“Many crowds followed Jesus, and he cured all of them, and he ordered them not to make him known.

Meditate on what it would have been like to have been in one of the crowds following Jesus.  You are moving along with the group and suddenly your broken, sick body is completely healed of its infirmities.  We may suppose it happened in this fashion instead of a direct personal encounter with our Lord for it says "he healed all of them" and all may not have had the chance to meet him directly.

So large numbers of people are following Jesus and large numbers of people are being healed.  What a powerful sign of the coming of God's kingdom.  It is a sign of that kingdom because in the kingdom there is no sickness or death.  So to witness so many healings would have been a powerful portent of God's presence among man.

But why mass physical healings and not mass spiritual healings when surely a sinful heart is far worse than a broken body?  Physical brokenness comes down through the ages to all of us.  We have all inherited the broken creation which began with the fundamental choice of the disobedience of our first parents.  It is precisely here that our Savior makes his encounter; it is precisely this wound which he first begins to heal.  Mankind's divorce from God is being rectified and in such a fleshly, real way that the crowds experienced it in their own bodies.  It will be their healed bodies which gaze upon Christ's broken, tortured body on the cross.

Spiritual healings require man's participation, an act of the will.  It was spiritual healing which Christ addressed with his preaching.  Only if we let his words enter into us and begin changing our stony hearts will we know liberation of spirit, even if we do carry around a sick body.  Only a soul which has already begun to be healed by him can carry its burden of sin to the foot of the cross and gaze up at its physician with wonder, awe and love.