So, my brethren, do you take the whole Christ for yours, the Son of God, the crown and end of revelation, the sinless and the perfect, who died on the Cross for our salvation, and loves and pities, and is ready to help every one of us; who, therefore, commands us with an absolute authority, and who one day comes to be our Judge?  If you turn to Him and ask Him, ‘Art Thou He that should come?’ let Him speak for Himself, and He will answer you:  ‘I that speak unto thee am He.’  When He asks each of us, as He does now, ‘Whom sayest thou that I am?’ oh that we may all answer, with the assent of our understandings, with the love of our hearts, with the submission of our wills, ’Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God.’

THE TOUCH THAT CLEANSES

’When He was come down from the mountain, great multitudes followed Him. 1.  And, behold, there came a leper and worshipped Him, saying, Lord, if Thou wilt, Thou canst make me clean. 3.  And Jesus put forth His hand, and touched him, saying, I will; he thou clean.  And immediately his leprosy was cleansed. 4.  And Jesus saith unto him, See thou tell no man; but go thy way, shew thyself to the priest, and offer the gift that Moses commanded, for a testimony unto them.’—­MATT. viii. 14.

THE great collection of Jesus’ sayings, which we call the Sermon on the Mount, is followed by a similar collection of Jesus’ doings, which we call miracles.  It is significant that Matthew puts the words first and the works second, as if to teach us the relative importance of the two.  Some one has said that miracles are ‘the bell rung before the sermon,’ but Matthew thinks that the sermon comes first.  He masses together nine miracles (the raising of Jairus’ daughter and the healing of the woman with the bloody issue being so closely connected that they may be regarded as one) which are divided into three groups of three each, and are separated by three sections of more general character, like three landings in a broad flight of stairs, or three breaks in a procession (ch. viii. 18-22; ix. 9-17, 35-38).

The first triplet comprises miracles of bodily healing, and shows Jesus as the great physician, curing leprosy, palsy, and fever, three types of disease which have their analogues in the moral world.  The cure of the leper comes first, apparently not from chronological reasons, but because leprosy had been made by the Old Testament legislation the symbol of sin.  The story is found in all the Synoptic Gospels, with slight variations, which make more impressive their verbal identity in reporting the leper’s appeal and the Lord’s answer.