Healing

Read Matthew 8:1-17.

Three stories of healing. In the first one, Jesus is presented with a man with leprosy and asked if he is willing to heal. In the second one, a Gentile soldier asks for help for his servant. He doesn't even want Jesus to come with him, just heal him with a word from afar. And in the third story, Jesus isn't asked to do anything, but he heals a fever that Peter's mother-in-law had so that, apparently, she can get up and make them dinner. Three stories of healing. Three stories of Jesus' authority to heal.

In the first story, we learn Jesus is willing to heal. In the second, Jesus is able to heal. In the third, Jesus is eager to heal. Make whatever else you want of these stories, they are ultimately about Jesus' healing authority. They confront us with the question: do I believe that Jesus can heal?

I've always believed that. I can't remember a time when I didn't believe Jesus could heal. But I also knew there were times when he didn't heal. I am living proof of that. The heart murmur that I had was prayed for by one of the godliest women I've even been privileged to know...and yet it wasn't healed miraculously or right away. I've stood by the bedsides of people who prayed (begged, even) to be healed and weren't. I've wrestled with the problem of pain and struggled with the knowledge that Jesus doesn't heal everyone. Sometimes I resonate with C. S. Lewis in his famous book A Grief Observed: "Go to him when your need is desperate, when all other help is vain, and what do you find? A door slammed in your face, and a sound of bolting and double bolting on the inside. After that, silence." There are times life is like that.

Some comfort themselves by saying it's God's will. But death and suffering were never part of God's will. They are a result of the Fall, of our sin. Were it just God's will, Jesus would not have come healing. Jesus came to push back the darkness, and the ultimate promise at the end is that there will be no more death and no more pain (Revelation 21). But what do we do until then?

Because of my wrestling with this matter, there was a time when I really didn't pray for healing. I was one of those who chalked it up to "thy will be done" and left it at that. I'm not sure my prayers during that time were very comforting, but I at least told myself they were honest. Maybe. But they were not in line with what Jesus came to do. There was healing in his hands. He had authority to heal. And he still does because he is the same now as he was then.

So now when I pray, I pray for a grand slam miracle. I ask God to heal and to be in the midst of whatever the situation is. And then I trust. Jesus has the authority and the power to heal. He has not promised to always heal, and some of the reasons why we will never know until eternity (and maybe not then, because all will be whole then and it won't matter anymore). But I still pray for healing, for Jesus to do what he is willing, able and eager to do.