a punishment to fall into the hands of a doctor!
Honour physicians for their services, for the Lord created them; for their gift of healing comes from the Most High, and they are rewarded by the king. The skill of physicians makes them distinguished, and in the presence of the great they are admired. The Lord created medicines out of the earth, and the sensible will not despise them. Was not water made sweet with a tree in order that its power might be known? And he gave skill to human beings that he might be glorified in his marvellous works. By them the physician heals and takes away pain; the pharmacist makes a mixture from them. God’s works will never be finished; and from him health spreads over all the earth.
My child, when you are ill do not delay, but pray to the Lord, and he will heal you. Give up your faults and direct your hands rightly, and cleanse your heart from all sin. Offer a sweet-smelling sacrifice, and a memorial portion of choice flour, and pour oil on your offering, as much as you can afford. Then give the physician his place, for the Lord created him; do not let him leave you, for you need him. There may come a time when recovery lies in the hands of physicians, for they too pray to the Lord that he will grant them success in diagnosis and in healing, for the sake of preserving life. He who sins against his Maker will be defiant towards the physician [or: may he fall into the hands of the physician].[7]
Because of sin and death, we need an approach to health that recognizes human frailty, suffering, disease and mortality, but we also need one that acknowledges God’s gifts of healing through medicine and pharmacy as much as through prayer.
The healing ministry of Jesus
The pastoral ministry of the Church needs to be part of the ministry of Jesus, for he is the Church’s pattern and the Church’s resource. The Letter to the Ephesians makes the point that each baptized Christian is united with Christ through the Holy Spirit, and the ascended Christ sends gifts of ministry on to the members. Each has gifts of ministry to offer to the whole body of Christ (Eph. 4.1–15). When the whole body of Christ is working properly, it results in growth and upbuilds itself in love. The corporate ministry of the Christian Church, in other words, is to express and work out the ministry of the ascended Christ. Or, as we put it, Christian pastoral ministry is to be caught up into the pastoral ministry of Jesus. It is worth noting four particular aspects of Jesus’ ministry of healing that are pertinent to our thinking about the Church’s contemporary pastoral ministry.
First, the healing ministry of Jesus proclaims God’s kingdom. When the deaf hear again, when the blind see again, when the paralysed walk again, and when the dead live again, the message is reinforced: God’s kingdom brings new hope where there is despair; new life where there is death, a renewal of health and well-being.
Again and again, Jesus breaks the rules. He touches a leper, even though leprosy made a person unclean. He touches the woman who has a discharge of blood, even though that was thought to be ritually unclean. He reaches out to the dead body of the son of the widow of Nain, even though touching the dead makes one unclean. God’s kingly rule in Jesus breaks down barriers of exclusion that prevent people hearing God’s welcome. It places the law in the richer, healing context of grace.
If the pastoral ministry of the Christian Church is to be caught up into the ministry of Jesus, it needs to be understood as part of the gracious work of God’s kingdom, bringing life to individuals, breaking down the barriers that stop people hearing God’s welcome.
Second, the healings of Jesus were community events. Usually they were in public – visible signs of God’s kingdom. When Bartimaeus is healed of his blindness,[8] Jesus faces him with his own responsibility and needs by asking: ‘What do you want me to do for you?’ Jesus hands responsibility and choice back to Bartimaeus. But everyone who is watching is confronted with the presence of God’s kingdom power – what does this mean for them? Is Jesus, perhaps, confronting the whole community with its blindness and responsibility and choice? In such healing events, society as a whole is called to the bar of God’s kingly rule.
A further social dimension to the healings of Jesus can be seen in his attitude to the demonic. As Jeffrey John makes clear, the New Testament uses the same terms ‘principalities and powers’ to refer both to supernatural forces, and also to ‘the very real powers – armies, nations, institutions, individuals – which represent them on earth . . . The freedom Jesus brings is freedom from both personal and systemic evil; his confrontation with the demons parallels and symbolizes his confrontation with the Jewish authorities. The relevance of this for us is that ‘the healing Jesus brings is as necessary for systems and societies as it is for individuals’.[9]
The pastoral ministry of the Christian Church, then, needs to be concerned not only with the individual, but with the whole society in which that person’s life story is set, and this takes us into political questions of community health, as well as questions of deliverance from ‘principalities and powers’.
Third, the healing ministry of Jesus changed people’s priorities. This is nicely illustrated in the story of Zacchaeus – the chief tax collector who had been economical with the truth.[10] After his encounter with Jesus, Zacchaeus promised to return goods to people whom he had defrauded, and his business priorities are turned around in the light of God’s rule. And Jesus said to him, ‘Today salvation has come to this house.’ Or, as William Tyndale’s translation has it, ‘Today, health has come to this house.’
If the pastoral ministry of the Christian Church is to be caught up into the ministry of Jesus, it needs to be concerned with lifestyle as well as with cure, with ethics as well as with feelings, with business as well as with private life. God’s kingly rule concerns all of life at all levels – as must the Church’s ministry.
Fourth, healing is linked to forgiveness. Four friends bring a paralysed man to Jesus and, because of the crowds, let him down through a hole in the ceiling.[11] Jesus first says, ‘Your sins are forgiven.’ Then later says, ‘Take up your bed and walk.’ The healing work of Jesus touches this person’s need for forgiveness as well as his hope to walk again.
Healing at all levels comes from God. This is beautifully expressed in the words of the prayer after communion in The Book of Common Prayer, which thanks God for ‘the forgiveness of our sins, and all other benefits of his passion’. Those ‘other benefits’ we can take to include the ministry of healing and wider pastoral care.
God, it seems, sometimes withholds healing at one level in order to heal us in other ways first. Sometimes we need to hear about the forgiveness of our sins before we can receive the other word about health for our bodies. Healing is a process: it doesn’t happen all at once. The theologian T. F. Torrance referred to ‘eschatological reserve’, by which I think he meant there is a gap between the word of forgiveness and the word of full healing. With this paralysed man, the gap was a few minutes; with some of us it takes a lifetime.
In the cross of Jesus, the word of forgiveness has been spoken, and in that sense there is healing in the cross: ‘By his wounds you have been healed.’[12] But the working out of that promise takes a life of growing into wholeness. God’s word of health comes to us sometimes just in part in this life, and in its fullness not until we reach the fullness of the kingdom. The Church’s ministry of healing – and indeed all our pastoral ministry – takes place in that gap between the presence of God’s kingdom in the life and death and resurrection of Jesus – with all the blessings that flow to us from that here and now – and the fullness of that kingdom in the life to come.
And it is that kingdom that is inaugurated in the resurrection of Jesus from the dead. The resurrection demonstrates the messianic hope that Jesus is the Messiah who brings shalom. It is an affirmation of creation and the beginning of its healing.
The resurrection is the resurrection of the body, which gives to our bodily life a value and meaning to be cherished. It established the victory
