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Luke 18‒19

The Lord foretells His resurrection; the blind man

Luke 18

31 And taking the twelve, He said to them, Behold, we are going up to Jerusalem, and all things must be finished which are written by the prophets respecting the Son of Man.
32 For He shall be delivered up to the nations, and shall be mocked, and insulted, and spit upon,
33 and they shall scourge Him, and shall kill Him; and the third day He shall rise again.
34 And they understood none of these things; and this saying was hidden from them, and they did not know the things that were said.

35And it came to pass as He drew near to Jericho, a certain blind man sat along the way begging.
36 And hearing the crowd go through, he inquired what it meant.
37 And they reported to him, Jesus of Nazareth is passing by.
38 And he cried, saying, Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me.
39 And they who went before rebuked him, that he should be silent; but he cried out much more: Son of David, have mercy on me!
40 And Jesus, standing, ordered him to be brought to Him; and when he was near, He questioned him,
41 saying, What wilt thou that I shall do to thee? And he said, Lord, that I may receive my sight.
42 And Jesus said to him, Receive thy sight; thy faith has saved thee.
43 And immediately he received his sight; and he followed Him, glorifying God; and all the people, when they saw it, gave praise to God.

AE 83. ...With those who are in love towards Him and faith in Him, the Lord lives, but with those who are not in love and in faith toward Him, He does not live.... The Lord, when He was in the world, was Divine truth itself, and as Divine truth was altogether rejected by the Jews, therefore the Lord, who was Divine truth, suffered Himself to be crucified.... Whenever, therefore, the Lord speaks of His passion He calls Himself the Son of man, that is, Divine truth.... That Divine truth was altogether rejected by the Jews is well known; for they accepted nothing that the Lord said, and not even that He was the Son of God.... “Jerusalem” here is the Jewish Church. “To be delivered to the Gentiles, to be mocked, to be shamefully entreated, to be spit upon, to be scourged, to be put to death,” are the wicked ways in which the Jews treated Divine truth; and as the Lord was Divine truth itself, because He was the Word (John 1:14), and as it was foretold in the prophets that Divine truth would be so dealt with in the end of the church, therefore it is said, “that all things may be accomplished that have been foretold through the prophets concerning the Son of man.”

AE 815:5. There were three reasons why faith in the Lord healed these [people]. The first was because they acknowledged His Divine omnipotence, and that He was God.

The second was because faith is acknowledgment, and from acknowledgment intuition; and all intuition from acknowledgment makes another to be present; this is a common thing in the spiritual world. So now, when a New Church was to be established by the Lord, it was this intuition from an acknowledgment of the Lord’s omnipotence from which they were first to look to the Lord; and from this it is clear what is here meant by faith.

The third reason was, that all the diseases healed by the Lord represented and thus signified the spiritual diseases that correspond to these natural diseases; and spiritual diseases can be healed only by the Lord, and in fact by looking to His Divine omnipotence and by repentance of life. This is why He sometimes said, “Thy sins are forgiven thee; go and sin no more.” This faith also was represented and signified by their faith in His miracles. But the faith by which spiritual diseases are healed by the Lord can be given only through truths from the Word and a life according to them; the truths themselves and the life itself according to them make the quality of the faith.

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