The Contagion of Holiness Text: Luke 6:17-19
Introduction: A Tame Lion is No Lion At All
We live in an age that has done its level best to domesticate Jesus. The modern project, both inside and outside the church, has been to turn the Lion of the Tribe of Judah into a housecat, a tame therapist who affirms our choices and soothes our anxieties. He is presented as a guru of niceness, a dispenser of platitudes, a safe and manageable deity who would never dream of making any absolute demands. This is the Jesus of sentimental worship songs, the Jesus of the therapeutic deists, the Jesus who can be neatly packaged and sold as a self-help product.
But that Jesus is a fiction. He is an idol carved out of our own fears and preferences. The Jesus we meet in the Scriptures is altogether different. He is not safe. He is the furthest thing from safe. He is the sovereign Lord of heaven and earth, and in our text today, we see that He is a walking, talking epicenter of raw, divine power. He is a contagion of holiness in a world riddled with the disease of sin and death. The crowds did not flock to Him because He was affirming; they flocked to Him because He was potent. They did not come to have their feelings validated; they came because they were broken, diseased, and demonized, and they knew, with a kind of desperate, animal instinct, that this man was their only hope.
This passage is a direct assault on our modern sensibilities. It presents a world that our secular age pretends does not exist. It is a world of spiritual warfare, of unclean spirits, of a clear and present demonic reality. And it presents a Christ who does not offer a five-step plan to a better life, but who offers Himself as the source of all life. Power, Luke tells us, was coming from Him. It was not a technique He employed; it was an attribute of His very being. This is the untamed Christ, the sovereign Christ, the Christ who does not negotiate with our brokenness but obliterates it with a touch. And the central question this text forces upon us is this: is this the Christ you have come to meet? Or are you still looking for the housecat?
The Text
And Jesus came down with them and stood on a level place; and there was a large crowd of His disciples, and a great multitude of people from all Judea and Jerusalem and the coastal region of Tyre and Sidon, who had come to hear Him and to be healed of their diseases; and those who were troubled with unclean spirits were being cured. And all the crowd was trying to touch Him, for power was coming from Him and healing them all.
(Luke 6:17-19 LSB)
The King on the Plain (v. 17)
We begin with the setting, which is far more than mere geography.
"And Jesus came down with them and stood on a level place; and there was a large crowd of His disciples, and a great multitude of people from all Judea and Jerusalem and the coastal region of Tyre and Sidon," (Luke 6:17 LSB)
Just before this, Jesus was up on a mountain praying all night and appointing the twelve apostles. The mountain is the place of divine communion, of high revelation. But the ministry does not remain on the mountain. In an act of glorious condescension, Jesus comes down. The Word became flesh and tabernacled among us, and here He comes down to stand on "a level place." He meets us on our own ground. He does not demand that we climb to Him in our own strength; He descends to our plane of existence, the common, dusty flatland of human need.
And on this level place, two groups gather. First, a large crowd of His disciples. These are the learners, the followers, the ones who have committed themselves to Him. But then there is a second group, a "great multitude." These are not just the committed; they are the curious, the desperate, the broken. They are coming from everywhere, from the heart of covenant territory in Judea and Jerusalem, and from the pagan outskirts of Tyre and Sidon. This is a picture of the magnetic draw of the true King. He attracts both the insider and the outsider, the Jew and the Gentile. His grace is not a tribal secret. The doors to His kingdom are thrown open to anyone from anywhere who recognizes their need of Him.
This is a picture of the visible church in every age. It is a mixed multitude. There are true disciples, and there are those who are simply drawn by the spectacle, or by a raw, undefined need. But the point is that Christ stands in the middle of them all. He does not shrink from the mess. He is not insulated from the raw, chaotic press of human misery. He stands on the level place, accessible to all.
Word and Warfare (v. 18)
Verse 18 tells us precisely why this great mass of humanity has gathered. Their motives were not complex.
"who had come to hear Him and to be healed of their diseases; and those who were troubled with unclean spirits were being cured." (Luke 6:18 LSB)
They came for two things: Word and power. They came "to hear Him" and "to be healed." This is the pattern of authentic Christian ministry. It is not one or the other. A ministry of the Word without the power of the Spirit is dead orthodoxy, a sterile lecture. A ministry that seeks power without being grounded in the authoritative Word of Christ is charismatic chaos, a subjective free-for-all. Jesus brings both together, perfectly and inseparably. His teaching has authority because it is backed by divine power, and His power has a purpose because it is directed by divine truth.
But Luke adds a crucial detail. Among those needing healing were those "troubled with unclean spirits." Let us be very clear. This is not first-century psychobabble for anxiety or depression. Our sophisticated, secular age, which has exorcised the supernatural from its vocabulary, wants to explain this away. But the Bible will not let us. The world is not a neutral stage where we work out our psychological dramas. It is a war zone. It is occupied territory. And the Son of God has invaded to reclaim it. These people were not just sick; they were captives. They were harassed and tormented by demonic powers.
The healing ministry of Jesus was not simply an act of compassion; it was an act of war. Every healed disease, every cast-out demon, was a direct blow to the kingdom of Satan. It was a raid on the strong man's house. Jesus was demonstrating that the true King had arrived, and He was plundering the enemy's goods and setting his prisoners free. To ignore this reality is to fundamentally misunderstand the gospel. The gospel is not just good advice; it is a declaration of victory in a cosmic war.
The Dunamis of God (v. 19)
This brings us to the climax of the scene, the very heart of the matter.
"And all the crowd was trying to touch Him, for power was coming from Him and healing them all." (Luke 6:19 LSB)
The entire multitude is pressing in, trying to make physical contact with Jesus. Why? Because they understood something that our abstract, disembodied age has forgotten. They knew the power was not in a program or a principle, but in a Person. The word for power here is the Greek dunamis, from which we get our word dynamite. It is explosive, creative, world-altering power. And notice the grammar carefully: this power "was coming from Him." It was not something He summoned or channeled. It radiated from Him as heat radiates from a fire. He is the source. He is the divine power plant.
This single fact demolishes every attempt to reduce Jesus to a mere human teacher. No prophet, no apostle, ever had power emanating from them in this way. They were conduits of God's power; Jesus is the reservoir. This is the bedrock of His deity. This is God in the flesh, and His very presence alters reality. Sickness cannot coexist with Him. Demons cannot stand before Him. His holiness is not a passive quality; it is an active, aggressive, cleansing force.
And look at the scope of it. He was "healing them all." Not some. Not the most deserving. Not the ones with the most photogenic diseases. All of them. This is a firehose of grace, not an eyedropper. This is a picture of the sheer, overwhelming, superabundant power of Christ. There is no lack in Him. There is no rationing of His grace. His power is more than sufficient for every last bit of human brokenness. This is a foretaste of His ultimate, postmillennial victory, where the knowledge of the glory of the Lord will cover the earth as the waters cover the sea. The healing of this one crowd on this one day is a down payment on His healing of the nations.
Touching the Untamable Christ
So what are we to do with this? The crowd sought to touch Him. How do we touch Him today? We are not to be superstitious. We do not seek out relics or holy places. Christ has given us the means by which we may "touch" Him by faith.
We touch Him when we hear the Word of God preached. The same authoritative Word that the multitude heard is proclaimed to you today. When you receive it in faith, you are making contact with the mind of Christ. His truth invades your heart and begins the work of healing you from the inside out, casting out the idols and lies that are the spiritual equivalent of unclean spirits.
We touch Him when we call upon Him in prayer. We are invited to come boldly to the throne of grace, not because we are worthy, but because He is potent. Prayer is reaching out the hand of faith to take hold of the one whose power can heal all our diseases, the first and most deadly of which is our sin.
And we touch Him, in a unique and powerful way, when we come to this Table. The Lord's Supper is not a mere memorial. It is a place of communion with the living Christ. In the bread and the wine, by faith, we touch the one whose body was broken and whose blood was shed for us. The same dunamis that flowed from Him on that level plain is present here, through His Spirit, to heal and to save. The power that flows from Christ at this Table is the power of forgiveness for our sins, strength for our weakness, and life for our souls.
The invitation is the same today as it was then. The King has come down to the level place. He is here, in the midst of us, radiating life. The question is whether you will press in. Will you abandon your attempts to heal yourself, to manage your sin, to pretty up your brokenness? Will you stop trying to touch all the dead wires the world offers you? Come, like the desperate multitude. Come and touch the only source of power in the universe. Come, and be healed.