Texts: Psalm 30: 1-3, 11-12; Mark 1: 29-34
The Faces of Healing
Lent traditionally begins with Jesus entering into the wilderness to confront his own temptations, after which he emerges to begin his public ministry. Mark’s was the first of the Gospels to be written, and so it’s interesting to note what Mark highlights just after the wilderness. Jesus begins to make public proclamations, in the tradition of John the Baptist; he forms an inner circle, a small collection of traveling companions that come to be known as disciples; and then he begins to heal people.
In the story that we heard earlier, Jesus enters the house where Simon’s mother in law is lying ill with a fever. He takes her by the hand, and somehow the fever simply disappears. We’ll come back to that short episode a little later, for she is our first face of healing.
After the brief episode, word of Jesus’s ability to heal spreads, and before long the house is barraged with people, all those, the text says, who were sick or possessed with demons. We’re then told that he cured many who were ill from all manner of unspecified diseases. We’re told that he cast out the demons, and we’re told that he instructed the demons not to speak, because they knew him. From that initial episode, the story expands and grows, so that, read through the prism of healing, Jesus’s entire ministry seems to be about the restoration of wholeness to individuals and communities. That is, after all, the root meaning of healing in the Gospels, and throughout the ancient world. It has to do with the ability to experience wholeness, to undergo a restoration of bodily or psychic or communal life amidst all that would tear it asunder.
Last year throughout Lent, we explored Jesus as a preacher, paying attention to the words he delivered, especially the strange stories that he told, what we call parables. They’re anything but straightforward, and they tend to work as a method of dislodging inherited assumptions about God, replacing them with a gentler and more gracious picture by far. This year I’d like to spend our time thinking about the many stories of healing that occur throughout the Gospels, but indeed, throughout the entire Bible. Today in particular, what I’d like to offer functions as a kind of introduction or prolegomena to the many faces of healing that are presented throughout the Bible. What I offer this morning won’t be the last word, but rather an opening toward a wider conversation about what healing might mean.
Now, healing was central to all that Jesus did, but the real surprise comes later: when the Holy Spirit is given in the first chapters of Acts, one of the capacities the Spirit brings is the power among ordinary people to provide healing, to bestow healing. In the biblical story, healing is a capacity that every person of faith is given – the power to be healed, and the power to bestow healing. What’s more, it’s a claim that pertains to you and to me, one that might constitute one of the fundamental features of our humanity. What if the event of the Holy Spirit, when the power of healing is conferred, isn’t an occasion isolated to particular time, or to particular historical individuals? What if that story, along with so many other stories of healing in the Bible, had to do with the rediscovery of something inherent in the world that had been forgotten or lost? What if being human has to do with the capacity to heal, and be healed?
What I’d like to do in the coming weeks is to take seriously those claims about healing. I want to explore the variety of healings that occur throughout the New Testament, but especially throughout Jesus’s ministry, and to ask what any of it might have to do with us. That’s a daunting task on a variety of levels. First, there’s the gulf standing between all of us in modernity and the world of the biblical writers. The Bible, of course, represents a pre-scientific understanding of the world, and while that doesn’t require us to dismiss it outright as a collection of peculiar fairy tales, it does mean that we’re asked to interpret carefully what might be going on in the stories. But then second, there are a variety of afflictions that are presented for healing. Some are physical; some are mental or emotional; others are political, or social, in nature. Quite often, the Bible doesn’t distinguish between those kinds of affliction. A political or social affliction can be every bit as costly to one’s well being as a bodily or biological affliction. But they’re all presented as cases for healing. Understanding the source of the affliction in question can be a challenge. But then third, there are all the hucksters and charlatans, the ones on TV who make a spectacle of healing. I would dare say that most of us are left feeling about as assured of the trustworthiness of those healings as we are stories in supermarket tabloids. They lack credibility, and give the whole enterprise a bad name. Not only that, they mislead by suggesting that there is an equation between faith and healing that can somehow be manipulated or gamed. There is not. People of faith get sick. The wicked prosper. So it has been at least since the days of Job.
But the greatest challenge to a consideration of healing has to do with us. We each of us have undergone, or carry with us, an array of afflictions that cry out for healing. Often, it is a medical ailment like cancer or heart disease, while sometimes it’s something emotional – a form of depression or anxiety, for example. Some of us carry wounds born from relationships that simply won’t mend, while others of us could use healing from a sense of guilt or regret. Beyond our individual wounds, there are the social afflictions that affect us all in one form or another – the afflictions surrounding racism, or disparities around gender, or imbalances pertaining to class privileges. As if we didn’t know it already, this past week demonstrated just how pervasive, and pernicious, that form of illness is. All of those forms of hate are illnesses from which we all long for healing. The point I’m making is that when treating the topic of healing, our own afflictions are legion, and many of us wonder whether faith can actually make any kind of difference at all.
Given all of those forms of ailment, and given all those challenges around this very topic, what are we to say about God and healing? Is there still a power of healing that Jesus can offer us, even on this side of modernity, even after so much that has diminished the credibility of healing, even under the weight of so many burdens that beg for healing? My answer, not surprisingly, is yes. Despite it all, I continue to believe that Jesus does have the power to heal. Or, to frame it another way, perhaps what Jesus does is to tap into a source of healing that’s already present within the world, and within each of us. Maybe that source has always been there, has always been present, like breath, like light, a condition for the world’s very being. Maybe Jesus doesn’t bring healing, or introduce it as something external to the world, so much as he helps us to discover capacities for healing that already exist within us and around us.
My own interest in the subject of healing stretches back to a time nearly a decade ago when I worked as a hospital chaplain in Bridgeport. I came to admire the healing work performed by medical professionals, but I was also intrigued by the array of non-medical healing techniques that I witnessed – everything from diet to yoga, from Reiki to acupuncture, from prayer to pet therapy to somehow being in touch with the natural world. I came to believe they were all important aspects of healing, part of a mysterious process that, in many ways, I came to revere. That year in the hospital taught me many things. It taught me that illness and disease are ubiquitous. It taught me that no one achieves immortality or eternal happiness, an ageless body or boundless energy. But it also taught me that healing does occur. Maybe it was through a successful surgery or the remission of a disease through treatment. Maybe it was a newfound reconciliation to a bodily condition that wasn’t going to change, similar to the ways we’re all asked to adapt to the ravages of aging. Maybe it was simply through the ordinary ways that cells and tissue reconstitute themselves after being damaged. I can’t always say what occurred, or how it occurred. But I’m confident I did witness healings. I’m confident that I witnessed bodies and lives being restored to health, as if the body itself had a memory, a kind of will.
Those moments, in which I witnessed the body’s capacity for healing, have stayed with me over the years. But they’ve become more important to me over the last several months. Here’s why. For a while now, I’ve been drawing upon the stories of those who confronted enormous adversity, and who wound up discovering sources of goodness within the world and within the people around them. There was the prophet Isaiah and there was William James after the San Francisco earthquake. There was Dorothy Day confronting poverty in New York. There was Joe Ehrmann, the former NFL linebacker confronting the crisis in American masculinity, and not only American masculinity. There was Joseph, the father of Jesus, and there were the prophets Joel, and Jeremiah. In the face of catastrophe or crisis, they were somehow liberated to discover the ingenuity and creativity, the altruism and idealism, the kindness and the generosity that somehow exist within people, but that too often remains hidden away. And of course there was all that we experienced here in our endeavor to provide sanctuary. Something, something, something that was just…good, happened in our midst. Once again, I can’t fully explain it or account for it, but there was an energy, a vitality, a power, let us say a Spirit, that was unleashed or exposed in that moment, and in all of the moments that I cited. It’s a Spirit that goes by many names, one that works to mend, to uplift, to strengthen, to encourage, and to heal.
Say that’s all true. If it is, might it also extend beyond the capacities of groups or individuals to cope with dramatic events? Is that same healing Spirit somehow at work in our bodies, in our cells, in our very biology? Or if it makes you uncomfortable, take the word “Spirit” out of it. Is there a mending process at work and available not only in our social processes, but also within ordinary biological life processes?
Andrew Weil is a physician who argues that healing is an intrinsic part of what it means to live. In his book Spontaneous Healing, Weil chronicles his quest to understand just how biological systems heal themselves. He notes the way that rivers, once contaminated and polluted beyond any ability to sustain dependent forms of life, can, under the right conditions, be rejuvenated and restored to health. He notes the ways that organs and bodies, once compromised by disease or misuse, can rejuvenate themselves in similar ways if given the opportunity. Weil presents numerous case studies of such spontaneous healings. There’s a woman with aplastic anemia, a deadly blood disease. There’s a middle-aged man with a tumor in his brain. There’s the man with mixed cell lymphoma, and another man with shattered discs in his back. There’s a woman with breast cancer and another woman with acute hypertension. Each of them undergoes a healing that demonstrates the body’s capacity for self-regeneration, using a combination of medical, herbal, mental, and spiritual resources to enhance the healing.
They’re not miracle cures. They’re not soft suggestions that immortality, or everlasting happiness, or an ageless body will be yours if only you apply this or that technique. It’s not about a denial of death. It is instead an embrace of life, an embrace of bodies, an embrace of biology, up to and including death. Can one live into one’s mortality and still be healed, Weil wonders at one point? His answer is an emphatic yes. “Death and healing are not opposites,” he contends. “To die as a healed person would mean being able to view one’s life as complete, and to accept the disintegration of the body” as a natural part of the life process. So too, Weil contends that healing wouldn’t necessarily mean the complete disappearance of disease. If, as I suggested earlier, healing has to do with becoming whole, one might experience an inner wholeness or peace even if one’s body wasn’t perfect. In that regard, I can say that I visited a double amputee in the hospital recently who struck me as a good deal more whole than a lot of people who have the use of all of their limbs.[1] The point, in other words, is not that we have the power to control life and death. We do not. But we do have the capacity to understand how human bodies can heal themselves, and we do have the power to enhance those capacities if we so choose. Healing, it turns out, is a capacity given to each one of us.
I promised earlier that we’d return to that first face of healing in Mark’s Gospel, when Jesus enters Simon’s house, and finds Simon’s mother in law laid up with a fever. It’s one of the simplest stories of healing that we find in the Gospels, a fact for which I’m grateful on this first outing. Mark starts with an easy case. Its elements follow a pattern that Jesus will use for nearly all of his healings. The person to be healed is brought to Jesus’s attention, usually by friends or family members. It then says that Jesus touched her hand, and then that he lifted her up. And then, it says, the fever left her.
I can’t say exactly what happened to Simon’s mother in law in the story. But a healing did occur. I believe it came through some combination of the elements that are named in the story: having supportive advocates, the experience of human care, and of human touch, the experience of being lifted up, in both a bodily and emotional way, and then the work of whatever regenerative capacities the body already does possess. All of it seems to be set in motion through a powerful encounter with a healing presence. I’m not saying it wasn’t a miracle. I’m simply saying that the miracle might have been far more ordinary, and far more common, than we might otherwise have believed.
There’s more to be said, and thankfully there are more weeks in which to say it. For now, I want us to stay with this relatively simple act of healing – that of a woman laid low by a fever, or, for that matter, of any of the relatively simple healings that occur in our own lives, passing as unremarkable. They’re not unremarkable. I submit that they’re nearly miraculous. They put forth the possibility that healing is a constitutive part of what it means to be alive in the world. They put forth the possibility that there exists a regenerative force that is already at work within us, and around us. They put forth the possibility that we each of us might have a role to play in the healing of another. And they put forth the possibility that the healing we each of us need is really and truly available. That healing is a source of both optimism and hope in a world caving in from despair. Like rivers returning to life, like tissues or organs slowly regenerating, perhaps there is that within the world that repairs and mends. Perhaps there is that within the world and within you the capacity to heal.
I close with the words of our final hymn: “We yearn, O Christ, for wholeness and for your healing touch; too long have we felt helpless; our burdens seemed too much. Forgetting all pretenses we make our pleadings heard, in hope and expectation await your gracious word.”
[1] Weil, Andrew, Spontaneous Healing (New York: Ballantine Books, 1995), pg. 109.
