In recent years I have found myself going back again and again to the saying of Martin Luther, Crux probat omnia; everything else in Christian gospel authenticates itself in terms of the saving act which is at the heart of the gospel, the cross of Jesus. That rule applies to the ministry of healing as much as to anything else , which is why I will start by looking at healing and the cross.
The Suffering Servant Heals
If we are looking for a biblical connection between cross and healing we can turn to Matthew 8:14-17, where that connection is made rather unexpectedly explicit. Having recorded the healing of Peter's mother-in-law, Matthew goes on "That evening they brought to him many who were oppressed by demons and he cast out the spirits with a word and healed all who were sick. This was to fulfil what was spoken by the prophet Isaiah, 'He took our illnesses, and bore our diseases.'". Just at the point where he is reporting the universal effectiveness of Jesus' healing ministry Matthew unexpectedly invites us to understand it in terms of a verse from the Suffering servant passage in Isaiah 53.
In the epistles and in the theological tradition Jesus has been seen as the suffering servant in relation to his atoning for sin on the cross but here, in the only reference to the passage in the Gospels, it is invoked to interpret his healing ministry.
That is true to the passage itself in which the reference to the Servant's bearing of our sins is sandwiched between two references to healing. It becomes clear that the purpose of his suffering includes his carrying of our diseases and the consequence of his suffering is that by his stripes we are healed. This implies that for Isaiah explicitly and for Matthew implicitly there is an integral connection between sin and disease since Jesus as the suffering servant of God bears both and supplies the remedy for both.
Illness and Sin
Not of course, as is often imagined by sick people, that all disease is a punishment for sin, although in some cases it may be its consequence. That is all too simplistic and one-sided and on at least two occasions Jesus repudiated any one-to-one relationship between an individual's disability and his sin.
But sin and disease are much more generally and randomly related as two manifestations of the forces of destructiveness and opposition to God's purposes that have been let loose in the world. We live in a world that is on the one hand God's good creation and on the other has fallen into wrong relationship with its creator. In our complicity with that we lay ourselves open to the attacks of destructiveness on physical, mental and spiritual levels that will get a hold on us wherever they can, quite apart from all questions of individual merit or deserving. 'It is not fair', people often say, when good people fall ill. Of course it is not - it is of the essence of evil that it is not fair and it respects nothing and nobody that it might destroy.
Some fall ill, some stay physically well but are in the grips of habits and attitudes that are more destructive than any illness. Sometimes as sinners we are responsible for what befalls us. If you smoke cigarettes you are liable to get lung cancer and then indeed the physical result is the direct consequence of how you have been living. But much of the time we are victims of destructive forces that our actions have not directly invoked. In even the most saintly of us there are backdoors left unlocked, priorities and attitudes left uncorrected and unconverted, and through these destructiveness enters, curtails and even terminates our life.
Into all this Jesus comes seeing the work of the Destroyer all around him, driving out spiritual evil, converting people from moral evil, healing their bodies from physical evil, rebuking the destroying forces of nature in the mini-tsunami on the Lake. These are all alike signs of God's reassertion of his kingly rule and will to restore and renew his people and his world, and to do all this as the Suffering Servant, on his way to the cross, where his suffering and his redeeming power reach their simultaneous climax.
Healing and Atonement
From this we may learn first that the work of Christ that climaxes in the cross extends far beyond the mediation of forgiveness for past sins. In his self-giving love he takes the sick and fallen human nature that we know, makes it his own, takes it down to death and raises it up to newness and wholeness of life.
In other words, there is healing in the atonement. It is not as immediately and universally available as forgiveness, as some Pentecostalists have misleadingly taught, but it is there in the more profound sense that Christ has, by offering himself on our behalf, reconnected and reconciled us to God so that the sanctifying energies of the life-giving Spirit can reach us, reshape us and makes us whole and blameless in body as well as in soul and spirit. The order and timing of that sanctification are shaped by God's freedom and our own responsive-ness, but its substance and means are given and available in the crucified and risen Lord.
Salvation by Identification
Second, as the Matthew verse makes clear, this whole sanctification is achieved by Christ's costly and complete identification with us. In his love he bears our sins, shares our suffering and carries our diseases. He can heal the way he does because he is moving further and further into that costly identification with us that becomes complete on Calvary.
In Christian healing ministry it is not esoteric techniques, or even sacra-mental rites or charismatic endowments as such that heal. All these in themselves are useless unless they are the instruments and mediations of the same kind of identifying love by which Jesus saved us on the cross, in which he lives and reigns and is able ultimately to conquer destroying evil in all its forms.
A church in which healing can happen is a church that is open to receive and communicate that Calvary love which is the most mighty thing in earth and heaven. By it the world was both made and saved and a church that would be a healing place has to express at least something of that compassionate self-giving to those who come in need of its ministry.
When there is little healing among us it may well be because there is little of that quality of love among us. According to I Corinthians 12 those who minister healing do so not as isolated individuals but as members of the body, and their effectiveness in healing depends on the health of the body to which as members they belong.
In the same way it is good I Corinthians 13 teaching to insist that spiritual gifts, including gifts of healings are wholesome and upbuilding only to the degree in which they are received and exercised as charismata, the spe-cific and appropriate expressions of that gracious charis. Without it they can become dangerous and disruptive. When we are thinking about the ministry of healing we have to think not just about the openness to that love of the sick and those who minister to them, but of the openness of the church in whose midst and in whose name that healing is offered.
Taking Out and Going Through
Thirdly, when we look at the healing ministry in the light of the paschal mystery we can gain some insight about what is going on when suffering is unrelieved and there is no physical healing in response to our most fer-vent prayers. From Jesus' cross and resurrection we can see that God's purpose is not always achieved by taking us out of what is hurting and threatening to destroy us. On the contrary his deepest purposes are achieved by taking us through the worst and making what is in itself a road to death, a road to new quality of life on the other side of death.
When God's self-giving love comes into a situation dominated by sin, suf-fering or death as it did with Jesus on the cross, through that same Jesus that love can act creatively and transformingly on that situation. What looks like unrelieved, unjust, and meaningless suffering can become salvific and redemptive because of Christ's presence in it and action upon it. Jesus does not rise from the dead on Easter morning in spite of his sufferings but because of them. The risen Jesus still bears and displays the wound of his suffering; the cross is the operating theatre without anaesthetics where, through his suffering, he is made ready for his resur-rection glory.
The way of the master, as the New Testament makes clear, is also the way of the servant. C S Lewis once said that miracles are for beginners. In the immature phases of our discipleship, which are not confined to early days but can keep recurring, God can and does show himself as our gracious rescuer from what is afflicting us. But there will come times when we are fashioned into maturity by finding with Paul that our thorn in the flesh, whatever it may be, is not removed even in response to our most fervent and persistent beseeching.
Paul's Thorn and Ours
Paul's thorn in the flesh is the classic biblical example of a prayer for healing that was answered but refused. Whether the disability was physical or psychological, its source as a messenger of Satan sent to upset him was clearly identified and persistent prayer was offered for its removal. "I besought the Lord three times that he might take it from me. The answer was in the terms we have been describing 'My grace is sufficient for you; my strength is made perfect in weakness.' This was indeed a case in which Paul was to be taken through rather than out of his affliction and in which his suffering which in itself was destructive was by the grace of God made to serve God's purposes in Paul's life and ministry.
While it is true that the gospel is ill represented by a teaching that all suf-fering is the will of God and our prayer ought to be for resignation to ac-cept and endure it, it is also true that the gospel is equally misrepresented by a charismatic or sacramental triumphalism that insists that it is God's will to heal all sickness and remove all affliction here and now when we ask him to and that if the healing does not happen, that is a sign of our failure rather than of his purpose. That is to pursue in Luther's terms a theologia gloriae rather than a theologia crucis. It is to fail to take account of the fact that the way God led Jesus through suffering and death to victory is the way he will also lead us and it is to fly in the face of the whole thrust of II Corinthians where Paul's apostolic walking of the via crucis is expounded.
Healing and the Eucharist
In a minute we shall explore that a little further, but let me end this dis-cussion of healing and the cross on a more practical note. All that I have been saying is best expressed liturgically when the ministry of healing in the local church is regularly offered in close connection with the eucharist.
It cannot always be so since healing ministry has often to be offered pri-vately and in emergency and to people who are not communicants, but if there is at the centre of it all a regular healings service which is also eu-charistic, that makes an eloquent witness to all that we have been saying. It diverts attention from human healers to the crucified and risen Lord. If the ministers of healing are also ministers of the eucharist, it integrates the healing ministry into the wholeness of the gospel by insisting that it also is the gift of the Calvary love that took Christ to and through his cross, and that it also reflects the paschal mystery by which God shows that through the sacrifice of Christ he can use suffering and death as the ways to resurrection and life.
Healing and Resurrection
All of which brings us to the relation between healing and resurrection. Let me lighten the theology a bit by telling you about two women in my last parish who between them illustrate the main point I want to make.
The first was an elderly lady who was well known for the many hats she wore and the many more healings that she talked about. At the drop of a hat, so to speak, she would regale you for as long as you could stand it with anecdotes about the many illnesses from which she had suffered and tell you how the Lord had healed her from them all.
She was quite obsessed with healing but I soon discovered that she was terribly afraid to die and the two things were by no means unconnected. One day when she was in fact terminally ill and very poorly I visited her and was exposed once again to the long healing recital by which she sought to persuade herself that what had happened so often was about to happen again. When I could get a word in, I said, "You know, Hilda - because that was not her name - "One of these days the Lord is not going to heal you because he wants to have you for himself." That made her very angry indeed "That won't be for years and years yet", she snapped, but in a week or two after that conversation protesting a hope of healing for as long as she could speak, she was gone in what for her age and stage was a quite appropriate transition from this world to the next.
Contrast that with another story from the same parish at roughly the same time., when our recently ordained NSM Deacon, Kathleen - and that really was her name - was lying in hospital dying of cancer. People who knew perfectly well that her illness was terminal kept sending her cards with anodyne messages about "hope you will be better soon", and "we are all praying for a full recovery", but she just lay there smiling se-renely at the cards on the shelf , because she knew that it would not be so and she had indeed stop wanting it to be so, because her eyes were fixed on something better than the most miraculous recovery.
She went through these last days repeating almost like a mantra the verse from Philippians "For me to live is Christ and to die is gain", and she went down into the ultimate mystery with these words on her lips and in her heart, having lost all personal interest in the kind of healing that so obsessed Hilda but quite ready to die in the Lord.
We can clarify the theological issues implicit in the attitude of these two women if we think of them in relations to the resurrection of Jesus which on the one hand relativises and on the other hand authorises the Church's ministry of healing. Hilda was all too typical of the contemporary world with its almost universal assumption that death is the worst thing that can happen to anybody. She rightly discerned in illness the approach and the threat of death and in face of it clung frantically to the hope of healing.
Perishable and Imperishable Healing
In contrast with all that the gospel of the resurrection says clearly that the final consummation of God's purposes and therefore the ultimate healing of our humanity, first for Jesus and then for us, lies not on this side of death but on the other side in the new heavens and the new earth of which the resurrection of Jesus is the first fruit and the guarantee.
In I Corinthians 15 where the subject is resurrection Paul says, "Flesh and blood" - and, we might add, however healed they may be - "cannot in-herit the kingdom of God nor does the perishable inherit the imperish-able." (15:50) Physical healing, however remarkable, still operates in the realm of the perishable. All the people that Jesus healed had to grow old and frail and perhaps fall ill all over again and even resuscitated Lazarus had to go back to his grave for the second time in order that Jesus prom-ise to be resurrection and life to him might be completely fulfilled.
There is an in-built perishability inherent in all our healings that makes them partial, vulnerable, and temporary. We should not be surprised when they turn out to be so, because the negative side of the great positive hope that all who are in Christ are bound for eternal life is that to reach it they are also bound for death.
We are not therefore to think of the denial of physical healing as always being failure. To parody the book of Ecclesiastes, there is a time to be healed and a time not to be healed, a time to live and a time to die. Kathleen knew when to put her hope not in healing but in resurrection and at the end of her life she found a serenity and a peace that Hilda never knew.
That means that in all healing ministry there has to be a continuing pas-toral discernment about which road we are on, the road to temporary healing or the road to death and resurrection. To get that discernment wrong can cause much pain and confusion so that around all healing min-istry there needs to be prayer support so that we can get that discern-ment right. Some of that needs to be prayer by people who are not too emotionally bound up with the sick person, so that they can hear what God is saying and not just what their love wants him to be saying.
I can remember within one week being asked to pray with three men terminally ill with cancer but with a probable few weeks to go. The first two died within twenty-four hours of my visit, so that I found myself warning the family of the third in case the same should happen again. It did, and left me feeling like a practitioner of a sort of spiritual euthanasia, a charismatic executioner, only to be reassured by the relief and gratitude of the families, that they and the one they loved had been spared the ordeal of these last weeks and the way had been opened to the ultimate healing that God had for them. Alongside the penultimate healing that can happen here and now there is the ultimate healing that belongs to the world to come and for all of us sooner or later the first has to give way to the second.
We were made for fullness of life of body mind and spirit and the resurrection of Jesus affirms that in spite of all the forces of destruction that destiny has been achieved for us and is available to us in the Lord. The healing ministry of Jesus does not inaugurate the new age in all its glory, but his healings are the signs, the anticipations, and the foretastes of it. As the great New Testament commentator Bengal said of the gospel miracles 'Spirant resurrectionem' - they breathe resurrection. They are promises, guarantees, and first instalments of the new life to come. They do not bring about resurrection, but they point towards it.
Paul brings together both the cautionary and the affirming aspects of the whole matter in Romans 8:11 'If the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead is living in you, he will give life to your mortal bodies through his Spirit who lives in you," The positive side of that is that the Spirit of resurrection is abroad and will give life here and now to your mortal bodies. That validates our healing ministries but at the same time he is insisting that the bodies to which he gives new life are still mortal bodies that are going to age and weaken and die because that is the only road to share in the resurrection of Christ.
The Eschatological Tightrope
In other words we have to walk with care and discernment a very narrow and precarious tightrope between a deferred eschatology that pushes all hope of healing into the post-mortem future and a triumphalistic realised eschatology that says that if the conditions are fulfilled it can all happen here and now for everybody.
According to our personality and experience some of us will be in danger of lurching to one side and some to the other. But as we pursue our ministries of healing, things will happen to correct us. Over optimism will be rebuked by the healings that do not happen and over pessimism by those that do. We shall have to learn to live with the tension that has faith to expect great things in the present and, if they do not happen, still to persevere in the hope that says, after today there is tomorrow and af-ter all the little tomorrows there is the great Tomorrow and when today is over and nothing has happened all is far from lost, because, says hope, 'Tomorrow is also God's.'
The Revd Dr Tom Smail is retired and a former lecturer in doctrine at St John's College, Nottingham and the former editor of Theological Renewal
These posts are by guest authors for Fulcrum