"What He Said" (Did Jesus Command Sicknesses to Leave?)

Hover over the references to see the Biblical text

When Jesus sent the disciples ahead of him with instructions to heal the sick, he gave them power and authority but no handbook conveniently outlining each step in its proper order. That wasn't just because the cost of papyrus or velum made it prohibitively expensive to mass produce handouts back then. It was because Jesus was their handbook. He had been modeling healing to the disciples for some time prior to sending them out, and they would have been watching closely because the whole point of being a disciple was to learn to imitate the master. Disciples were like super-fans: they wanted to be their rabbi. We should be the same. So, the question for us—in regards to healing—is the same one the twelve would have been taking mental notes on: what did Jesus do? 

His "methodology" should also be ours. Whatever he did, that's what we want to do too. However, what we actually do tends to have more to do with whatever contemporary models we have been exposed to than with the model presented by Jesus in the Gospels. There are a number of different models of healing employed in the Church today, but in this post I want to focus on just one—commanding healing—and ask the question, is this what Jesus did?

The way this is commonly practiced to is by speaking to a sickness and/or body part and commanding either the sickness to leave or the body part to be healed (or if you're like me, don't really know what you're doing, and want to cover all your bases, both). 

In one tradition that practices this, known as Word of Faith, the approach is more than simply an optional methodology, it's actually seen as being an essential part of making healing work. As Andrew Wommack, a well know Word of Faith teacher has said, "Faith is voice activated," and he means that literally. Your speaking makes faith, which is understood to be the power by which God created the universe, do its thing. If the theology is taken to it's logical extreme, which it sometimes is, God is no longer active in the miracles. If you have faith and you have words, your have everything that is needed.1

While Word of Faith represents an extreme in Christian Theology, speaking a command is a common approach to healing even in Pentecostal and Charismatic circles, and is frequently sighted as resulting in greater effectiveness. This is worth bearing in mind while reading my thoughts below. While I believe good theology is important and can make a big difference to both motivation and practice, it will not automatically make healing happen. Trust me on this. I can, in fact, make the observation from personal experience that neither well thought out theology nor issuing verbal commands guarantees success. With my own current lack of effectiveness noted, let's return to the question of whether Jesus modelled commanding healing or not.

I spent quite some time studying the Greek verb tenses Jesus used when he healed people (and I've put some notes about that in the footnotes below2), however, there really was nothing special about them. For example, Jesus' choice of and active or passive is sometimes interesting, but not particularly instructive. What is instructive, however, is that when he gives commands, he nearly always addresses the sick person rather than the disease.

An exception to this is when Jesus is driving out demons. Regarding that work, we're told he "drove out the spirits with a word" (e.g., Matthew 8:16) and we're given numerous examples of him doing that (e.g., Mark 1:25-27, Luke 4:35-36; Matthew 8:32, where Jesus literally uses "a word", Mark 5:7-8, Luke 8:28-29; Luke 4:41; Matthew 17:18, Mark 9:25,  Luke 9:42). However, even here there are notable exceptions. With the woman who was bent over "by a spirit for eighteen years," Jesus never addresses the spirit, he just told her "you are set free from your infirmity," and touched her, and she was immediately healed (Luke 13:10-17). With the Syrophoenician Woman whose daughter was "demon-possessed and suffering terribly," Jesus simply informs her that her "request is granted" (Matthew 15:21-28). And with the people healed at sunset in Luke 4:40-41, it seems the demons came out of the people because they were healed rather than being commanded by Jesus to leave and healing being the result of the demons departing. So even with demons—which I would have expected to be the slam dunk for showing Jesus being consistent in commanding—we don't always see him employing that approach.

In the cast majority of healings where Jesus speaks, he is speaking to the person, and not to their body or symptom. Actually, only once that I can think of do we see Jesus speaking a command to a non-functioning bodily organ, and that's when he tells a deaf mans ears to "be opened" (Mark 7:32-35). Of course, that's an example with some problems too: it seems reasonable to assume Jesus was speaking to the ears, but the ears were deaf, so was he actually giving them an instruction? Then again, he also speaks to a storm (Luke 8:24; Matthew 8:26; Mark 4:39) and storms don't even have ears. Other than this, the only example of commanding healing I can think of is when Jesus rebuked Peter's mother-in-law's fever (Luke 4:39). 

As I already mentioned, it is more common for Jesus to give an instruction to the sick person than to their disease or symptom. Typically, what he tells them to do is the very thing they're unable to do. This is often interpreted by practitioners of healing, especially those in the Word of Faith camp, as Jesus telling the afflicted person to do something that would "activate their faith," without which (according to Word of Faith teaching, at least) they would not be able to be healed. That idea, is something never stated in the text and is an assumption that ignores the fact that some commands Jesus gives are things the person has no capacity to act on. For example, in Matthew 8:3, Jesus says to the leper, "Be clean." Even though it was a command directly spoken to the leper, it was not something the leper had any control over. The same thing could be argued regarding the lame man in Matthew 9:6, whom Jesus commanded to, "Get up."3 Lame people cannot get up, so the man would have to be healed prior to acting on the command, not afterwards. What makes this more obvious with the lame man is that Jesus command was issued to provide evidence that the man was forgiven of his sins, and that forgiveness was already completed four verses earlier (Matthew 9:2) and had required no action on the man's part.

There are, of course, numerous examples of Jesus healing people without issuing commands at all.4 Here are just a few:

  • The Syrophoenician woman's daughter, mentioned above (Matthew 15:28)
  • The centurions' servant (Matthew 8:13)
  • The hemorrhaging woman (Mark 5:25-29)
  • The crowds who touch him and where healed (Luke 6:19, Matthew 14:36)
That, however, is not the point I wish to make with this blog post. Rather, I have set out to demonstrate that commanding healing, although a very common practice today, is one of the least common methods Jesus employed and is, in fact, really only attested to twice.

So, if we are serious about imitating Jesus when we lay hands on the sick, perhaps we should dispense with this particular practice and say the kinds of things Jesus did, things that presupposed the healing. That, however, requires a model that is almost universally rejected: you treat the person like they're already healed and expect them to be able to act accordingly. Note that I don't say you believe they're already healed and that you're waiting on it's manifestation. I'm saying you don't wait on it's manifestation, because healing is the manifestation of healing. Although Jesus has already done the work of redemption, a sick person is not a healed person. They're a sick person. Healed people are, by definition, not sick.


FOOTNOTES
1. Actually, that healing can be done without God's direct involvement may be a defensible position. When Jesus sent out the 12 he gave them power and authority (Matthew 10:1, Mark 6:7 Luke 9:1), but not the Holy Spirit, and he said, "Freely you have received; freely give" (Matthew 10:8b). Read at face value, that suggests the Lord had been given them what they needed to heal the sick and that they could do it themselves without needing the Lord to act again. However, my point in this blog post is not to discuss that issue but the issue of whether the methodology of commanding healing is actually modeled for us in the Gospels.

2. By my count, while healing, Jesus used aorist imperatives 21 times, present imperatives 12 times, aorist participles 3 times, present indicatives 5 times, perfect indicatives 2 times, and an aorist indicative 1 time. I could expand on what those various verb tenses mean, but, as the summary of that discussion is that there is nothing special about the way Jesus said what he said, that would add little value to the conversation. By way of comparison, when Jesus sends the disciples to find the colt in Matthew 21:2, he uses an aorist imperative, a present imperative, an aorist participles, and a future indicative. All these verb forms are simply either instructions (imperatives and participles) or observations (indicatives), and the same is true with Jesus' words in the healing miracles. More relevant to the discussion is not what Jesus said, but who or what is addressed and what is actually commanded.

A good example of where the verb tense really seems to make no difference is in the comparison of two of Jesus' resuscitation miracles. In Luke 7:14 Jesus speaks to the widow's dead son with a passive imperative, effectively saying, "Be arisen," but in Luke 8:54, he uses the active imperative of the same word and says to the dead girl, “Arise.” Now, when you give a passive imperative to a person (as Jesus did when addressing the dead boy), you're not commanding them to do anything. Essentially, you're just letting them know that something's being done to them, which makes sense when you're speaking to a dead person. However, it doesn't really seem to matter if that makes sense or not as in the second case, Jesus addresses the dead person directly and tells them to get up. So should we be giving commands to the person or just updating them on the progress? Apparently it doesn't matter: either works.
 
3. The paralytic is actually an example of Jesus using a passive verb, so "get up" could more directly be translated as "be arised" (that is terrible English, of course, so what we read in English bibles instead is simply (and I would argue, reasonably) "get up" or "arise."
 
4. At this point, with the discussion having moved to the reality that Jesus healed people in many different ways, a common statement to hear is "there is no formula." While that may be true, it is outside of the scope of this discussion except that it weakens any suggestion that commanding healing is the way to heal the sick. However, my argument above is that we barely ever see commanding healing modelled to begin with.

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