The year 1921 marked a major shift in surgical practice. Dr. Evan O’Neill Kane was concerned with how often surgeons were using general anesthesia given the risks of coma and death that came with it. He was convinced that local anesthesia could be used in many surgeries. To show that surgery with local anesthesia wouldn’t be too painful for patients, he had the idea to remove his own appendix. After he successfully completed the surgery on himself, he and other surgeons felt confident in using local anesthesia for more of their operations. While this feat is remarkable on its own, it also helps illustrate another aspect of Jesus’ story: he, too, was a doctor who operated on himself.

Recap: Israel’s Predicament

Since the Jewish people were in exile, they knew that they and their ancestors had fallen short of God’s mission for them. God had given them the Sinai Covenant, a treatment plan that would help them to cure the corruption in their human nature. He had told them to internalize His commandments so deeply that they would become etched into their hearts. This would simultaneously act to cut away, or circumcise, the corruption of sin from their hearts. But they had encountered a paradox. The corruption in their nature prevented them from following the treatment plan closely enough to circumcise the corruption. The Israelites could not heal the human condition because they too suffered from it. As a result, they landed in exile from their garden land just as Adam and Eve had been exiled from the original garden land. We can imagine the Jewish people wondering what it would take to cure the sin-disease that all humans suffered from.

Luke’s Gospel helps us to see how Jesus answered Israel’s predicament. In Luke’s outline of Jesus’ family history, he goes all the way back to Adam, where the corruption in human nature entered the story. This is a good reminder to us that though God chose to partner with the Israelites as a medical focus group, the Jewish people were working to heal human nature on behalf of all humans everywhere. As Jesus worked to accomplish Israel’s mission of being a Clinic for the sin-disease, he not only inaugurated a new era of Jewish history, he forged a new humanity that we are all invited to join. Before we get to the big picture, however, let’s start by looking at how Jesus retells Israel’s story in Luke’s Gospel.

Jesus Retells Israel’s Story

In the opening chapters of his Gospel, Luke shows several parallels between Jesus’ life and Israel’s history. Zechariah, Elizabeth, and Mary, with their sons John and Jesus, allude to Abraham, Sarah, and Hagar, with their sons Ishmael and Isaac, the main characters at the beginning of Israel’s story. Both Mary’s and Zechariah’s songs see their sons as part of the fulfillment of God’s promises to Abraham. Jesus’ baptism in the Jordan riverreflects Israel’s crossing of the Jordan river, which itself mirrored the crossing of the Red Sea. Jesus’ forty days in the wilderness recounts Israel’s forty years in the wilderness. Luke intentionally draws these parallels in his gospel account to show who Jesus is and what he accomplished for us. Every Jewish person in the first century would have been familiar with Israel’s story. By showing the ways in which Jesus followed in Israel’s footsteps, Matthew expresses that Jesus is a new standard-bearer for Israel, the Messiah who represents the Israelites, who themselves represented all of humanity in their partnership with God.

There is, however, a point where Jesus’ story deviates from Israel’s. In the desert, Israel was tempted to worship another god and ended up giving in to that temptation. Jesus’ story ends differently. The devil tempts Jesus in three ways, including an invitation to worship him, but Jesus is able to redeem Israel’s story by resisting this temptation. Jesus succeeded where the Israelites failed because of what he had been doing to his own human nature. Luke gives us a brief look at this just before his account of Jesus’ baptism with Luke 2:52: “And Jesus increased in wisdom and years and in divine and human favor” (emphasis added).

That verse seems somewhat unremarkable in English, but there are hidden layers of meaning in the Greek that Luke wrote in. While “increase” is an accurate and succinct translation of the Greek word “prokopto,” it leaves out an important association that Luke’s original audience would have immediately picked up on: “prokopto” is the same word that describes the blacksmith’s process of hammering impurities out of a hot piece of metal. What this verse reveals to us is that Jesus underwent a lifelong process of hammering out the corruption from his human nature. Jesus’ love of God and faithful obedience to Scripture worked to pound away at his disordered desires and recover the image of God that had so long been distorted.

Was Jesus’ Human Nature Really Corrupted?

Depending on your background, the idea that Jesus’ human nature was infected with the sin-disease might be new to you, and it might even sound heretical. If you want an in-depth look at this idea, including a range of scriptural support, check out our article, [insert article here]. In this post, we will give a brief overview of what this means.

Let’s consider an analogy. When someone says “I have the flu,” they might mean one of two things:

• they are infected with the influenza virus
• they have symptoms (e.g. coughing, sneezing, fatigue) that are associated with the flu

In other words, “the flu” could be referring to the underlying disease or the symptoms that follow. The word “sin” in the Bible is like this. It can describe two things:

• the underlying sinful condition (e.g. Romans 7:17)
• the actions that result from the condition (e.g. Luke 17:3-4)

Up to this point, we have been careful in distinguishing between “sin-disease,” the condition, and “sin-sickness” the actions/symptoms that result from the condition, but when coming across this word in the Bible, it is up to the reader to distinguish between the two meanings in context.

With this distinction in mind, we can say that Jesus suffered from the sin-disease, just like all humans, but in Jesus, the sin-disease did not result in a sin-sickness. Jesus, in contrast to all other humans, was able to fight against his corrupted human nature at every turn, pressing his healing love into every ounce of his being to drive out all traces of sin, never sinning in the process.

Jesus’ Restorative Mission

We can gain insight into what Jesus was doing in his own human nature through Luke’s documentation of Jesus’ ministry. Shortly after Jesus’ encounter with the devil in the desert, Jesus publicly announces the purpose of his ministry by reading Scripture to the synagogue in his hometown of Galilee:

The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,
because he has anointed me
to bring good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives
and recovery of sight to the blind,
to set free those who are oppressed,
to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.

These verses that Jesus quotes come from the book of Isaiah. In the last chapters of this book, God promises that Israel will be restored from exile and shares what a restored Israel would look like. They include many images like the ones Jesus mentions: comforting those who mourn, rebuilding ruined cities, feeding the hungry, bringing light into darkness, and more. These passages encapsulate the hope that the Jewish people had for the future. Referring to these promises, Jesus says “today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.” A radical proclamation! Jesus is declaring that he is the one who will bring forth this new age, this return from exile.

We saw in the previous post that [Jesus is king][CU1] of this new kingdom and new age, but what does this mean for everyone else? Luke’s Gospel shows us. Over and over, we see stories of healing. In the next three chapters alone, we see Jesus heal…

• Many in Capernaum
• A man with skin disease and many others after
• A paralyzed man in front of a crowd
• A man with a withered hand in a synagogue during the Sabbath
• A multitude of people from Judea, Jerusalem, and the coast of Tyre and Sidon

If we read closely, we’ll notice that Luke connects two important biblical themes to Jesus’ healings in these passages: cleansing/purification, and “forgiveness of sins.” By doing this, Luke is teaching us that the meaning of these themes are tied together with the experience of physical healing.

Jesus the Healer

The connection between healing and purification/cleansing should make sense to those who have read through the Clinic portion of this series, especially part two. The Jewish Law, the treatment plan for human nature that God gave to the Israelites as part of the Sinai Covenant, outlined a way of living that would help the Jewish people to circumcise their hearts. Where we have used the language of “corruption” and “restoration,” the Law often uses the language of “impurity” and “cleansing/purification” in a spiritual sense. The concept of “impurity” is not exactly the same as “an act of sin,” as people could become impure by circumstances out of their control, such as being in a house when someone dies, but God used this concept as a teaching tool for the Israelites.

God entrusted the Israelites with understanding impurity and purity. Being in a state of impurity blocked someone from being able to participate in temple rituals, which were a main source of the Israelites’ interactions with God. Some impurities could be cleansed by a ritual, but others could not. Some kinds were contagious, and coming into contact with a person in a state of impurity would “infect” others with impurity. Leprosy, for instance, was a type of impurity that was contagious, and it was generally incurable. As a result, people with leprosy were quarantined to avoid infecting others with both the disease and the state of impurity. Unfortunately, this meant that people with leprosy were largely cut off from communal worship and life. They could still pray, and priests visited them, but they could not take part in temple rituals or pilgrimages.

This context helps us to see why Jesus visiting those with leprosy was so shocking to those in his time. And he not only visits them, he heals them! Instead of the leprosy and impurity being contagious to him, Jesus’ healing and purity are “contagious.” Jesus’ touch heals skin disease. The crowds try to touch Jesus to experience his healing power. This is not to say that Jesus only heals by touching, as he heals a Roman centurion’s servant from a distance, but Luke highlights the stories about physical contact to shock a Jewish audience especially. Jesus touches both dreaded diseases and ceremonial impurities. But he is infected by neither. Instead, Jesus overcomes both by his power.

In reading these passages, the Jewish audience would also remember another object that makes things clean through touching: the brazen altar in the temple. This altar was where the Jewish priests kept a fire burning perpetually. At this burning altar, God drew the Israelites close to His special presence; [via animal sacrifices][dialysis], they passed impurities to God, and received purified life back from Him. Approaching God in the sanctuary year after year retold Moses approaching God back on Mount Sinai. In this way, the altar’s flame represented the purifying fire that the Israelites witnessed on Mount Sinai. Moses ascended Mount Sinai through the fire and was purified in some sense–his face shone with God’s glory when he descended. The divine fire on Mount Sinai itself paralleled the [flaming sword outside of Eden][CO2], which symbolized the need for Adam and Eve to cut and burn away the corruption in their human nature in order to return to the garden state, where they could experience the fullness of joy and life as [image bearers][CR] in relationship with God.

In short, Luke is saying that Jesus is the embodiment of the purifying flame that brings humanity back into full relationship with God, others, and Creation. Jesus’ external acts of healing others are an interpretive clue for understanding his internal work of healing all human nature. The medical treatment he gives others points toward the spiritual surgery–circumcision of the heart–that he is doing in himself.

Forgiveness of Sins

Another connected theme that shows up during Jesus’ ministry is the forgiveness of sins. This becomes a key phrase for Paul and the early Church for summarizing Jesus’ mission. It is often interpreted to mean that God is a judge who must punish us for our wrong actions, and Jesus can pardon us because he took our punishment instead. But this interpretation ignores the larger story of the Bible. Sin damages our relationship with God, but it does so in the way that an eye disease changes our perception of the sun, not in the way that a father might change his attitude towards a child who misbehaves.

The Greek word normally translated as “forgiveness” in the Bible means something like “a release from,” or a “sending away” of something. It has sometimes been translated as “remission,” as in “remission of debt,” or “remission of cancer.” Thus, Jesus frees people from the self-destructing power of sin. Viewed from another angle, Jesus sends sinfulness away. Talking about the use of the phrase “forgiveness of sins” in Acts, which is the continuation of Luke’s Gospel, N. T. Wright says

The purpose of forgiving sins, [in Acts] as elsewhere, is to enable people to become fully functioning, fully image-bearing human beings within God’s world, already now, completely in the age to come.

Luke’s Gospel helps us to understand the medical undertones of “forgiveness of sins” with the story of Jesus healing the paralyzed man.

”Which is easier: to say, ‘Your sins are forgiven you,’ or to say, ‘Stand up and walk’? But so that you may know that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins”—he said to the one who was paralyzed—“I say to you, stand up and take your stretcher and go to your home.” Immediately he stood up before them, took what he had been lying on, and went to his home, glorifying God.

Here, Jesus uses his power to heal paralysis as proof of his ability to forgive sins. The association between the two is not an accident, as the ancient world drew strong connections between physical and spiritual health. This story takes place right after Jesus heals the man with leprosy. Notice that the man with leprosy fell before being healed, and the paralyzed man rose after being healed. The falling and rising is an allusion to Jesus’ future death and resurrection, but it is also another way that Luke ties these stories and their themes of healing, purification, and forgiveness of sins together.

With all of this in mind, we might interpret the phrase “forgiveness of sins” to mean something like “healing from the sin-disease” when used in reference to a person. This healing has a repairing effect on a person’s relationship with God, just as curing an eye disease would allow someone to better experience the sun. It is an undoing of the corruption in our nature that holds us back from living out our image-bearing responsibilities and participating in the overflowing life of joy and love that God has for us.

Jesus in Israel’s Story

For the Israelites, “forgiveness of sins” took on an additional meaning in reference to the Jewish people. Early on in Luke’s Gospel, Zechariah celebrates that his son, John the Baptist, will point people towards Jesus. He implies that Jesus will accomplish “salvation by the forgiveness of sins” for “[God’s] people,” Israel. What, then, does “forgiveness of sin” mean for Israel? As N. T. Wright explains,

Forgiveness of sin is another way of saying “return from exile.”

This is the “salvation” that Jesus accomplishes. In contrast to the Israelites, who had been trapped in cycles of unfaithfulness to their covenant partnership with God because of the corruption within them, Jesus broke free of those patterns into full faithfulness to God the Father. Through Jesus, Israel’s story came to a new ending and opened up to new horizons. Through his life, death, and resurrection, Jesus cured the corruption in his human nature. This is what Jesus meant when he said “I have not come to abolish [the Law], but to fulfill.” Recall from Clinic, Pt. 2 that the Law was given to Israel as part of a treatment plan for the Israelites’ (and all others’) diseased human nature. The Israelites were unable to stick to the treatment plan in its entirety, which is what led to the Babylonian exile, an extension of Adam and Eve’s exile from the Garden of Eden. Jesus didn’t come to show that the Law was bad or wrong. The Law, as the apostle Paul wrote, was a “teacher” that helped the Jewish people to see God’s character and live better as images of God.

Therefore, God’s work with Israel as a clinic had not been in vain. Jesus saved his human nature from the corruption of sin. The Israelites had been God’s clinic, but Jesus was God’s cure. Israel tried what the rest of the world would not, and Jesus accomplished what Israel could not. The Israelites partnered with God further towards healing than anyone else, and even diagnosed and documented the disease, which took incredible honesty and hope; however, they still could not complete their mission with the Law alone. Jesus succeeded where all others had failed. As a representative for all of Israel, and therefore all people, Jesus accomplished Israel’s vocation and the Law’s purpose: the defeat of corruption and the restoration of human nature back into full relationship with God, others, and Creation. “Salvation,” then, doesn’t mean “salvation from God’s punishment,” as some Christians claim. To the Israelites, it meant “return from exile.” With our understanding of Israel’s story, we can put it another way: restoration to who God always intended us to be. Jesus accomplished this for us.

Jesus, as Israel’s true representative, and even as Israel, came fully home from the Babylonian Exile. And this was the answer to all human yearning to be restored and come home. Though he was fully human and suffered from our sin-disease, Jesus resisted the corruption and lived a truly human life, one that fully embodied what it meant to be an image of God. As the truly human one, Jesus returned human nature from our exile from the Garden of Eden.

As God, Jesus fashioned a new humanity. That is the topic of the next post, Cure, Pt. 3: Jesus Retells God’s Story in John.