Eucharistic exhortation

Matthew 4:24: And the news about Him went out into all Syria; and they brought to Him all who were ill, taken with various diseases and pains, demoniacs, epileptics, paralytics; and He healed them.

Jesus comes preaching, casting out demons, and healing. In doing all this, He fulfills the prophecies of Isaiah. According to Isaiah, the Messiah comes to bring Israel out of captivity by giving sight to the blind, by causing the deaf to hear, by restoring the lame. The captives who are healed and restored form a procession in a new exodus, journeying out of exile into the land of promise.

Jesus fulfills this new Exodus prophecy. He gathers the lame, sick, demon-possessed, paralyzed, deaf, blind, and dumb, heals them, and then this multitude follows Him up to a mountain, where He speaks to them as the new and greater Moses.

This is the kingdom God is forming. This is the kingdom of heaven. Its subjects and citizens are not the wellborn and the mighty. Not many wise, not many strong, not many well-born, but the foolish and despised of the world. Look at the multitudes following Jesus, and see the face of the man whose eyes bulged and who drooled when he was having an epileptic fit. See the face of the handicapped fellow from Wal-Mart whose twisted hands and garbled voice made you nervous as you walked into the store. See the woman whose illness you could smell whenever you were near her.

Look up and down the rows here at Trinity, and see the same people. This is the feast of the kingdom of heaven, and this feast is packed with the same kinds of people. We are all cripples in the process of being healed. We have all been blind to the light that has come into the world, deaf to His word, paralyzed when God demanded action, under the dominion of Satan. This is the feast of the kingdom, and your table companions are like Jesus' – healed paralytics, demoniacs, cripples, blind and deaf and dumb. Healed, to be sure; still, the foolish things of the world.

Is this a kingdom you want to be part of? It had better be, because there is no other.

posted by Peter J. Leithart on Sunday, August 12, 2007 at 07:58 AM

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