Jesus was and is a healer. He healed when He walked among us and has continued to do so for two thousand years. He heals through love and empathy. The accounts of Jesus’ healing in the Gospels describe agape, or “descending love” according to Pope Benedict XVI in Deus Caritas Est. (The opposite being eros, or “ascending love,” the word used in most non-Christian ancient literature.) And as the Apostle John declared in his first letter, Ο Θεός είναι αγάπη: “God is love.”
The Greek and Roman Art of Healing
By the first century, Greek and Roman physicians had been practicing the art of healing for hundreds of years. The philosopher Plutarch argued that Homer was something of a physician and that the Iliad and Odyssey showcase an understanding of the physician’s art.
The greatest ancient physician was the fifth century B.C. Greek Hippocrates, whose legacy lasted for over two thousand years. Hippocrates was an asclepiad on the Aegean island of Cos; the asclepiads were self-described descendants and disciples of the first healer, Asclepios, who was subsequently deified according to Greek mythology.
Hippocrates was an empirical observer of disease more than a healer, but he inspired a variety of healers that included Erasistratus, the third century physician who studied not only physical causes of disease but nervous and emotional causes as well. The Platonic vision of the combination of the body and soul, inspired in part by divine love, Eros, resulted in a commensurate approach to medicine. In perusing the Hippocratic Corpus and other ancient sources, however, the reader does not encounter the kind of empathetic healing of Jesus.
The Transformational Power of Jesus’ Healing
The synoptic gospels provide several examples of Jesus’ healing in quick succession. In the Gospel of Matthew chapter eight, for example, Jesus healed by touching. A leper approached Him asking for healing, to which Jesus replied by touching the leper and saying, “Be thou healed,” and the man’s leprosy vanished. Likewise, when He went to Peter’s house and saw that Peter’s mother suffered from fever, He touched her and the fever left her. That same day the demon-possessed came before Him, and “he expelled the spirits with a word.”
Soon after, Jesus healed a women suffering from incessant bleeding by her merely touching the hem of His garment. The Gospel of Mark explained that Jesus felt power (Greek dynamin) flow from Him, which is how He knew the woman had touched His garment, even though He was in the middle of a crowd. Jesus’ healing, according to the synoptics, involved touch, words, and sensations of a healing power that emanated from Him.
The most astonishing example of Jesus’ healing was when He healed a man possessed by demons who lived on the eastern shores of the Sea of Galilee, in the Decapolis. In this episode, Jesus arrived in a place where the prohibitions and attitudes of the people were not Jewish, but rather part of the Hellenistic culture of the eastern Mediterranean that developed after the conquests of Alexander the Great.
The people at the time were influenced by the traditional Greco-Roman pantheon of anthropomorphic deities that intermixed with humans who worshipped them by sacrifice in temples. The growth of mystery religions differed from this traditional polytheism by the worship of sometimes single deities, like Isis or Cybele. These worshippers were initiated into mysteries that only the initiates could enjoy. The mystery religions typically promised eternal life.
Jesus was approached by a man who had been influenced by this Hellenistic culture. Interestingly, the man groveled before Him in an act, called proskynesis, typical of religions influenced by Asian culture. Having never seen Jesus, this man nevertheless knew Him to have the spirit of the divine upon Him, and thus cried out, “what have you to do with me, Jesus son of God the most high?”
According to the different accounts in the synoptic gospels, the man was a savage who lived among the tombs of the dead; even chains could not hold his demon-possessed strength. Indeed, when Jesus asked his name the man replied, Legion, evoking both the multitude of demons possessing him and the strength of a Roman military unit.
Jesus allowed the demons to flee from the man into a nearby heard of swine, which stampeded into the lake and drowned. People arrived from one of the ten towns of the Decapolis, and they witnessed that the formerly crazed lunatic was now sitting next to Jesus, rational and calm.
How could such a transformation take place?
Although the Greek word sympatheia is not used, the story nevertheless implies it in Jesus’ approach to healing the man. His healing relied on empathy, that quality by which a person is able to feel what another feels. But even more, Jesus could feel, sense, intuit, know all about this poor, distraught man overwhelmed by his past, and the countless images of trauma and horror that had so disabled his mind.
One’s past experiences can accumulate at times into tumultuous waves and spasms of crippling fear. Christ understood this. “Somehow or other, Jesus took upon himself Legion’s fears, insecurities, memories, past, and sin, and through love and empathy broke the weight of the past to make the present endurable and the future possible” (Lawson, 2019). Jesus was able to transform, metamorphosize, this man, unknown except for his chosen appellation of Legion.
Physical and Spiritual Metamorphosis
Examples of metamorphosis are found often in ancient literature. Ovid’s Metamorphoses contains the stories of the Greek gods interacting with and changing humans. Lucius Apulius’ account of the man transformed into a donkey and saved by the mysteries of Isis was also titled Metamorphosis. Jesus’ healing of Legion was the same, a complete transformation, from sin, doubt, despair, and evil to hope, goodness, and love. This is truly an example of agape, or descending love, transformative love, of so loving another that such love heals, metamorphosizes a person into something completely different.
So complete was the change in the body, mind, and soul of Legion that he became arguably the first Apostle to the Gentiles. He wanted to join Jesus in His ministry, but Jesus commanded him to go among his people of Decapolis telling them of what he had experienced. When Jesus returned to the region later, so many people had heard of his healings that four thousand appeared, hungry for the preaching of the Word.
That other, more famous, apostle to the Gentiles, Paul of Tarsus, experienced a similar metamorphosis in his body and soul on the road to Damascus—this time by the risen Christ. The impact of Christ’s healing on Paul was similar to that of Legion.
Jesus was a physician unlike the many physicians of the ancient world. He was able to heal in a way that Hippocrates and Galen could not, because of His overwhelming empathy and love for the other. He healed body and mind of pain, crippling diseases, hate, despair, and hopelessness, accompanying the many illnesses that overwhelmed the people of the ancient world. Christ especially healed—and conquered—fear, including the greatest fear: death.
Editor’s Note: This article is part of a CE original series on the History of Love, pursuing the meaning of love and our understanding of it throughout time.
Image from Wikimedia Commons
