A Healing God?

For the Feast Day of St Luke, 18th October, Evangelist and Physician

How should we understand healing as Christians? What does healing and wholeness mean for us? Christianity asks us to grapple with ourselves – to take life seriously. Here, we do not escape the frustrating and complex questions that narrate our humanity. Why are we so vulnerable? Why is there death and decay? Why is nature so powerful, awesome and threatening? How can humans treat each other with such contempt and violence? Why does God let us suffer? How do I cope with the sin that drives me in my own life?

Christians can be tempted when faced with such problems to preach a false message of miraculous cure and healing and in so doing they can do enormous damage. Those with life-long conditions, with disabilities and chronic illnesses can suffer the well-meaning but misdirected desire of Christians to offer them ‘healing’, usually interpreted as cure.

Healing, if it is to be authentic within the Christian faith must be interpreted in the light of the Cross and in a holistic way. When Jesus is on the Cross, he is asked by standers-by why he cannot save himself, as he saved others. He is mocked and tormented for his vulnerability and his weakness. Hanging there on the Cross we do not see a miracle, wonder-worker but a crucified and tortured, abandoned human being:

‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’

Healing is borne from Jesus’ utter abandonment and hopelessness, an experience that he shares with humanity.

‘Although he was a Son, he learned obedience through what he suffered; and having been made perfect, he became the source of eternal salvation for all who obey him’.

As Christians we must challenge the human, limited concept of wholeness and healing which is fed by the temptation to be omnipotent (all powerful). If humans were to use their unlimited power to create a perfect world, what would it be like? A western version of perfection, I suggest, is one in which medicine takes away all pain; in which death is sanitized and hidden and in which vulnerability and weakness is mastered. In such a world the disabled are seen as problems; disability and illness are greatly feared and those who are ill are punished through callous, Kafkaesque-systems of so-called ‘support’ and ‘benefits’.

Christian healing in contrast is about restoring a vision of humanity that locates salvation in the Christian virtues of love, gentleness, peace, compassion, repentance, faith and sacrifice. To be all-powerful in such a context is to be all-loving, the sort of power that God chose in Jesus.

Jean Vanier has spent his life living alongside people with severe disabilities in communities of mutuality and love known as the L’arche communities.

‘Jean Vanier shows how a life shared with people who have disabilities calls us to selflessness and risk. In response to a call from God, he moved to a tiny French village, bought a small stone house, and invited two men with disabilities to live with him. By living with these two men he discovered his own “disabilities of the heart.” He discovered that love and forgiveness did not come easily for him, and that anger did’ (https://www.jean-vanier.org/en/books/the-heart-of-larch).

Jean Vanier has experienced healing through living with those with severe disabilities. Through the redemptive experience of living with weakness, illness, deformity, ugliness and suffering, the ‘well’ are healed from their false understanding of what it means to be saved. Our understanding of what it means to be ‘well’ is redefined and through the power of the Holy Spirit we learn that wellness and wholeness cannot only be thought about in relation to physical manifestations of illness, but that rather, God’s perspective teaches us to focus on the spiritual healing of the soul. Miraculous physical healings abound in the Gospels but put in relationship with what Jesus did on the Cross, we have to reassess our priorities. The healings that Jesus performed were outward ‘signs’ of the restoration of humanity (and creation) that he would effect through his suffering on the Cross. For these healings to be understood apart from the Cross and the Resurrection are for them only partially to be understood. In this understanding our concept of healing and wholeness is transformed by viewing our humanity from the viewpoint of Jesus on the Cross.

A Lebanese theologian, Youakim Moubarac writes:

In as far as I understand Jean Vanier, daily dealings with people who have handicaps makes those involved face their own violence. Confronted by the irreducibility of the other, the one whom they mean to serve but whose condition they cannot ameliorate, they discover with horror that they are capable of striking them […….]. But, if only we force ourselves not to lose heart, if only grace come to the aid of our weakness, we apprehend that to spend time with the poorest of all is not to do them charity, but to allow ourselves to be transformed by them and to apprehend God as gentleness.

Moubarac focuses our attention on the holiness that emerges from a true understanding of human nature, a true assessment of the soul. Like the experience of desert spirituality, humans can find that attempting to be alongside and serve those who suffer can have a purifying effect on the soul.

We know the stories of terrible abuse in homes for those with disabilities, for orphaned children, for those who are elderly and with severe illnesses. It is easy to judge those who have succumbed to hitting and abusing, but to be confronted day by day with the abject poverty of those who suffer with such conditions and with such vulnerability is to face the deepest fear at the heart of our humanity: that we are worthless, loveless, without help and unable to save ourselves. It is this which Jesus wishes us to explore and it is from this point that Jesus wishes to save us.

Jesus demonstrated his power by emptying himself and becoming a slave. To fully experience the wholeness for which we were created we must learn the truths that: we are not powerful, we are not great, we are not in control, we are not self-defining, we cannot achieve all things. It is in this poverty that we learn our need of God and our inter-dependence on each other. It is here in the darkness of our own fear that we can be led to new life in Christ. St John of the Cross who is renowned for his writing on the dark night of the soul experienced this whole-scale remaking by God in the prison cell to which his fellow monks abandoned him. And like may monks, anchorites and religious before him he experienced what it is to be undone and remade in the image of God.

Wholeness and healing within Christian life is always a corollary of repentance and forgiveness. If we remind ourselves of when Jesus heals, he normally says to those he is healing: ‘your sins are forgiven, get up and walk….’. It is forgiveness of sins, which brings healing and leads to faith. Such a faith encourages us to open our ears to the suffering of others and to be compassionate. We can be God’s co-workers if we find out where he spends his time, and that will mean searching for those who are suffering and struggling.

The invitation at the end of this service for laying on of hands with the oil of healing, is a physical reminder that to be healed as a Christian is to seek God’s grace and forgiveness. We bend our knees before the one who saves; we seek to understand our own violence and our own temptations; we offer ourselves to God’s healing touch and his redemptive presence.

Quotes are from ‘Arthur’s Call, A journey of faith in the face of severe learning disability’ by Frances Young.

Jean Vanier has written a number of books and has his own website where you can explore more of his life, thought and work. All his work is highly recommended. https://www.jean-vanier.org