If the healing ministry of the Church is to be integrated with the whole gospel of the Church, it has to be rooted in what is central and normative for everything else that claims the name of Christian, namely the incarnation of the eternal Son of God in Jesus of Nazareth.
Of course the incarnation itself has to be understood in the whole context in which it was given to us. The coming of Jesus makes sense only in relation to the purpose for which he came, a purpose that was announced in his ministry and fulfilled in his death and resurrection. What therefore we have to say about the relation between healing and incarnation needs to be supplemented to what we shall go on to say about healing and the cross.
Healing a Sick Creation
The first thing to be said is that the purpose of the incarnation can be seen in the most general terms as the healing of a sick creation and specifically of a sick human creation that is on the one hand the victim and on the other hand the perpetrator of an evil that contradicts the life-giving purpose of God. In so doing it takes men and women out of the promise and power of life into the threat and the power of death.
Jesus could describe himself in medical terms as the doctor. When rebuked for consorting with tax collectors and sinners his riposte was "Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick. I came not to call the righteous but sinners." (Mark 2:17) He is the doctor who has a cure not just for physical illness that is the outward manifestation of the destructive power of evil, but of the bent mind, heart and will which is the central citadel of evil in human life.
Our humanity cannot be compartmentalised as if you could deal with the body without reference to the person whom that body both supports and expresses. To put it in traditional terms the healer of bodies is also the saviour of souls and there is, not just in contemporary medicine and psychology but in the witness of the gospel a psychosomatic connection between the one and the other. That is yet another reason why it is good practice to exercise the healing ministry within the local church where there is at least the possibility not just of a physical anointing of a sick body, but the exposure of the whole person to the full impact of the love of God in the ongoing worship and pastoral care of the Church.
It is worthwhile pursuing the notion of the purpose of the incarnation as the healing of the creation just a little further. The God who is incarnate in Jesus is the Creator God who is therefore in affirmative and positive relationship to all that he has made and who comes into it not to reject and destroy it but to renew and fulfil it. As the Johannine prologue emphasises the Word who is made flesh is the word by which the world was made; his love for it stems from his commitment to it.
Nevertheless his diagnosis of its situation is that what he made good has been mysteriously infiltrated by a destructive evil that is threatening and destroying it, so that it needs a radical reorientation to bring it back into the Creator's positive purposes for it. On the one hand he cures it by taking it into his own life and thus affirming all that is of God in it; he becomes a physical, growing, thinking feeling human being, who finds his life in his relationship to others and in his relationship to God. That is his Yes to his creation.
On the other hand he is confronted by the physical, relational, social , religious and spiritual evil that is divorcing the creation from its Creator and bringing about its physical, environmental, personal, social and spiritual perversion and destruction from which he has to take decisive action to set it free. That is his No to his creation in so far as it has itself said No to him.
In the incarnation of Christ God affirms, judges and redeems his whole creation. His purpose as creator is identical with his purpose as redeemer: the latter restores and fulfils the former.
The Healing Inbuilt in Creation
If we make that a bit more specific in our present context we can say that both as Creator and as Redeemer God is healer. The possibilities and means of healing are built into the very fabric of creation as the gift of the very same gracious God who in his Son comes to renew his creation.
That is why in mainstream Christianity there has never been an either/or relationship between the healing work of the doctor and the healing ministry of the Church. There are obvious pragmatic reasons for that, especially nowadays when modern medicine has so much to offer. But there are also excellent theological reasons for that affirmation, because in Christian perspective, modern medicine is the means by which God's creatures appropriate and deploy the remedial potentialities that God has built into his creation, and at the same time given to his human creatures the increasing ability to recognise, organise and deploy them to help to maintain their fellow human beings in physical and psychological health. That means that with an excellent theological conscience we are to accept with gratitude as a gift of God all the healing that comes to us by the doctor's prescription and the surgeon's hand.
It is not hard to find people whose lives have been curtailed and disabled and their relationship with God spoilt, because others have persuaded them to seek the spiritual healer when they should have been visiting the medical doctor and, by such a diversion, have found that it was too late to benefit by the healing that the doctor could have offered. Such are the baleful results of this kind of gnostic rejection of the healing gifts that the Creator offers in his creation.
But if the healing arts are the gift of God, they like all created things are subject to perversion and corruption. The medical man can become the witch doctor where legitimate healing is the door to dangerous occult involvements. Modern medicine can claim a omni-competency which it is not able to deliver, as the present agonies of the NHS witness. It can open possibilities for example of genetic engineering that it may not be right to realise. Even the best medicine, as the best doctors recognise, is a patching and a mending that does not address the basic problem of sin and evil which, when if it is conquered at one point, will break out at another, as superbugs develop resistance to antibiotics, and as old plagues are eradicated but replaced by new plagues threatening the suffering and death in new forms.
So alongside the healing that comes from what is given in creation there is need of the healing that has its basis in the act of recreation that has its basis in the incarnation of Christ. This does not arise from what is given in past creation but is the sign, promise and foretaste of what is to come in the future. The healing miracles of Jesus are seen in John's gospel as the signs of the eternal life that Jesus brings to those who belong to him; they point past themselves and introduce us to the radical overcoming of the sickness at the heart of humanity that lies beyond the possibilities of a creation-based medicine and is made possible by the renewing initiative of the Father, the incarnation of the Son and the outpouring of the Holy Spirit.
When somebody is healed by the laying on of hands in the name of Jesus and anointing with oil in invocation of the Holy Spirit, we are being reminded both that all healing is the gift of God, although often he employs the instrumentality of human skill to deliver it, but also and equally that there is a radical healing of our whole humanity which creation of itself has not the ability to achieve but must be sought and found in the activity and gift of the triune God.
Healing through the Humanity of Jesus
All that said, it is of great importance to recognise that just as the healing resources of creation are delivered through the work of the humanity whose calling it is to realise the potentialities of creation, so the healing that is based on the incarnation does not bypass, but works in and through, the humanity of Jesus. When our humanity is brought into personal unity with the divinity of the Son of God. the hand that raised Jairus' daughter from death, like any other hand, utilised the interaction of brain., nerves, bones, joints and muscles to do what it did. Yet, through these natural interactions, it achieved what no ordinary human hand could achieve because this hand was joined in incarnate union with the Son of God.
Recreation through our Humanity
That utilisation and deployment of the human by the divine is summed up in the famous tag of Thomas Aquinas. Gratia non tollit naturam sed perfecit, grace does not suspend nature but perfects it. That holds not simply in what happens in the physical stretching out of a hand but applies equally to the processes by which God's healing reaches us - namely the psychosomatic connection that establishes an interaction between what happens to us spiritually in our relationship to God and what happens physically in our bodies and psychologically in our hearts.
If that is so, we are not allowed to say that the doctors heal naturally, by using the mechanisms built into the world and into our psychosomatic humanity, whereas in the Christian ministry of healing, God heals super-naturally, overriding all these mechanisms and doing something that is a pure miracle deriving from his divinity rather than by a divine power operating first through Christ's ands then through our own humanity.
I have come to think that the contrast between natural and supernatural is not a helpful one in theology in general and in the theology of healing in particular. It creates a chasm between the two as if one were all human and the other were all divine and that is in contradiction to the divine/human relationship as it is unfolded in the Incarnation.
If we speak instead of the order of creation and the order of redemption, of the healing that derives from the world's origin in the triune God and of the healing that derives from the world's future in the redeeming activity of the triune God through the incarnate Christ, it becomes much clearer that the human and the divine are involved in the healing that happens in both orders and that the distinction between them is real but relative rather than absolute because the same God works through human means in both.
An Instructive Miracle
In my own practice of the healing ministry I have seen one or two happenings that might fall into the category of miracle, where it is not just a matter of depression being lifted, blood pressure reduced, rheumatism eased, but where things have happened that could not be explained in terms of human psychosomatic interactions but strongly pointed to the intervention of a divine energy doing for us what we could not do for ourselves.
The most outstanding of these events happened some fifteen years ago when as someone who was known to exercise a ministry of healing I was asked to go and pray with a man in a BUPA hospital in Kent who was terminally ill with a brain tumour that had been diagnosed by X-ray and pronounced untreatable.
I went with the person who had invited me and found the man far gone in semi-consciousness so that only the briefest laying on of hands and anointing were possible. A few days later the word came through that after we left he began to recover consciousness, was soon sitting up and eating and was now on his feet preparing to go home. Even more remarkably new X-rays had shown that the tumour had shrunk and more or less disappeared so that the consultant involved, comparing the two sets of X-rays, had no explanation to offer, except to say that very occasionally and quite unaccountably that sort of thing did happen and then, turning to his patient he added, "All I can say is that somebody from Nazareth has been looking after you."
These things happen far less often than charismatics imagine or claim, but in the mercy and mystery of God's love they do happen. The healing ministry is not all about consoling the neurotic and encouraging the arthritic, just sometimes the hand of the Lord is revealed and we are left wondering and rejoicing at what he has done.
The sequel is not edifying. The man recovered and went back to work and to the best of my knowledge remains in good health. For a time he went around with copies of the two sets of X-rays inviting whoever would listen to examine them. He came and showed them to us, but it soon became obvious that while the miracle amazed him, the God who had performed the miracle remained as far as one could see as distant and unreal as ever and it could not be got through to him that gratitude for what had been done for him might suggest a radical review of his relationship to the one who had done it.
When my wife asked his wife, "What difference has all this made to you?" the only answer she got was that now they could go walking the dog together the way they used to and, as far as I know, it never got further than that. As Jesus himself found out, even the most remarkable signs and wonders can fail to have any converting effect on those for whom they are performed.
The Spirit's Action and the Human Response
However, the point and relevance of this story has still to come. Just after it happened, as one of the Bishop's Examining Chaplains, I was in touch with a man who had been ordained NSM priest after retiring from a distinguished medical consultancy in a well-known London teaching hospital.
I told him the story I have just told you said , 'John, wearing both your hats as priest and physician, what do you make of it all." I have always cherished his reply, "I have learnt," he said," that when the Spirit of God touches and penetrates the human spirit, there is no limit to the responses that the body can make to it."
That seems to me to catch in a single sentence what I mean by an incarnational understanding of the ministry of healing. It is not that God applies some laser-like energy from heaven to excise the tumour from the brain, setting aside all the complicated interactions between mind and body that affect the health of both.
Rather through the ministry of healing and in all the freedom of his love he touches a person's spirit with his own; he energises that part of us that is open to him so that something fresh and new that comes from the Father through the Son and in the Spirit is inserted into the situation and proceeds to achieve its aim through the itself mysterious psychosomatic interaction which is the context in which all healing takes place. That interaction works sometimes on the mind through the medicines and the treatments applied to the body and sometimes on the body through what energises and renews the mind. That interaction is being taken more and more seriously in contemporary medicine of all kinds.
This interaction is itself mysterious. Part of the mystery of our human personhood is our ability to translate mental aspirations, purposes and intentions into physical actions that employ natural causalities to bring these purposes to fulfilment. The transition from a thought in the mind to an electrical impulse in the brain that can be transmitted through the nerves to the place in the body where it can be expressed in the outer world is the subject of endless scientific and philosophical debate , but it is on this mysterious transition that in their different ways musicians, authors craftsman surgeons and ordinary people in the countless actions of daily life depend.
In a way that is at least analogous to that, we can see that when the human mind and spirit is reinforced from outside itself by the Holy Spirit, who, in the creedal phrase, is 'the Lord and Giver of Life,' that life can run through that psychosomatic chain of command that we have been describing so that the healing powers of the body are mobilised and enabled sometimes in quite unpredictable and remarkable ways. The inbuilt processes that make for healing are not suspended or over-ridden but enhanced and reinforced by fresh contact with the risen Lord from whose creative energy they originally sprung.
The God who gave his creation its order, purpose, and meaning can restore that order by the same power that gave it when that order breaks down in sickness. His creation remains accessible to him and he can purify, repair and energise it for its healing, just as in the incarnation of the Son he purified, repaired and renewed our humanity by taking it to himself for our saving.
In the great mystery of Christ as in the little mystery of healing the Creator enters into a new positive and dynamic relationship with his creation that respects it, heals it and claims it for himself.
Incarnation and Faith
Of course similarity is not identity. The union between God and man in Christ is hypostatic, the two natures, in the language of Chalcedon are inseparably united in one person. Our union with Christ on the other hand is interpersonal, it is forged and maintained not by incarnation but by faith, the transmission of healing energy from him to us depends on the kind of faith that unites us to him, so that for us, as the teaching of Jesus again and again confirms, there is the closest overarching connection between salvation and faith of which reflects itself in the connection between healing and faith that the gospel affirms and that will be the subject of our final session.
In the meantime, to sum up this section, the incarnational approach to healing that we have been exploring excludes on the one hand a purely naturalistic understanding of disease and its healing in terms that seeks to understand both in exclusively physiological, psychological and social terms and thus expels God from his own world.
On the other hand it equally excludes a purely supernaturalist understanding which insists that God works healing by methods that have no connection with the physical and psychological mechanisms that doctors investigate.
The doctrine of the incarnation insists that we are healed through authentic divinity working through authentic humanity both in Christ and in us and just as in healing the Creator needs his doctors, so the Redeemer needs his priests.
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