Matthew 15:30, “…they put them at His feet, and He healed them.”
Matthew’s language in this section is almost a verbatim reproduction of Isaiah 35:5-6a where YHWH’s coming to His people brings about miraculous healing. And yet, in both Isaiah and here in Matthew, the sort of healing that is recounted—and especially the way in which it is recounted—lays emphasis on these healings as instances of “too-good-to-be-true” reversals….as undoings of the curse, as inbreakings of life into death. The blind are made to see, the lame are walking, the mute are speaking (or singing for joy). The very thing that seemed assuredly impossible, the very thing that could never happen here….*that* is what YHWH achieves for His people—supremely so in Christ.
These healings are—on the human level—what water in the wilderness and streams in the desert is on the geographic level. The salvation anticipated in Isaiah 35 (and throughout Isaiah) is one that will deny our curse-conditioned expectations, it will overturn our assumptions about the way things are, it will startle us with the good, it will be a eucatastrophe. Where we expected only burning sand there will be a pool of water. Where we expected only dry, hard rock, there will flow a stream of life. Where we expected only thorns and thistles, there will spring up the flowering myrtle and fragrant cypress; where there was blindness there will be sight, where there was lameness there will be strength, where there was silence there will be song, where there was death there will be life—this is the salvation of YHWH, this is Jesus Christ: Life in death, Hope in hopelessness, Light in darkness, Joy in sorrow, Peace in tribulation, Order in Chaos, Day in the Night, God with us.
Any and all who cast themselves at Immanuel’s feet will find this “too-good-to-be-true” healing. Why? Because His feet are the feet of our Risen Lord and God, and yet they are also the feet that bear in themselves the wounds of all our sin, sickness, shame, and damnation. How beautiful are the feet of Him who IS the good news (Is. 52:7), the feet that still carry the scars of our death now transfigured into the emblems of our eternal life in Him.
