Jesus,who inspired confidence and faith by the absolute honesty of his person and the lovable simplicity of his character,was undoubtedly able to help those who came to him in the agony of imagined distress.
When it became known that the young Nazarene (prophet,Messiah,or whatever else the people in their blind devotion believed him to be)could give people a temporary relief from their ailments,men and women and children came from far and near to ask that they be restored to health.
Tradition,in its eagerness to make a good story better,insisted upon depicting the second journey through Galilee as the triumphant progress of a wonder-doctor.
First,on the way back to Capernaum,it was the child of a rich man which had been given up by the local physician and which was brought back to life.
Next it was the mother-in-law of Peter who was ailing with a severe fever and who,in the twinkling of an eye,was sufficiently recovered to cook a meal for her guests and serve it to them at her own hospitable table.
Then there followed a steady stream of patients;people who thought that they were lame and had to be carried to Jesus on stretchers;people who for years had suffered from strange and indescribable maladies;nervous patients of every form and deion who needed but one reassuring word to be set upon the road to recovery.
Whatever the truth of several of those stories (dead people rarely come back to life)they certainly created great excitement and curiosity in Galilee and were soon repeated in Jerusalem.
But the Pharisees could not entirely approve.They were undoubtedly grateful for what Jesus had done for their suffering fellow-men,but they thought that he had gone much too far when he refused to make a difference between members of his own race and foreigners and had cured the servant of a Roman officer and the daughter of a Greek mother,and had relieved the pain of an old woman who insisted upon being sick on the Sabbath day,and when he had allowed lepers to touch the hem of his garment,in their desperate hope that this would ease their misery.
Besides,his willingness to accept a tax-gatherer,employed by the Romans and stationed at Capernaum,as one of his pupils,was a terrible thing.It seemed little short of treason to the cause of the much-suffering fatherland and several good people told Jesus so.
But although he appreciated their motive,he was not convinced that he had done any wrong.
To him,all men and all women,tax-gatherers,politicians,saints and sinners,were alike.
He recognised and accepted their common humanity.
And that there might be no doubt about his stand upon this matter,he took all his disciples and together with them he went to dine at the house of one of the offending officials as if it were an honour to sit at the humble table of a Roman henchman.
When the Pharisees heard of this they did not say anything openly.
But they told each other what they would do when Jesus again should venture to come within their jurisdiction.And when Jesus came back to Jerusalem for the last Passover of his life,he was met by the silent enmity of a determined group of men who understood that their little world would come to an end just as soon as the ideals of this strange prophet should have been turned into realised facts.