Discipleship Includes Healing the Sick, Thousands of Them
Hover over the references to see the Biblical text
We tend to picture Israel's architecture as static in Jesus time. Out in the sticks, people might have added rooms to there homes when their children married, but beyond that we imagine it as unchanging. But that's just not the case. Herod the Great built the fortress of Masada but he also built cities like Caesarea Maritima with pagan monuments that were close enough to Jerusalem, Josephus tells us, to offend the Jewish priestly class (who he estimated to number 6000 in the city). Under Pilate, we have the Pilgrimage Road being built in the heart of a bustling city that has two million pilgrims visiting it at festival times. In fact, Josephus also says that Galilee there were 204 cities and villages, so full of people because of the richness of the soil that the very least of them contain more than 15,000 inhabitants. Those numbers would put the population of the Galilee region at in excess of three million. So, when the Bible says things like "Large crowds from Galilee, the Decapolis, Jerusalem, Judea and the region across the Jordan followed [Jesus]" (Matthew 4:25 NIV), and it expressly uses the term "large crowds" rather than just saying "crowds", it's likely describing thousands of people coming to Jesus. This is NOT your church Easter pageant.
A road that took ten years to build would have been a fairly invasive construction project, but that happened in Jerusalem in Jesus' day.
We tend to picture Israel's architecture as static in Jesus time. Out in the sticks, people might have added rooms to there homes when their children married, but beyond that we imagine it as unchanging. But that's just not the case. Herod the Great built the fortress of Masada but he also built cities like Caesarea Maritima with pagan monuments that were close enough to Jerusalem, Josephus tells us, to offend the Jewish priestly class (who he estimated to number 6000 in the city). Under Pilate, we have the Pilgrimage Road being built in the heart of a bustling city that has two million pilgrims visiting it at festival times. In fact, Josephus also says that Galilee there were 204 cities and villages, so full of people because of the richness of the soil that the very least of them contain more than 15,000 inhabitants. Those numbers would put the population of the Galilee region at in excess of three million. So, when the Bible says things like "Large crowds from Galilee, the Decapolis, Jerusalem, Judea and the region across the Jordan followed [Jesus]" (Matthew 4:25 NIV), and it expressly uses the term "large crowds" rather than just saying "crowds", it's likely describing thousands of people coming to Jesus. This is NOT your church Easter pageant.
This also adds some weight to the verses directly before that in Matthew: "Jesus went throughout Galilee, teaching in their synagogues, proclaiming the good news of the kingdom, and healing every disease and sickness among the people. News about him spread all over Syria, and people brought to him all who were ill with various diseases, those suffering severe pain, the demon-possessed, those having seizures, and the paralyzed; and he healed them" (Matthew 4:23-24 NIV). The few detailed accounts we have of individual healing miracles in the Gospels are cherry-picked because of their instructive nature, but as John 21:25 notes, Jesus did so many miracles that, "If every one of them were written down, I suppose that even the whole world would not have room for the books that would be written" (NIV). Over the period of his three year ministry, Jesus very likely healed thousands of people, and trained his disciples by example commanding them to proclaim that the Kingdom was here and demonstrate it by healing the sick, raising the dead, cleansing lepers, and driving out demons (Matthew 10:7-8). Then he told the disciples to reproduce and to teach the new disciples to do all the things he had commanded them to do. In Acts 5:16 we read, "Crowds gathered also from the towns around Jerusalem, bringing their sick and those tormented by impure spirits [to the apostles], and all of them were healed."
Jesus healed all the sick who came to him, numbering in the thousands, and he taught the disciples to do the same—with the command that progressive generations of disciples be instructed to do the same. That's us. We need to learn how to do this. Jesus' command was not a suggestion. It was a command. If you chose to be a disciple of Jesus, you are making a choice to follow his commands.
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