I’ve been praying for a lot of hurting people lately. You know who some of them are because their names are on the Trinity prayer list. In recent weeks we’ve prayed for people with COVID, with cancer, and for people recovering from surgery. Some of you here today have been among those we’re praying for. I also know of and visit a few members of our extended Trinity and Guadalupe family living with complex brain injuries and mental illness, and you may know that my own sister suffers in those ways. It’s hard to live with chronic illness, God knows. And hard to know how best to support persistently sick people, especially when there isn’t an easy or obvious cure. “Woman you are set free from your ailment!” Lordy, How much I wish we all had the healing power of Jesus.
There’s a story in the 5th chapter of John’s Gospel in which Jesus heals a person suffering from another sort of disability. He’d been stranded on a mat at a pool by the Jerusalem Sheep’s Gate for thirty eight years, the story goes. That’s not the story we just heard this morning—lest there be any confusion—but there are some interesting parallels. That healing also took place on the Sabbath, and the religious leaders were equally critical of Jesus. So, much as I wish we all had the healing power of Jesus, it clearly upset the social order and came at a personal cost to him.
There’s another similarity between the healing stories in John and the one in Luke that we just heard today. Neither of the sick people asked to be healed. Remember in this morning’s story, Jesus saw the woman enter the synagogue and called her over to him. “When he laid his hands on her, immediately she stood up straight and began praising God.” Notice that he diagnosed and healed her without any conversation whatsoever. In John’s healing story, there was conversation, but it was kind of a weird one. Jesus asked the man if he wanted to be healed, but the paralytic dodged that question. “Sir, I have no one to out me into the pool,” was his response. Either he was just a complainer, or he simply didn’t understand what Jesus was asking him. I get that. Sometimes what Jesus offers us is so very wonderful that it’s beyond the scope of our human comprehension.
A bent over woman who likely couldn’t see except for what was under her feet; a paralyzed man who couldn’t envision what Jesus was offering. Both of them are limited in their vision in different ways: they didn’t see as clearly or as much as God does. Which is not so much a bad thing as it is the nature of the human condition. But these stories show us that Jesus healed more than hurting bodies; he unbound those who were not free, he restored perspective, and he kindled the capacity to imagine new things. Even when people didn’t even ask for all that. And the crowd rejoiced in what God made possible
But not everyone rejoiced. Religious leaders found Jesus’ apparent suspension of the normal rules—of health and sickness, purity and uncleanness, Sabbath and work—so disturbing that they began to conspire against him. We know from the two stories I just mentioned that he healed on the wrong days, but what else are we to make of Jesus’ transgressive healing miracles? Well, here are a few things to consider—
(1) Jesus’ healing miracles weren’t prizes for the good. In the scope of the Gospels, Jesus healed a variety of people: woman and men, Jew and Gentile, powerful and humble. The majority were people who had been marginalized, but that’s because illness itself was marginalizing in Jesus’ time. So being healed restored them to full participation in their communities.
(2) The miracles didn’t seem to be exclusively– maybe not even primarily– for the benefit of the suffering one. Indeed, in the 9th chapter of John, Jesus states unambiguously that people do not get sick because of their sin, but nor were they healed just for themselves. Rather, Jesus healed them in order to demonstrate God’s mercy. Which is to say, we should all be out with the crowd, rejoicing at all the wonderful things that God has done.
(3) The healing miracles weren’t actually so much counter to the laws of nature as they were to the constraints of time. So many of the diseases for which people were sick and marginalized in Jesus’ day are fully treatable now, or—perhaps more significantly—are not even considered to be marginalizing disabilities anymore. Deaf people, gay people, people with mobility challenges lead full and joyful lives with cultural strengths of their own. God’s healing mercy is demonstrated when we practice acceptance of human diversity
Still, the kinds of pain and disease that truly inhibit human flourishing persists. And although I know that our healing prayers make a difference—we see it in our own community, quite regularly—intercessory prayers are not like a vending machine. Sometimes we pray and don’t see the results we want. Sometimes we pray and things get worse. Sometime people die too soon and we have no alternative but to grieve. The Bible and the Christian tradition give us many good tools for coping with loss and sorrow, even while we await God’s mercy to be fully revealed in time.
There’s another form of prayer that can help when our pleas for healing don’t have an immediate effect. From the Jesuit tradition, it’s called an Examen, and part of the practice includes harvesting the blessings of each day. God’s mercies, if you will. In the midst of times both hard and good, we can still pause and take notice of where God showed up through the blessing of a lovely day, a connection with a friend or family member, or through unexpected delight in ordinary things. The full Examen prayer actually asks us to hold the good things—what St. Ignatius called the consolations—in tension with the hard things. Those are what he called the desolations of our days. His prayer practices teaches us that we humans beings are complex and resilient: we can hold both joy and sorrow in the same prayer.
It’s been said that prayer doesn’t change God, it changes us. That’s good, because God doesn’t need changing. The healing miracles reveal that unambiguously: God’s intentions for us—in the fullness of time—are always good. But if God is always good, are we always grateful? Are we the ones who show up rejoicing in the wonderful things God does? Sometimes, the answer is surely yes. Except for we religious authorities: we seem to struggle to get on board. But for the rest of us, let us practice the spiritual discipline of the crowd who witnessed the woman stand up straight. Let us rejoice with those who rejoice, even as we grieve with those who grieve. Let’s open our imagination to possibilities greater than what we can currently see, and let us thereby become people who bring the healing medicine of hope to one another.
