Lk.22;50,51 – Just then, one of the disciples swung his sword at the high priest’s servant and slashed off his right ear.
Jesus stopped the incident from escalating any further by shouting, “Stop! That’s enough of this!” Then he touched the right side of the injured man’s head and the ear grew back —he was healed!
The Bible is overflowing with shocking miracles and astounding actions from the Lord. One of our challenges as a Christian is not to have our eyes covered over with the glaze of this world and with our familiarity with the Bible accounts. The first amazing thing about this encounter was Jesus’ actions. He diffused the situation by not allowing His disciples to resist and by willingly turning Himself over to the temple guards.
Then an even more shocking turn of events took place, Jesus healed the man’s ear. It’s not really clear if He picked up the ear and reattached it or just grew a new one; either way it was quite astounding. To me, I can’t quite understand why the arrest continued. They were arresting Jesus on trumped up religious charges. If He is growing someone a new ear maybe they should have reconsidered. Here is how Brian Simmons describes this scene.
“Implied in the context of this miracle, Jesus, the Creator, re-created his ear. The last thing Jesus did before they tied and bound his beautiful hands to arrest him in Gethsemane: He used his healing hands to restore the cut-off ear that Peter slashed. He was bound for hours until they loosed his hands to pierce them with nails.”
I had never really thought about Jesus having His hands tied up. Brian Simmons’ observation may be accurate, the last thing His hands did before He was crucified was to heal His enemy’s ear; that is pretty amazing. The other wild twist in this story was who got his ear cut off and healed; it was the attendant to the high priest. I would sure like to hear the rest of this man’s story (his name was Malchus). I would have to think that after having his ear healed, watching Jesus falsely accused and crucified over the next few hours, Malchus had to have been effected. The Lord was reaching out to the very inner circle of the leadership of Israel all the way until the end: the Lord is good and His mercy endures forever.
1 thought on “THE LAST WORK OF JESUS’ HANDS”
Interesting, of all the things a sword could have inflicted damage to on Malchus’ body, I wonder how Peters sword flung fast enough to remove the ear but missed the shoulder? Could it be that this final act of Jesus’ compassion and healing power is also directed at the importance of hearing the Word? “Without faith it’s impossible to please God” & “Faith comes from hearing, hearing the Word of God”. There’s always MORE to the living Word, it’s what draws us back every morning to feed upon it.