Calling and healing
Day 107, Tuesday, Nov. 26
Mark 1:21 – 2:17 Click here to read
There are a lot of reasons to read the Bible. One of the strongest is to be reminded of the priorities that Jesus had, which may not be the same list of priorities you would imagine if your understanding of the Christian faith comes mainly from sermons or devotional reading.
As one who preaches, I know how easy it is to focus on the benefits that faith offers to the people listening to the sermon. After all, they are the ones who are hearing it and are in a position to gain something from it.
But Jesus tends to focus on several things that are more challenging to hear, because they are calls to action more than promises of immediate benefit.
Today’s reading is about one of Jesus’s favorite topics: healing.
This can make us uncomfortable for several reasons. Perhaps the first is that we associate healing with abusive practices we have seen all too often: faith healers who prey on the desperate for their own profit or the cruel false teaching that anyone who isn’t healed is to blame for their own lack of faith. Thinking of healing also makes us doubt our own level of faith: do we really have enough faith to speak words of healing? Also, the idea of healing is uncomfortable because we don’t really want to admit to being sick.
But you can’t honestly read the gospels without recognizing that much of Jesus’s ministry was spent healing people and that he expected his followers to do the same.
Not all healing is of visible physical maladies. Sometimes Jesus healed the blind and lame, but we also see him healing those who are demon-possessed.
I think it’s fair to think that some of the people thought to be possessed by demons were in our understanding mentally ill, but we don’t want to gloss over the fact that some people are inhabited and controlled by evil in a sense we can’t completely understand. That aspect of his healing ministry likely included the truly evil-possessed, the mentally ill and the overwhelmed and exhausted.
We don’t know why some were healed and others weren’t, either in the day of Jesus or in our own day. But we do know we’re called to a ministry of healing.
I recently read something on this topic that said we should always pray for healing. As with any prayer, we cannot know how God will choose to answer it, but even if there is no visible healing in this life, the person prayed for receives the reassurance that they are cared for and loved.
And even if the body is not healed, the soul can be. We have all witnessed people who faced illness and death with fear and defeat, and others with courage and confidence. That, too, is healing.
Notice also that Jesus deliberately associates with those who need healing from their sinful nature, not to tell them that their sin is OK, but that they might be freed from it. That is also healing.