Conforming (phase 2), Jesus Heals: To be Free to be Able to Choose - AtaDc (step18), session 6

And they brought to him a man who was deaf and had an impediment in his speech; and they besought him to lay his hand upon him. And taking him aside from the multitude privately, he put his fingers into his ears, and he spat and touched his tongue; and looking up to heaven, he sighed, and said to him, "Eph'phatha," that is, "Be opened." - Mk 7: 32-34 (full reading, 31-37)

I have always imagined this healing as taking place among the crowd. In my mind's eye, I saw Jesus and this deaf man surrounded by a throng of observers as he healed him. Today I notice the words at the beginning of verse 33: taking him aside from the multitude privately. There were a number of other healings which Jesus performed in private, too. Therefore the purpose of them was never spectacle.

Throughout this step we have touched around the central reason for each healing Jesus performs without explicitly stating the two most fundamental facts about them. Each of these miraculous healings was temporary; eventually, their recipients grew old, became sick, or encountered an accident in which their body ceased to live. Therefore purpose of every corporal, passing healing which Jesus performed in the gospels and provides today as the comparatively rare miraculous answer to prayer - rare lest it might seem mundane or capricious - and the true lasting miracle that results from them, is the permanent healing and restoration of our souls, either for the recipient of the physical miracle or for one or more witnesses to it. I don't know all the reasons why God has healed the hearing of Anna, our friends' daughter who had never heard from birth without the use of hearing aids, and then not well. But whatever other purposes God may have, he has used this to bolster my own faith in times when I am prone to doubt.

And he charged them to tell no one; but the more he charged them, the more zealously they proclaimed it. - Mk 7: 36

At first reading this seems an ungrateful response to the restoration of one's hearing. In rereading, "they" appears to refer to the multitude throughout these verses.