Healing

The Gospels appointed for the Sundays leading toward Lent are all healing stories; stories where Jesus demonstrates his love and power by bringing the suffering into a renewed wholeness and newness of life.

Healing is all about the Lordship of Christ. It’s about who rules God’s world. It is a question of who is in charge. Healing is not simply about making us better; it is about making us whole children of God. It is not simply about taking away our pain; it is about God in Christ reclaiming God’s world from other forces that seek to diminish it.

How does God heal us? Well, at one level the answer is obvious. Healing happens when symptoms are taken away. The blind see. The deaf hear. The leperous are made clean. The grieving are comforted. The troubled find peace. And this of course does happen. (I have been witness to it.) But there is another possibility--a very real possibility for each one of us. If healing is about Jesus’ Lordship and who rules our lives, then real healing can be a defiant refusal to be dominated and ruled by our suffering. It can be a question of affirming what truly rules our life: not our sickness, not our disease, not our loss, not our pain, but over and above all else, the resurrected Christ, who lifts us up as He himself was lifted up, into a new and holy reality.

Where do you need God's healing? What will healing look like for you?