Why is it that no-one seems to be able to reproduce his healings today? I do not think it wise to dismiss them all as “fairy-tales”. There have been healers in every age, including our own. There is nothing improbable in his having been a very successful healer. Today we may explain the infrequence of healers by saying that most peoples’ vocations leads them elsewhere. But some people must have this vocation, yet say that it would be inconvenient for them to follow it; impossible to reconcile with family life, impossible to reconcile with promotion in the Church. Just as with a man and a woman, any decision to regulate one’s life as one wants it to unfold, destroys the spontaneity of love; so with God, any decision to map out one’s life in the way one wants it to go, and the spirit of God is thwarted, or even throttled. Love does not tolerate the rules of convention; and though we all have to conform to convention to lead a useful or even a professional life, it is suffocating unless one breaks free of it occasionally. And freedom may take the form of being willing to die that others may live. Not to die that others may die; but so that others may live.
It surely stands out that if Jesus was to be the Messiah, he had to be the Messiah of his own freewill; he could not be the messiah at second-hand because he believed God wanted him to be, and he wanted to please God in everything. Faced with the prospect of execution and torture, it would all have ended in a tremendous fiasco, if all along he had simply been trying to please God. So it had to be his plan for redeeming Israel, and he had to implement it. That meant he had to remain in command; he had to claim to be a King. But since he had never been a soldier, and had no military experience whatever, that ruled out from the start any idea of using force. He had to preach turning the other cheek to violence, he had to accept the rather brutal Roman peace, and seek instead to make Israel a light to lighten the Gentiles. There were two ways of doing this; to establish the Kingdom of Heaven on Earth by persuading Capernaum and Bethsaida to repent when they saw his mighty works, or if they would not repent, raise the stakes and himself die for the sins of the world.
However few people are willing to venture into a world of which they know nothing, unless they are very bold or very reckless. And it was unrealistic to expect Capernaum and Bethsaida to repent; they might feel the urge to do so, but on looking round and seeing the risks, the urge was easily suppressed. If you attempt to climb rocks before you have acquired much experience, you look round and see the risks with horrible clarity; but you are quite unable to tell the difference between an easy way of escape and a traverse which will lead you into even greater difficulties. So to attempt rock-climbs alone, before one has gained sufficient experience, is one of the most straightforward ways of killing oneself. Similarly to expect Capernaum and Bethsaids to repent on seeing his mighty works, was asking too much of any society.