On September 7, the Spiritual Life Committee will offer the first of a series of opportunities for Healing and Wholeness which will represent a variety of forms and traditions. From the very earliest of days of the Church, healing has played a role in the ministry of the Christian Community.
As members of the Body of Christ; however, we should approach such situations with our hearts and minds prepared. And so, I wanted to speak a bit about the ministry of Jesus and healing.
A significant body of research suggests that for certain medical conditions, there is an association between faith or prayer and better health or healing. Perhaps the best known study was done in 1986 by Dr. Randolph Byrd, a cardiologist. He divided into two groups all patients (400 total) admitted to the coronary care unit at San Francisco General Hospital over a period of ten months. Group One was assigned to a variety of prayer teams throughout the United States, who prayed for them each day. Group Two was not assigned any prayer team. Each prayer team was given the first name of the patient and told that the patient was in the CCU but they were given no instructions as to how they were to pray, as long as they prayed for the patient once a day. Neither the doctors, nurses, and technicians caring for the patients, nor the patients themselves knew to which group they had been assigned. Most were actually unaware that the study was in progress.
The collective recovery experience of the patients in the two groups differed significantly. Those who received the prayer
had less congestive heart failure (8verses 20),
needed less antibiotic therapy (3 versus 17),
had fewer episodes of pneumonia (3 versus 13)
and had fewer cardiac arrests (3 versus 14)
And yet the mortality rate in both groups was the same.
The study has been criticized because it did not take into consideration the fact that the patients who were not being prayed for by the assigned groups may have been praying for themselves or had families who where praying for them.
Other papers have reported that faith and prayer
lowered blood pressure,
hastened the healing of wounds,
decreased headaches,
shrank the size of tumors,
and hastened recovery from anesthesia.
Dartmouth researchers found that among 232 people over the age of 55 who underwent heart surgery, those who found no strength or comfort from religion were 3 – 4 times more likely to die after heart surgery than those who did. In fact, none of the 37 people in the study who considered themselves deeply religious died within 6 months after surgery; but of those who considered themselves not religious or less religious, 21 passed away–15 of them never left the hospital.
This study was criticized because it did not account for lifestyle differences between the 2 groups. Sooo
So, to remove the effect of self-prayer or lifestyle differences of church go-ers, the Spindrift Foundation (a research foundation dedicated to the scientific research of consciousness and prayer) conducted experiments to document the influence of prayer on nonhuman organisms — bacteria, molds, seed, plants, and other things. And prayer affected the growth of all.
I will confess to having grown up as a skeptic.
I remember my grandmother watching the faith healing of Oral Roberts on television and thinking what a crime it was to trick and fool vulnerable elderly people out of their money with staged recoveries. I confess to having scoffed at those who lit candles, performed rituals, prayed to saints, and believed that their faith would heal. More than once I have argued that if we say that prayer can cure and that faith can heal, then how do we explain good Christians who suffer
…is their faith not strong enough?
……Do they not say the right words in prayer?
……..Does God just not love them as much?
My own father, a good man, a man of faith surrounded by people of faith, lived his entire adult life in enormous pain from a back injury he received in World War II. Twice he had surgeries that put him a full body cast. Then at 72 he was diagnosed with cancer and, in spite of my prayers and the prayers of many others, he died younger than either of his parents and most of his siblings.
Did God just not love my father enough?
Did I not pray hard enough for him?
Why would God subject him to that kind of suffering?
After my father’s death I spent a year as a chaplain in the Oncology Unit at Shadyside Hospital. I knew that I had to learn to get past the images of his suffering……
I expected to be a comfort and consolation to the people whom I saw.
I expected to pray with them, talk with them, explore faith with them.
I expected to help them be healed in their hearts and minds so that they could experience the peace of Christ regardless of their physical health
And all of these expectations were realized; but, what I saw that I didn’t expect, was to see the faith of some of these people curing their bodies. ….I had not expected to see their prayers for a miracle being fulfilled. It was a profoundly powerful experience that challenged my assumptions and turned my skepticism into belief.
When we think about healing and faith, it is important to put it in a context. And the primary question that we need to ask in looking at a context for our healing and faith is this:
What does God want for us?
What is God’s desire for us?
What is it that is God’s first choice for our lives?
Jesus said, “I have come that they (meaning us) might have life and have it abundantly.” What does that abundant life look like? Well, we can start with the biggies, here. Jesus said that the entire law and all of the prophets could be summed up in the commandment to love the Lord, your God, with all your heart, with all your mind and with all your spirit. And to love our neighbors as ourselves.
So a full and complete love of God is the primary desire that God has for us. To have abundant life is to be overflowing with love of God and neighbor. Nothing directly there about curing our infirmities.
Since our desire for healing usually involves prayer, the second place we might want to look is at how Jesus taught us to pray. We just said the prayer that Jesus taught:
Thy kingdom come, thy will be done
Daily bread
Receiving and giving forgiveness
Lead us not into temptation
Deliver us from evil
Nothing about curing our illnesses here either.
And, yet, Jesus spent more time and more miracles on healing than on anything else. So, lets take a closer look.
There are two primary Greek words that get used for healing in the New Testament. The first is therapeuo – you can hear our English “therapy” or “therapeutic” in it. The first meaning for the wordtherapeuo is not what you might expect, it is “to serve.” The second meaning gets a little clearer: “to serve the sick.” And, finally, the third meaning is “to cure.”
The other word that is used is iaomai, – the first meaning of which is “to heal.” The second meaning of iaomai is “to make whole.” This word is not used as often, except, interestingly enough, by Luke whom we know was a physician: in Luke 6:18-19 we read, “They had come to hear him and to be healed (iaomai) of their diseases; and those who were troubled with unclean spirits were cured (therapeuo). And all in the crowd were trying to touch him, for power came out from him and healed (iaomai) all of them.”
The distinction between being physically cured and being made whole/being healed is most clearly made, however, by Jesus himself, not so much in his choice of vocabulary, but in his teaching itself. In the text that I read at the beginning of the sermon, the friends have lowered the paralytic through the roof and before Jesus in the hopes that he would be cured. Jesus, so touched by their faith, forgives the sins of the paralytic instead. Now when Jesus announced to the paralytic that his sins had been forgiven, the friends must have been disappointed. Besides that, some of the others who were around were shocked at what Jesus said, since only God has the power to forgive sins. Jesus, sensing the confusion asks,
“Why do you raise such questions in your hearts? Which is easier, to say to the paralytic, ‘Your sins are forgiven,’ or to say, ‘Stand up and take your mat and walk’? But so that you may know that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins” he said to the paralytic “I say to you, stand up, take your mat and go to your home.”
And he does!
The first inclination of Jesus when he was touched by the faith of the friends was to forgive the sins of the paralytic and, as he reminded them, that internal spiritual healing was more difficult than a cure for the man’s paralysis — but he cures the paralysis anyway. And he tells us why he is doing it: “so that you may know that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins.”
Remember that, in the Lord’s prayer, Jesus taught us to ask for forgiveness, but not physical health. For Jesus, it seems that healing was about more than curing the body.
“You shall love the lord your God with all your heart and mind and spirit and love your neighbor as yourself.” And, yet, our love is limited by whether or not – and to what degree – we are able to love ourselves. We can love through pain and illness, but we cannot love another if we do not love our self.
There is another Greek word that gets translated sometimes as “heal” it is sozo and its first meaning is “to save.” James uses it as he sums up much of what we have been hearing about healing: “Are any among you suffering? They should pray. Are any cheerful? They should sing songs of praise. Are any among you sick? They should call for the elders of the church and have them pray over them, anointing them with oil in the name of the Lord. The prayer of faith will save (not cure – more than cure, sozo, make whole, save) the sick, and the Lord will raise them up; and anyone who has committed sins will be forgiven. Therefore confess your sins to one another, and pray for one another, so that you may be healed (iaomai – made whole).”
But, still, there is all that healing that Jesus did and If God’s loving desire for us is that we live abundant life, loving God and one another and if our ability to that is somehow tied to our inner wholeness and love of self that forgiveness affords, why did Jesus then (and why does God still) heal our bodies. And why now as then, if God is going to heal, why is everyone not healed? Jesus, presumably, could have healed everyone but he did not. My father died in spite of my prayers.
What are we to make of God and healing?
In the case of the paralytic we are told that Jesus cured the paralysis as a sign of his power and authority and, in fact, most of the healing of Jesus, like most of the other miracles of Jesus, are called, in the Scriptures, “signs.”
Signs of the power of God,
Signs of the authority of Jesus to let us know our sins
are forgiven,
Signs of the love of God
Signs of the in-breaking of the kingdom of God.
Because God’s first desire for us is not the curing of our physical bodies but the wholeness of our lives that leads to the abundant life of loving God and loving neighbor, God does not need to cure everyone. Curing is a sign and there is a certain holy efficiency with curing that we are just not meant to understand.
How, then, are we to pray about our illnesses our infirmities – or for others?
Jesus set the example in asking about his own impending suffering: “take this cup away, yet not what I will, but what you will.” And he taught us to pray the same: Thy will be done.
But we also approach our prayer in the context that we live in the love of God whose deep desire for us is that we might live abundant lives of loving God and loving one another. We approach God, asking for healing for wholeness and for curing, but surrendering in the end to God’s will, knowing that we already live in God’s salvation.
If we receive a cure in our body it is a sign, not of our faith, but of God’s faithfulness.
If we receive some measure of healing, it is not for us to live as we want but for us to embrace the abundant life that is God’s desire for us.
And if, in God’s holy efficiency, we do not seem to have received what, in our hearts we had hoped for, then we still rest secure in the embrace of God’s love and in the assurance that God’s intention/God’s will is done in us and for us.
What I learned all those years ago in that hospital is that faith – even imperfect faith, even little faith, even deeply flawed faith – is more powerful than enlightened cynicism.
Thanks be to God!