Expositor's Bible: The Gospel of St LukeBurton, Henry
Religion
Expositor's Bible: The Gospel of St Luke
Burton, Henry
Bible. Luke -- Commentaries
And now it remains for us to gather up the light of these miracles, and
to focus it on Him who was the central Figure, Jesus, the Divine Healer.
And (1) the miracles of healing speak of the knowledge of Jesus. The
question, "What is man?" has been the standing question of the ages, but
it is still unanswered, or answered but in part. His complex nature is
still a mystery, the eternal riddle of the Sphinx, and Œdipus comes
not. Physiology can number and name the bones and muscles, can tell the
forms and functions of the different organs; chemistry can resolve the
body into its constituent elements, and weigh out their exact
proportions; philosophy can map out the departments of the mind; but man
remains the great enigma. Biology carries her silken clue right up to
the primordial cell; but here she finds a Gordian knot, which her
keenest instruments cannot cut, or her keenest wit unravel. Within that
complex nature of ours are oceans of mystery which Thought may indeed
explore, but which she cannot fathom, paths which the vulture eye of
Reason hath not seen, whose voices are the voices of unknown tongues,
answering each other through the mist. But how familiar did Jesus seem
with all these life-secrets! how intimate with all the life-forces! How
versed He was in etiology, knowing without possibility of mistake whence
diseases came, and just where they looked! It was no mystery to Him how
the hand had shrunk, shrivelling into a mass of bones, with no skill in
its fingers, and no life in its cloyed-up veins, or how the eyes had
lost their power of vision. His knowledge of the human frame was an
exact and perfect knowledge, reading its innermost secrets, as in a
transparency, knowing to a certainty what links had dropped out of the
subtle mechanism, and what had been warped out of place, and knowing
well just at what point and to what an extent to apply the healing
remedy, which was His own volition. All earth and all heaven were
without a covering to His gaze; and what was this but Omniscience?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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