One cannot read the gospel stories without noting the frequency with which Jesus heals:
A paralyzed man, carried by friends to Jesus’s feet,
A woman reaching out to touch a sliver of his robe,
An unresponsive child, whose parent frantically plea for aid,
A mother-in-law, tossing with fever in bed,
Each is restored to wholeness. One fifth of the gospels are devoted to such stories. If the question underlying the gospel accounts is, “What is the ministry of Jesus, Son of God?” then the answer given is “He comes amongst us to teach and to heal.”
But how does Jesus heal now? That is a second question. We, acclimated to a scientifically-informed, materially-based world, do not expect our prayers to erase a diagnosis or stop the ravages born of bad choices and a broken earth. Yet we approach Jesus the healer, expecting something in response. This simple story early in his ministry offers clues to how Jesus heals.
Jesus and his disciples have left the synagogue, site where Jesus’s authority was displayed. They enter the Simon Peter’s family home. His mother-in-law is sick. Jesus is called to her side. He touches her and raises her up. After she arises, the house is opened to many others seeking help. Jesus stands in the doorway , greets each suffering one and heals them. The next day after the disciples locate Jesus in solitary prayer, he will lead them to the neighboring town. From that town he will go to the next, and then the next. Teaching and healing. Healing and teaching. Space by space, life by life, he offers his power for life to those who seek his aid.
From this tiny snapshot we glimpse how Jesus heals. First, Jesus is available. Whether it is in the home of a chosen disciple or at the threshold of yard, whether walking amid a crowd or to a distant town, Jesus embodies healing by his ever-ready compassion, by his always attentive presence. No matter where you are, Dumbledore said to Harry Potter, help will always come to those who ask for it. Jesus’s healing nature rests in his readiness to receive our needs. He is here.
Have you ever noticed how suffering results in isolation? An illness causes pain, which leads to greater suffering, which can outrun our capacity to describe. When we can’t put words to our suffering, we feel isolated, cut off from health and others. I’m alone in this hospital room. I’m stuck in this house. I’m imprisoned by the pain. Such walls do not impede Jesus’s presence. He is available, always.
A second way Jesus heals is through restoring meaning to persons’ lives. After the fever leaves Peter’s mother-in-law gets up to serve them. She hurries out of bed, exchanges her robe for a dress, lights the fire and fixes a feast. Maybe she listens to the disciples’ plans, offers suggestions, mends a knapsack, or packs tomorrow’s lunch. No longer isolated, she’s a part of the community. No longer helpless, she contributes to keeping hope coming alive.
Jesus does something similar for us. He heals by crafting a path from isolated, senseless suffering to shared meaning in the greater purposes of our lives. Our limitations do not impede the power of God flowing through us. Such a healing might not be a disease cured or a scar erased, but the capacity to love anyway, to know more of Jesus’s cross and its power, to testify from the pains and triumphs of your life. Whenever Jesus heals, persons are returned to communities and offered new roles. They are restored for service or graced with insight into God’s mysterious workings.
Finally, Jesus heals by letting us touch resurrection, God’s ultimate healing of all life. When Jesus comes to her bedside, he lifts up Peter’s mother-in-law. The verb for “lifting up” mirrors the description of Easter, when Jesus himself is lifted out of the grave. Like every healing, it is a mini-resurrection, a glimpse of the glory to come. Daniel Hurley puts it this way, “every divine gesture, however small, is a miracle, in in-breaking of God’s activity. They are angels of the small cups of water passed to us along the course of the marathon” that is our life.1 Each experience deepens our trust that all will be healed one day.
Chris’s mother was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease about a month before he and I met. The ten years I knew her were the last decade of her life. Other persons, long-time friends and neighbors, would hint that I did not know Ann in her fullest vitality. In one sense, that was true. In the early years, I tasted her cooking skills, witnessed her artistic zest, but soon she could not stand over the stove or hold a paintbrush long. Next came a walker; then a wheelchair. In the final months she was caught in a cycle of a fall, hospital stay, long weeks in rehabilitation, and then home, only to fall and start the cycle again. A healing such as “he got up and walked” or “the disease left her” did not occur.
But other healings did. A marriage grew closer. An independent spirit had to be refashioned for interdependence in which we all reside. Prayer circles and coordination of care brought those around her into deeper friendship. Home visit by eucharistic ministers. The space, at the end, to say, “I love you.” Sitting by her bed, situated in the living room, in the days before she died, I found myself grateful; for the home she had created, for the son she has raised. On the day she died, a three-year old grandchild danced beside her bed, unafraid by the passing of a life. The joyous movement of the next generation symbolized for me, then and still now, the love that filled the space and the promise of resurrection that encircled Ann and all of us.
How does Jesus heal? He is ever-available in every need. He carries in his wounded body a purpose in the pain, for every life has eternal meaning. He gives us glimpses of resurrection, that dazzling newness, mending of broken hearts and bodies with divine love that encircles us even now. Amen.