Tell No Man

After Jesus healed the man who had roamed the tombs possessed of devils, he wanted to stay with Jesus.  But the Savior said, “Go home to thy friends, and tell them how great things the Lord hath done for thee, and hath had compassion on thee” (Mark 5:19).  This was actually a very unusual request for the Savior to make and is one of the few times—at least in the accounts we have—when the Savior instructed someone who was healed to go and tell people about it.  In nearly all instances He asked either the person healed or the group watching to remain silent about what had happened.  For example, after a leper came to Him and He healed him, “Jesus saith unto him, See thou tell no man; but go thy way, shew thyself to the priest, and offer the gift that Moses commanded, for a testimony unto them” (Matt. 8:4).  On another occasion after Christ healed the daughter of Jairus, the ruler of the synagogue, “Her parents were astonished: but he charged them that they should tell no man what was done” (Luke 8:56).  After He healed a blind man, the Savior “sent him away to his house, saying, Neither go into the town, nor tell it to any in the town” (Mark 8:26).  When one who was deaf and “had an impediment in his speech” was brought to Him at the coasts of Decapolis, He healed him such that “his ears were open, and the string of his tongue was loosed, and he spake plain.”  We then read that “he charged them that they should tell no man” (Mark 7:32-36).  Why was it that He so often told the recipient of His blessings to tell no one about it? 

               There are a few different reasons why perhaps the Savior gave this counsel often to “tell no man” of the great works He did for them.  One could be that He was following His own teaching: “Take heed that ye do not your alms before men, to be seen of them. … When thou doest alms, let not thy left hand know what thy right hand doeth” (Matt 6:1, 3).  This is how President Monson, encouraging us to give and serve anonymously, used the story of Jesus healing the leper from Matthew 8 when He commanded the newly clean man to tell no one.  Another reason may have simply been that He didn’t want those following Him to come only for the physical benefits, like those who followed Him just to get bread but didn’t believe on Him.  Elder Ashton suggested another possibility: “Perhaps the charge to “tell no man” meant they were not to tell the account in a boastful way, lest a spirit of pride—a spirit of self-adopted superiority—should come into their souls.”   Perhaps a related reason that Christ may have given this counsel so often was to teach them that sometimes spiritual experiences need to be kept sacred and private.  He taught in another place to not cast “pearls before swine” and these supernal experiences these people had as their bodies were made whole in such a miraculous way may have been the kind of “pearls” Christ didn’t want scattered about in front of everyone (Matt. 7:6).  The Prophet Joseph suggested that we indeed need to be able to keep private, at least in many cases, the things the Lord reveals to us: “The reason we do not have the secrets of the Lord revealed unto us is because we do not keep them but reveal them, we do not keep our own secrets but reveal our difficulties to the world even to our enemies then how would we keep the secrets of the Lord.”  Joseph on the other hand, said he “can keep a secret till dooms day.”

               Perhaps the reasoning for the Lord’s admonition to tell no man was different for each individual that He gave that counsel to.  In our own lives as we seek spiritual experiences too, though, the counsel surely is valid for us.  We must be careful to keep sacred things sacred and to be humbly grateful for whatever the Lord reveals to us and seek in no way to “boast [ourselves] in these things” (D&C 84:73).  And our sole purpose in sharing if the Lord does grant us great miracles should be to “tell [others] how great things the Lord hath done.”