Malachi 4:2 has long been recognized by Christians as a messianic prophecy:
"But for you who revere my name, the sun of righteousness will rise with healing in its wings" (NIV).
In particular, this verse may be in view in Luke 1:78, which speaks of the sunrise visiting us from on high.
One detail of this verse's connection to Jesus is not so widely recognized, however, outside of the Hebraic roots/Messianic community. As Lois Tverberg explains in Chapter 11, footnote 8 of Sitting at the Feet of Rabbi Jesus, the Hebrew word for "wings'' in Mal 4:2 (kanafim) also refers to the "corners'' of a man's garment, to which tassels (tzitziot) were attached. And so when people received healing by touching the "hem" of Jesus' garment (Mark 6:56), they were being healed by his "wings".
I first learned about the connection between Malachi 4:2 and the tzitziot of Jesus in 1998 from Dwight Pryor's Our Hebrew Lord teaching series.
New Testament scholar Dale Allison has found that this connection is not a new development in Christian exegesis. In a 2008 paper, he reported that it is mentioned in the Testimony Book of Pseudo-Epiphanius, a Christian source that has been dated to the fourth century AD. He has also found it in the Bibliotheca of Photius (ninth century), as well as in commentaries by Hugo Grotius (1583-1645), Matthew Poole (17th century), Matthew Henry (1662-1714), H. Elsley (1745-1833), and Christopher Wordsworth (1807-1885). He has found no trace of it, however, in any academic commentaries from the last 150 years.
As far as Allison can tell, the Hebraic roots/Messianic community has independently rediscovered and revived the idea of connecting Mal 4:2 with Mark 6:56 and its synoptic parallels. This is one specific example of the value of being aware of the Jewishness of Jesus. For people who know that Jesus, as a Jew, wore tassels on the corner of his garment, it is not so hard to put the two passages together.
Source: Dale Allison, "Healing in the Wings of His Garment: The Synoptics and Malachi 4:2", pp. 132-146 in The Word Leaps the Gap: Essays on Scripture and Theology in Honor of Richard B. Hays, J. Ross Wagner, C. Kavin Rowe, and A. Katherine Grieb, editors, Eerdmans, 2008.
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