In 4:23 the evangelist gives as the two main features of our Lord’s ministry his teaching and miracles. The former of these offices he has sufficiently illustrated in the sermon on the mount, and he now begins to treat of the latter. As from a popular point of view miracles are of a higher order than doctrine, so does the evangelist in the narrative of the miracles themselves pass from the less to the more important. Jesus shows himself first as the Messianic liberator