Long-Term Faith in the Compassion of Christ
Alicia Wright
I was born a church-going kid and grew up into a church-going adult. I’ve seen all the worn, red church carpets, held strong opinions on the best Bible translations, and had Sunday lunch in more slightly dank church basements than I care to admit. I know what churchy people mean when they pray “for a hedge of protection” or “traveling mercies,” and I’ve heard at least a dozen pastors preach long and animated sermons on tithing immediately after sharing how much they hate to preach on tithing.
When you’ve been in church all your life, there are things you get used to reading in the Bible and hearing from the pulpit—but there are still plenty of things that feel brand new when you hear them from a different perspective or see them with new eyes. Lately, the miracles of Jesus have been hitting my heart in fresh ways. All my life I’ve heard that Jesus’ miracles were done to show His divinity—to prove to others that He was God Himself. He was God coming down as a human to bridge the gap between humanity and Himself. This is undoubtedly true, and if we take away only one purpose behind the miracles of Jesus, this is one of the big ones we don’t want to miss.
The thing is, though, there were a million different ways Jesus could have proved He was God. He could have gathered massive crowds and parted seas in front of them. He could have darkened the sun, moved mountains, flattened temples—we could go on listing any incredible, earth-shattering displays of power we can imagine. He had infinite power and an audience hungry to see things they’d never seen before. If His only goal was to convince others He was God, He could have gone about it in much more dramatic ways. But rather than using “force powers” to shock His audience, the miracles of Jesus show us a consistent pattern revealing a very different purpose. They are all done for the good of the people around Him. They’re done out of compassion and selfless love for the struggling people He encounters. The Creator of the entire cosmos chose to heal the sick, feed the hungry, calm storms, raise the dead, teach everyday people who had been rejected by the religious elite, and save souls—sometimes doing these things for long, exhausting periods of time.
There’s a lot we could pull from this idea, but I want to sit for a moment in the beauty of Jesus’ care for us. Thinking about God’s healing of others can make our chronically ill bodies and hearts ask why we ourselves haven’t been healed, but even without experiencing healing now, there’s something deeply reassuring in realizing that He absolutely delights in healing His children. Jesus spent His physical strength each day of His earthly ministry pouring out love and care on His people. With the power of heaven at His fingertips, He chose to sit among crowds of sick people, touching them one by one, encouraging their faith, sharing His desire to heal them, and offering gracious forgiveness for their sins.
On at least two occasions after He taught for days on end, Jesus looked out over a crowd of thousands and had compassion on them because He knew they were hungry. He didn’t want to send them away to find their own food because He was concerned they would “faint along the way.” So He fed them all with a handful of bread and a few fish, miraculously stretched to feed thousands until everyone was full.
One of my favorite miracles is one we’re given very little information about: an outcast man with leprosy coming to Jesus (Matthew 8:1-3) with a simple but beautiful acknowledgment on his lips—“Lord, if you will, you can make me clean”—and Jesus’ response as He reached out to touch someone labeled untouchable by everyone else: “I will; be clean.” The man knew Jesus had the power to do whatever He wanted, and Jesus response showed clearly that He absolutely did want to accept him, heal him, and forgive him.
If you’re living with chronic illness, I don’t need to ask whether you understand the position of this man with a chronic disease that isolated him from society and was leading him toward a slow and heartbreaking death. He desperately needed healing, and he was given both physical restoration and a glimpse into God’s heart for him. Jesus both willed his healing and accomplished it because He loved the man—body and soul.
Despite the beauty of all these miracles recorded for our benefit millennia later, we still don’t get answers to the questions of why we weren’t among those crowds, and why we haven’t received the healing we so deeply want. But we do get something that may be better in the long run. We get to step back and be swept up in the wave rising through the Gospels—Jesus, the “image of the invisible God” (Hebrews 1:3), showing us that our God is a God of compassion and love. His heart is full of care for us, and His miracles are always done for the good of His people. Whether we see His physical healing here or must wait for it until His new creation arrives, it will come. We will see the One who chooses to show His power through accomplishing our good and it will be enough for us.