This Sunday? Oh, just another miraculous healing.
In the lectionary readings for this week is a curious story about Jesus healing a man. There was a pool in Jerusalem that, every once in a while, had the waters stirred up by an angel. The first person who got into the water when the angel stirred it up was healed of their ailments. Naturally, this attracted a crowd, most of whom probably lived there, waiting day and night for the angel to roil up the water. This was not some freaky thing on the outskirts of town - a kind of holy roller tent meeting for the ancient world. A terrace had been built, columns, a roof. As you can see from the model in the picture, it was pretty hard to miss.
So Jesus comes along, strides into the middle of the crowd, picks out one guy and say, ‘hey, buddy, pick up your mat and go on home’. And he does. A few minutes later the religious leaders of the day see him carrying his mat and ask him who he thinks he is, carrying a mat like that on the sabbath. He offers that the guy who healed him said to do it. Later Jesus finds the guy in the temple and says quit sinning, or something worse might happen.
Okay, so this story raises far more questions than it answers. Above all else, I think, it serves to illustrate that Jesus has the power to heal. And that is precisely where the questions arise. Why this man? Why not someone - anyone - else? The man didn’t ask to be healed, didn’t even know who Jesus was. This is quite unlike any other healing we see in the gospels. What’s with Jesus saying ‘quit sinning, or something worse might happen to you’. What are we to make of that?
And what are we to make of this whole healing business, anyway? What do we know about healing? What do we not know? What do we believe? What do we know that we’ve learned from real world experience?
Yeah, let’s talk about that on Sunday morning.
Dear Woman
Jesus, a Jewish Rabbi, meets a Samaritan woman at Jacob’s well. He not only asks for a drink of water but strikes up a conversation with her. This just isn’t done. This is not just a woman, it’s a Samaritan woman. A less than ‘pure’ woman. A less than fully human being. And what’s more Jesus short circuits thousands of years of racial bigotry and apartheid by explaining to her that the time is coming when all God’s children will worship God in Spirit - that it won’t matter who belongs to what caste or tribe, that God’s love will fall like rain from the heavens and she - yes even she - can be welcomed and fully loved in God’s family.
But he does something else. He answers her question. Not the, ‘what about the temple in Jerusalem’ question. He answers her real question. The ‘what about me’, cast off in the world, cast off by God’, question. He begins by saying, “Believe me, dear woman, the time is coming when…” I wondered at this. Wondered at the word ‘dear’. Wondered enough to look it up at Dictionary.com. It means loved. Precious. Cherished. It also means ‘expensive’, like the price of Christ’s life, perhaps.
Believe me, Jesus says, you are loved, precious, cherished. Believe me, Jesus says, I love you. And then he goes on to say that the Spirit will come, this apartheid will end. How many times have I read this story and missed those four words? Believe me, dear woman. Believe me, I love you…” In that moment, and in those few words, she was given a new name, a new identity. She was born again.
I no longer believe that the reason Jesus came was to make unrighteous people righteous. Jesus came to make broken people whole, to heal our broken world. The only paradigm in which we can fully appreciate the person, life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ - and his coming, again - is that of healing. Love is the balm God applies to our lives and our world. Shalom is the end result - a state of well-being beyond health or prosperity; a state of transcendent wholeness. Any other approach perpetuates wounding, the terrible cost of vanity and brings death. Yes - death.
Believe me, I love you…
Broken
What I’ve learned is that God is in the broken places, that God is in the broken and wounded and hurting places. God is in all the parts of life that are messed up, chewed up and run over. Don’t get me wrong - God is all about healing, wholeness and redemption, God is all about bringing freedom to the oppressed, rest to the weary and wholeness to the broken. It’s just that the process with which he does that is bloody and messy. Got a car crash? Got a train wreck? Got a life that’s full of twisted steel and broken glass? If so, you’ve found a place where God is at work. I keep thinking about what my doctor says: “God doesn’t care very much about our comfort.” It’s true. He’s not callous, but if he needs to blow up our life in order to achieve his purpose - well, that’s exactly what he’ll do. But after the implosion and the collapse, after the smoke has cleared and the blood has been mopped up he begins creating again.
Creating gardens out of chaos is what he seems to do. I can count on my fingers the friends who know this from the inside out. Truth is - you don’t know it until you’ve been through it. We can agree with the sentiment but the experience of it is something else. Sometimes God brings our world to a crash - sometimes we crash and burn all by ourselves. Sometimes, though, we go through pain because the world is just a messed up place, and we suffer through no work of God or fault of our own. Yet somehow God seems to work through it all. “Everything happens for a reason” is a heart-wounding platitude when you’re in the midst of the suffering, mostly because not knowing God’s reason makes suffering all the more difficult. So we make the best decisions we can with what we know. We do the best we can with what we have. We keep putting one foot in front of the other. In the end, we often must simply sit our spirit still, and wait, and trust that God love us.
Notes on Psalm 32
We lead two lives, you and I. The first life is what’s on the surface - the face we show the rest of the world, the smile we put on for customers and co-workers, the pretending we do so easily. The other life is what’s going on inside - and often, that’s a very different thing. This psalm is a lot like us: there’s the story that’s right on the surface, in black and white, that’s obvious. Then there’s the other story, the one that isn’t on the surface, that isn’t so easy to read.
On the surface, David is living with some unspecified sin, and it’s eating him up. His body wastes away, he groans all night long, his strength evaporates like a spray of water on a hot sidewalk. He can find no relief until he confesses his sin and, with the forgiveness of the Lord, finds joy and freedom instead of sorrow, grief and guilt. The other story? Well, the other story is our story too, and it starts with a question: Why did he wait so long? Why suffer so much?
David’s not the only one of us who lives in denial. We’ve all done things to wound our relationship with God, with one another and with our self. Often we carry the burden of the sins done to us, as well. Denial means that we’re pretending it doesn’t matter when it does, pretending that everything’s okay when it isn’t. So when our pain surfaces we push it down - again and again, sometimes for years, sometimes for most of our life. But a strange thing happens when we keep pushing our pain deep into the basement of our heart. No matter how many times we push it down it never goes away. It never gets weaker - only stronger. And we become so afraid of the monster in the basement that everything we say and do - everything - becomes a careful orchestration to keep the beast out of sight.
And our denial is killing us.
Honesty - that is, being honest with ourselves - might be the scariest thing in our world right now. But it’s the only way out of our pain. Opening the door and facing our hurts, wounds, failings and flaws might be incredibly painful but it’s the only way we can find healing. There is no other way. We must be courageous enough to finally be honest - really and truly honest - with ourselves. And it might not be something we should do alone. Seeking help with our healing might be the right thing to do.
Some time ago I was speaking with a man who had suffered unimaginable pain as a child. I suggested to him that he might need professional assistance to find a way out of his difficulties. He looked at me in amazement and said, “You mean Jesus isn’t enough?” I looked him right in the eye and said, “No.” And it’s true. Jesus can heal instantly and miraculously - and sometimes still does. But our insistence on a miraculous cure often is used as a smokescreen to avoid the difficult and painful work necessary for inner healing. “The Lord says I will guide you along the best pathway for your life,” verse 8 reads, “I will advise you and watch over you.” The suggestion is one of a journey, of process and of time.
We’ve been wandering around in the psalms for about a month now and a surprising theme has emerged. That theme is one of ‘journeying’. This psalm is no exception. Often we want our healing to be a destination we arrive at without the journey. But God is wiser than we are, and he knows that if we arrive at healing without being able to name our wounds we won’t really be healed at all.
“To everything there is a season,” the preacher says in Ecclesiastes. The season of healing always begins with us finally - finally - being honest with God and with ourselves.