To the two disciples sent by John the Baptist Jesus said: 'go and tell John what you hear and see: the blind receive their sight and the lame walk, lepers are cleansed and the deaf hear, and the dead are raised up, and the poor have good news preached to them' (Mt 11.4-5). What the prophets had promised is now being fulfilled (Isa 29.18-19; 35.5-6; 61.1). Even the dead are being raised to life. But even that is not the greatest miracle. The most important stands at the end: 'and the poor have good news preached to them'. The poor are the first beneficiaries of the proclamation and the inchoative realization of the kingdom.
Jesus did not just promulgate theories about liberation. He brought concrete salvation reaching the most fundamental needs of people. Jesus proclaimed the good news to the poor not only in words but also in mighty deed, in healings and exorcisms. The latter indicated the end of Satan's rule. Explaining their significance, Jesus said: 'How can one enter a strong man's house and plunder his goods, unless he first binds the strong man? then indeed he may plunder his house' (Mt 12.29). The exorcisms Jesus performed were signs that Jesus was binding the power, the stronghold of Satan and all evil powers and establishing God's rule among people. He was liberating the poor who were under the tyranny of evil. His miracles announced the dawning of God's rule when the poor would be liberated from their poverty. ...
Jesus' miracles are in the first place a sign of the dawning of the eschaton, the kingdom of God in our world of misery and injustice, and its immediate radiation on people, in particular, in favor of the poor of all kinds.
This message of salvation is addressed first of all to the poorest, to those who cannot wait because their needs concern their very lives. If people are in a desperate situation, they ask for a 'miracle', and nobody has the right to disapprove of this request. Paralytics and lepers lived in such a situation: no medical hope, no social security to assure them a minimum of livelihood. Moreover, they were in total religious insecurity because they were considered sinners. Physically, morally, socially, they were outcasts. Jesus came to restore their taste of life. ...
Salvation which starts from the elementary needs of people moves towards deeper liberation from sin, offered to everyone personally. This is the irruption in people's life of the unexpected, which opens up for them a new possibility of existence, and invites them to a life which makes them come out of their closed world of sin, law and death. Thus the miracles reported in the synoptic gospels provoke a movement much deeper, much more radical than just physical healing: they insist on the conversion of being. Through faith they call people to follow Jesus. And yet the fact should still be stressed that redemption for Jesus was much more than something merely internal, something infinitely greater than a theological proposition limited to the forgiveness of sins. The forgiveness of sins is a narrower, concentric circle within the wider reality of cosmic redemption, of the transformation of the world.
Let me repeat ...
miracles ... provoke a movement much deeper, much more radical than just physical healing: they insist on the conversion of being. Through faith they call people to follow Jesus. And yet the fact should still be stressed that redemption for Jesus was much more than something merely internal, something infinitely greater than a theological proposition limited to the forgiveness of sins. The forgiveness of sins is a narrower, concentric circle within the wider reality of cosmic redemption, of the transformation of the world.
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