, 'forasmuch as
the children were partakers of flesh and blood, Himself likewise'--in
their own fashion of weakness, and weariness, and sorrow, and pain, and
ultimately death--'took part of the same.' 'He bore our sicknesses,'
therefore He bore them away, and, in so doing, taught us the law of
Christian help.
And lastly, let me not pass from this subject without leaving on your
hearts, dear friends, the other thought, of the connection and the
relative importance of these two hemispheres of Christ's work. The
sicknesses are symbols of the sins; the removal of the bodily pain and
disease is a prophecy and a visible parable proclaiming the removal of
all the harassment and abnormal action that afflict intellect, will, or
spirit. Christ Himself has taught us to regard His miracles of healing
as the making visible, in the outward sphere, of the analogous miracles
of healing in the spiritual realm. And although I have been saying a
great deal about the preciousness and the sacredness of the curative
influences which flow from Christ, and deal with outward diseases and
evils, let us not forget that a sound body is of small worth as compared
with a sound mind; that the body is the servant of the spirit, meant
mainly to do its behests, bring it knowledge, and express its will; and
that high above, and pointed to by, the lower, though precious work of
healing men's sicknesses, towers that work which we all of us need, and
the robustest of us, perhaps, need most, the healing of our sick souls
and their deliverance from death.
Every one of these manifold miracles which the Saviour wrought may be
taken as parabolical. You and I grope in darkness as the blind. You and
I have ears deaf to hear, and lips dumb to speak, the praises and the
love and the word of God. We are lame in the powers of mind and spirit
to run in the way of His commandments, and to walk unfainting in the
paths of duty. The fever of hot, passionate, foolish desires burns in
the veins of us all with its poison. The paralysis of a will that is
slothful to good infests and hinders us all. But there comes to us that
great hope and promise that Christ has the Spirit of the Lord upon Him
to bring liberty to the captive, sight to the blind, hearing to the
deaf, healing to the fevered, vigour to the palsied, activity to the
lame. Only let us set our trust in Him, carry our weaknesses to Him,
acknowledge our sins to Him, seek the touch of His healing and
quickening hand, and the miracle shall be wrought.
The old-fashioned surgery used to believe in the transfusion of blood
from a sound to a diseased person, and the consequent expulsion of
disease. That is the fact about our relation to Christ. Put your arm
side by side with His by simple faith in Him. Come into contact with
Him, and the blood of Jesus Christ, the 'law of the spirit of life that
was in Him,' will pass into the veins of your spirits, and make you
whole of whatsoever disease you have. 'Then shall the eyes of the blind
be opened, and the ears of the deaf shall be unstopped; then shall the
lame man leap as a hart, and the tongue of the dumb shall sing.' And so
shall you begin that course of healing and purifying, which will know no
pause nor natural termination until, redeemed in body, soul, and spirit,
you reach the land 'where the inhabitant thereof shall no more say, I am
sick,'--'and there shall be no more death, neither shall there be any
more pain.'