Thursday
Thursday
The Healing Ministry
Jesus went throughout Galilee, teaching in their synagogues, preaching the good news of the kingdom, and healing every disease and sickness among the people.
Matthew 4:23
The Gospel writers describe Jesus’s ministry as threefold: teaching, preaching, and healing. Teaching and preaching are not hard to grasp or to imitate, but how are we to understand the ministry of healing?
Perhaps the place to begin is to affirm the goodness of God’s creation. That is to say, disease was no part of God’s original intention for the world, and it will be no part of his ultimate purpose either. In the new universe there will be neither sickness nor pain nor death nor tears (Rev. 21:4). Since, then, disease and death are alien intrusions into God’s good world, doctors and nurses are right to wage war against them. Moreover, all healing is divine healing, since God has put into the human body remarkable therapeutic processes. For example, no sooner has an infection appeared than antibodies are created to fight it. It is this conviction that led Ambroise Paré, the Huguenot physician, to say, “I dressed the wound, but God healed it.” The words are inscribed on a wall of the École de Médicine in Paris.
The Gospels make it plain, however, that the healing ministry of Jesus belonged to a different order. Like changing water into wine, multiplying loaves and fishes, and walking on water, Jesus’s healings were supernatural demonstrations of the kingdom of God.
In trying to understand them, we will be wise to avoid opposite extremes. On the one hand, it would be absurd to put the Creator in a straitjacket and declare that miracles can’t and don’t happen. On the other hand, we have no liberty to say (as some do) that performing miracles is the normal Christian life. For however we define miracles, they certainly belong not to the normal but to the abnormal. If we claim to be able to heal the sick like Jesus, we need to remember that he healed without the use of medical or surgical means, without delay, degree, or remission, but immediately, completely, and permanently, and that even hostile eyewitnesses said, “We cannot deny it” (Acts 4:16).
For further reading: Acts 4:8–16