Where's the Good News?

It’s been a difficult few weeks in Lake Woebegone. We’ve heard of several deaths of members of our extended families and of former members of this parish. Some were perhaps expected and foreseen, and we had some chance to say goodbye to our loved ones. Others were perhaps sudden and unforeseen, even shocking. At the same time we’ve been confronting physical illness in our family members and friends. We know that many of our Loaves and Fishes diners confront various forms of illness, as do the people who come to me for help with groceries or electricity. The son of a close friend has a condition that seems to be getting worse rather than better from the prescribed treatment. We ourselves may struggle with chronic illnesses, whose flare-ups periodically send us to emergency rooms or doctors’ offices. Despite continued prayers for physical healing, nothing much seems to change.

Recently, another friend confided to me that he has a hard time with the healing stories in the Gospels. His spouse is now in a nursing home with a chronic debilitative illness. When he hears a healing story in one of the Gospels, he wonders why Jesus seems to heal some people but not others. When he hears today’s reading, he especially wonders why Jesus seems to have abandoned all those others at Capernaum who would have liked to come to him for physical healing. Most especially, my friend wonders why Jesus can’t heal his spouse. Do we ask these questions too? When we hear today’s reading or ones like it, do we too ask Jesus, “Where were you when my loved one got sick?” Perhaps we think, “You could cure Peter’s mother-in-law’s fever, and you could heal the blind, the lame, and the leprous. Why couldn’t you cure my child, my spouse, my friend?” And do we ask, “Why couldn’t he or she have lived longer?”

Scripture does give us some ways to answer these questions. But to hear what the Bible has tell us about illness, healing, and God’s role in healing, we may have to put aside some of our modern preconceptions. Initially, the Bible may even disconcert us and offer us scant consolation. To begin with, in our understanding of health, we moderns have generally focused on conditions affecting only our bodies. We ignore the psychological, social, and spiritual dimensions of health. However, the Biblical view, in both the Old and New Testaments, is that health does not equate to physical or bodily health alone. Rather, the Bible has a holistic view and constantly reminds us that health consists of wholeness of body, mind, community, and spirit all together. When sickness occurs, we must address all aspects of health. What is more important, in the Bible it is ultimately God who heals. Indeed, physicians were regarded in the ancient world as sorcerers and magicians. “I am the Lord who heals you,” God tells the people in Exodus. “I kill and I make alive; I wound and I heal,” God reiterates in Deuteronomy. Ezekiel tells us that God is the healer of the weak, the sick, and the lost. The psalms too consistently refer to God’s healing power. “O Lord my God, I cried out to you/ and you restored me to health,” the psalmist declares in Psalm 30, for example. In the Gospels, Jesus always heals as God’s agent, as the one who, as the Word made flesh, is able to do what God does. And similarly, when the disciples heal others, as they do when Jesus sends them out in pairs, and as they do in the Book of Acts, they always do so in the name of Jesus, i.e., they act as Jesus’ and ultimately God’s agent.

When we look more closely at the Gospels, we discover that the miracles – healing miracles and others – are never the point of Jesus’ actions. The miracles are always secondary. Nowhere in the Gospel according to Mark, or in any of the other Gospels, did Jesus proclaim that his ministry was about performing miracles. Jesus resisted “miracles on demand” and feared that they would give people the wrong idea about him. Rather, Jesus’ miracles are a by-product of his mission of the proclamation of God’s kingdom. They identify Jesus as the one having the authority to speak for God, and they signify that the reign of God has come near. They are signs of the coming victory of Jesus over sin and death and a promise of a kingdom in which illness and death are no more. As Jesus reminded the disciples in today’s reading, proclaiming the arrival of that kingdom “is what I came out to do.” For that reason, despite our most fervent prayers, it is not Jesus’ job to heal our physical ills. As Mark clearly reminds us, Jesus was not called to be the head of the Capernaum free clinic – nor of the Gallipolis free clinic.

Ultimately, who is physically healed in the Gospels and who is not is a mystery, as it still is today. Creation remains imperfect and unfinished, and we all still must undergo death, whenever it comes. Our physicians, counselors, pastors, parishes, and anonymous groups use their God-given skills as best they can. We continue to pray for own healing and the healing of others in body, mind, and soul. Even so, in the end why a person dies at five hours, five months, or five years, why another person lives past one hundred, why one person is cured of disease and another is not, why one person conquers his or her addiction and another does not, are all largely inexplicable.

At this point you might be thinking, “Where’s the good news? Is there any?” Of course there is, if we have ears to hear it. To begin with, our reading from the prophet Isaiah reminds us of God’s care for us. Even though, in God’s eyes we are comparable to grasshoppers, and “the rulers of the earth as nothing,” the creator of all that is cares deeply for us. Ultimately, God will sustain, renew, and restore us: “those who wait for the Lord shall renew their strength … they shall run and not be weary, they shall walk and not faint.” Today’s psalm reiterates Isaiah’s message. Even though God “counts the number of the stars/ and calls them all by their names,” even so God “heals the brokenhearted/ and binds up their wounds.” The Gospel of Mark reminds us that Jesus knows our brokenness of both soul and body, as he calls out both the demons and the fevers within us. What is more important, despite our brokenness, Jesus calls us into partnership with him and invites us to share in his mission. “Let us go on to the neighboring towns,” he tells the disciples, “so that I may proclaim the message there also.” As did his friends, in Jesus we too have a model for faithful discipleship, as we too are called to proclaim, pray, act, and trust that God is indeed bringing in God’s reign. And we also have Jesus’ promise that whatever happens to our physical bodies, the relationship that we have begun with him here will transcend the limitations of illness and death.

Beginning in the third century, in Egypt and other parts of the ancient world, men and women who wanted a more ascetic life left the opulent towns and congregated in small communities – the forerunners of today’s monasteries and convents. These early Desert Fathers and Mothers, as they came to be called, sought integrity and wholeness, personal experience of God rather than intellectual knowledge. However, they discovered that, even as they left behind the conspicuous consumption of their home communities, they nevertheless took with them into the desert all their personal demons and sicknesses of all kinds: wherever you go there you are, as Buddhist teachers say. The Desert Fathers and Mothers also came to understand that life is difficult wherever we live it. “Expect trials until your last breath,” Saint Anthony the Great said. Nevertheless, in their desert life they also demonstrated, as Daniel Clendinen reminds us, “confidence in God’s unconditional love.”1 They were patient with one another and refused to judge one another. And they understood that they were called to live out and proclaim God’s infinite care for all of us.

As Jesus cared for Peter’s mother-in-law, as he ministered to those who crowded around the door of Peter’s house, so Jesus cares deeply for us. More importantly, he calls us to work with him, whatever the physical, mental, or spiritual limitations of our lives. He knows that we finite human beings not angels. And he assures us and all whom we cherish, that his care for us will never end. As Paul reminded the Christian community in Rome, “We do not live to ourselves, and we do not die to ourselves. If we live, we live to the Lord, and if we die, we die to the Lord; so then, whether we live or whether we die, we are the Lord’s. For to this end Christ died and lived again, so that he might be Lord of both the dead and the living.”

As Jesus’ faithful disciples, we press on, not expecting miracles, but trusting in Jesus’ promise of eternal life.

“’This is Why I have Come,’” Journey with Jesus, http://www.journeywithjesus.net/index.shtml, accessed January 31, 2012.