We’re walking through a series of reflections on Mark 1:29-39. (Part one was yesterday.)

Did he heal everyone who was sick in the town?

Maybe. Capernaum was a town of maybe 1500 people. The text said that the whole town showed up, all the sick and demon-possessed, and that many people were healed. The people who were there that night were healed, and the evil spirits were driven out of people.

It could be that everyone who was chronically or acutely ill was brought. If that was 1 of 100, that would be 15 people. If it was 1 in 10, that would be 150 people. So it is possible.

Why did Jesus stop healing people in that town? Did he mean to turn his back on them?

We don’t know everything that happened that next morning. When Matthew tells this story, he says that the people wanted to keep Jesus from leaving. So it’s possible that they were interested in the idea of having someone around who could cast out demons and heal people. It would be really convenient for them and would help them out economically as well as physically.

And the people who were needing healing on this next morning would have been people who weren’t from the town. They had been carried in from the region around the northern part of the lake.

And they don’t seem to be asking him to stay so they could listen to him teach.

Why does that matter?

Because, according to Jesus, physical healing isn’t the most important thing Jesus does. He wanted to move to the other towns in the area and tell them the good news of the Kingdom. To call them to repent and believe in God.

The good news of the gospel isn’t that we will have physical healing. The good news of the gospel is that we can know God, in sickness and in health, in richness and in poverty.

It sounds, when I say that, a lot like marriage. And that’s a metaphor that’s used in the Bible about the relationship between God and his people. God’s interested in long-term relationship even during the pain, not just to take away pain.