One of the hardest things I have ever had to do was a couple of summers ago, when as part of my ordination process, I was required to spend a summer working as a hospital chaplain. The hospital I ended up at that summer was a large, level one-trauma center, which meant that all of the worst accidents in the area ended up at this particular hospital. As I started the summer, I was terrified by this. I was terrified to be on call— having to respond to whatever came into the emergency room at any hour of the day or night. Gunshot wounds, car accidents, motorcycle accidents— you name it, I saw it. Yet while those first few on-call experiences were indeed terrifying, as it turned out, that wasn’t the hardest thing I had to do that summer. The hardest thing about that summer was actually my experiences working on the oncology and intensive care units-- working with patients who were there day after day after day, and seemingly not getting any better. Sometimes, their families would ask me to pray for them— to pray for a miracle, a cure. I would comply, yet day after day, despite our prayers, I would watch patients continue to decline in health and their families continue to suffer. At times, the patients themselves would confide in me about their anger with God. Why was this happening to them? What had they done to deserve this suffering? Why hadn’t God answered their prayers for healing? Were they doing something wrong?
These were the questions that haunted me over the course of the summer. These were the questions that challenged me more than anything else I experienced. And this morning’s gospel story— for me— calls to mind those experiences. It calls to mind those questions that I think all of us have, about prayer and healing, miracles and human suffering.
It’s a familiar scene— our gospel reading this morning. Jesus crosses paths with someone who is in need of healing. And despite the restriction of not working on the Sabbath, Jesus doesn’t hesitate to heal the woman of her ailment. I say it’s a familiar scene because time and time again, in every gospel, Jesus does not fail to work anything short of a miracle when he encounters those who are sick and suffering. Every single time, he provides a miraculous cure— one that wipes away any trace of illness or deformity. For many Christians, these are stories of hope. But I have to admit, that summer, that when confronted with patients and families who wanted to know why God wasn’t answering their prayers, I sometimes found more frustration in these stories than hope. I would think to myself, if only there were a few stories where Jesus didn’t provide a miraculous cure, and instead, offered simple compassion and care to a sick or dying person-- care that didn’t necessarily cure them, or rid them of their physical infirmity, but that comforted them in their time of distress. If only there were such a story I could point to so that these patients and their families didn’t have to feel abandoned by God. So that they didn’t have to feel that their prayers somehow weren’t good enough, or that their faith wasn’t strong enough. Even the book of Job— the quintessential biblical tale about the nature of human suffering-- has a happy ending. Yes, Job suffers tremendously. But in the end, he regains everything that he had lost. The very last line of the story says that “Job lived one hundred and forty years, and saw his children, and his children’s children, for four generations. And Job died, old, and full of days.” I’m pretty sure this is the biblical version of “and they all lived happily ever after.”
This leaves many of us asking the question: what about all those times when fortunes aren’t restored? When illnesses aren’t cured? What about those times when disabilities and deformities aren’t taken away? How do we, as Christians who process the healing power of God, make sense of all those times when continued woundedness and brokenness-- not miraculous cures-- seem to be the result of our prayers?
I was in a Bible study once, when the subject came up of the difference between praying for a cure and praying for healing. One member of the group gave an example from a film called “The Robe”— a film which takes place after Jesus’ death and centers around a Roman centurion who wins the robe worn by Jesus during the crucifixion. In one very powerful scene in the movie, the centurion comes across a character by the name of Miriam. Miriam is filled with love and light— she is an inspiration to those around her, and her community sees her as an example of Jesus’ miraculous healing power. Miriam also happens to be crippled. And so the centurion is mystified by Miriam and the claims made by her community.
“How is it,” he asks, “that you claim she has been miraculously healed?! She’s a cripple! Can’t you see that??”
An elder in the community explains to the centurion that since she was paralyzed at a young age, Miriam had been bitter and hateful for most of her life. She had affected everyone around her with her envy and malice. But one day, in their small town of Cana, there was a wedding. Everyone in the town went— everyone except Miriam. She stayed at home-- bitter and weeping— for what man would ever ask to marry her? But when her parents returned home from the wedding, they found Miriam changed. She was smiling, singing, and full of joy.
“Wasn’t Jesus at that wedding?” the Centurion asked.
“Yes,” the elder said, “but he came late.” He had another stop to make first.
The healing that Miriam receives is no less miraculous than the one we read about in the Gospel story for today. In some ways, it is even more extraordinary. For it is not a healing that takes away her physical limitations. Rather, it is a healing of her soul.
“He could have healed my body,” Miriam explains to the centurion, “but he did something even better for me. He made me an agent of his word. He left me as I am, so that all others like me would know that their misfortune needn’t deprive them of happiness, or their place in God’s kingdom.”
Now this is, of course, a fictional story. It’s just a movie. But in some ways, this is the kind of story that I wish we found more of in the bible. Perhaps then there wouldn’t be so much hurtful theology out there. Theology that tells people with chronic illness or disability that the reason for their continued suffering is that they are weak in faith, or that there is some hidden sin that keeps them from being cured. There are plenty of Christians out there who would argue that if God does not heal people in the visible, dramatic way that is expected, then those people have not prayed hard enough. Their faith is weak. But I don’t think that’s true. I disagree with that theology, because I believe that God does not always heal in the way we demand or expect. I believe that God’s healing does not always amount to God delivering us from every trace of what ails us.
It is perhaps worth noting at this point that there is at least one character in scripture who has a story that mirrors that of Miriam’s story. The apostle Paul writes in his second letter to the Corinthians that he was given a thorn in his side— something that plagued him a great deal. We don’t know what this “thorn” was, many have speculated, and many biblical scholars suspect it was some kind of physical disability or deformity. We don’t know for sure. However, what we do know is that Paul appealed to the Lord multiple times for it to be taken away. Whatever it was, it was something that burdened him deeply. One can imagine that in the religious culture of the day, in an age when any kind of physical illness or disability was seen as the product of sin, that he may have received quite a bit of grief for this.
“Look at him,” some might have said, “he talks a whole lot about the power of faith, so why can’t he free himself from this ailment? Why doesn’t Jesus deliver him? Why doesn’t God just cure him?”
But unlike the woman from our gospel reading, Paul is not cured. The thorn in his side does not leave him. Nevertheless, he remains to this day one of the most powerful witnesses to the gospel of God’s love and grace that there has ever been. His writing on the power of faith in the midst of suffering has offered us comfort to many going through difficult times.
“We do not lose heart,” he says, “because we look not at what can be seen, but at what cannot be seen; for what can be seen is temporary, but what cannot be seen is eternal.”
The thorn— whatever it was-- led Paul to the most earnest kind heartfelt kind of prayer— the kind of pouring out of the soul that requires total dependence on God’s love and grace. A grace that is sufficient, Paul learned, to hold us together in the midst of whatever challenges life may bring our way.
I think perhaps one of the biggest differences between a healing and a cure is that while we tend to think only sick or disabled people are in need of a cure, there is not a single one of us that is not in need of healing. Almost all of us have some aspect of our lives in which a “healing” is needed. Some “thorn in our side” that we wish the Lord would take away. Maybe we suffer from chronic pain, or perhaps we or someone we love has experienced depression or some other mental illness. Perhaps there has been a traumatic event in our lives that has kept us enslaved to feelings of fear, bitterness, or resentment. In some way or another, I suspect we can all relate to the woman from the gospel this morning— bent over, struggling under the weight of what ails us, unable to see the sun. We pray consistently for God to heal us and to take away that which ails us. But it may be that God is already sending healing grace into our lives— perhaps in unexpected ways. And it may be that while there are aspects of our lives that are difficult, we are intended sometimes not to be rid of them, but to allow Jesus to walk with us as we go through them. For only then do we come out on the other side— healed in ways that we could never have imagined. Paul says that we are to be agents of Christ’s reconciliation and Christ’s healing in the world. Perhaps it is to be that like Miriam, like Paul, and indeed like Christ himself— our own woundedness can often be the very thing which allows us to be a healing force for others.
We yearn— all of us do— for healing and wholeness. For ourselves, for our loved ones, and for the world. I believe that one of the greatest miracles of all, is that God offers this healing to each and every one of us— without exception. I believe that even in the midst of brokenness, there is hope to be found. A hope which can be summed up for me in four words: we are never alone. God does not abandon us in our suffering— God walks with us. And just as God walks with us in our suffering, we can then find the strength to stand, and walk with others in theirs— allowing the hope given to us by the gospel to heal not only us, but to begin that great and grace-filled work of healing all of creation.
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