The Great Physician

I recently read the gospel of Matthew over the course of a few mornings on a patio overlooking the Pacific Ocean while on a holiday on the Sunshine Coast. Like many who preach regularly, I have grown accustomed to approaching Scripture in bite-sized, preachable sections. A story from the gospels here, a passage from Paul there, a Psalm, an inspiring (or at least inoffensive) OT narrative, etc. Preaching necessarily involves taking Scripture in smaller chunks and one can get in the habit of kind of raiding the bible for homiletical content. It had been a while since I had just read a book of the bible from start to finish. I decided that a few quiet mornings in idyllic surroundings were as good a time as any to rectify this deficiency.

I came away with an entirely unoriginal but still important observation/reminder. We all create Jesus in our own image. We focus on the things he says and does that resonate with us—our experiences, understandings, and preferences—and we largely ignore the things he says and does that we find baffling or confusing or annoying or just plain hard. For example, the Gospel of Matthew does not make for pleasant reading as a religious professional. Jesus launches numerous blistering attacks on the Pharisees and other religious leaders. He calls them a “brood of vipers” and compares them to “whitewashed tombs.” He calls them “blind guides” and “hypocrites,” and tells people not to follow their example. He says that they honour God with their lips, but their hearts are cold and distant. He says their worship is in vain. Now, it’s easy for us to simply park the Pharisees in the “villain” category of our brains, but these are the interpreters and authorities of Israel’s sacred scriptures and traditions. They are earnest, morally serious people. These are the ones who have ostensibly devoted their lives to God. And Jesus regularly excoriates them. This should probably make people who speak for God (like me!) squirm a lot more often than it does.

I was struck by something else. The gospel of Matthew is saturated with supernatural healings and miracles. Like, at almost every turn. Again, it’s easy to miss this if you just rummage around in the gospels for inspiring moral lessons or focus on the parts that reinforce what you already believe or want to be true. But it’s hard to avoid if you read it straight through. I had made my way through the genealogy and birth narrative, finished up with John the Baptist and the temptation of Christ in the wilderness. I had rehearsed Jesus’ familiar and familiarly bracing Sermon on the Mount (Mennonites’ professed canon with the canon). So far so good. But then all of a sudden, I was in a long stretch of almost uninterrupted healings. A man with leprosy, a Roman centurion’s servant, many who were demon-possessed and sick at Peter’s house, two more demon-possessed men in the region of the Gadarenes, a paralyzed man, a dead girl and sick woman, a couple of blind men and a mute man (who was also demon-possessed). And that’s just in chapters 8-10. There are more healings sprinkled throughout the remainder of Matthew’s gospel, to say nothing of the other three gospels and the story of the early church narrated in Acts and beyond.

This makes for slightly awkward reading for those of us who live and move and have our being in the vaguely progressive terrain of the Western church. Speaking personally, I don’t tend to preach much on healing and certainly not on demon possession. When I do touch on such passages, I probably tend to treat these stories as first-century manifestations of the inbreaking of Christ’s kingdom, not as normative experiences that Christians should expect today. I am solidly a product of my time and place, I know. Educated to approach faith in very rationalistic categories, disinclined to hunt around for supernatural phenomena behind the events of our world, more or less satisfied (or at least resigned) to relegate most of the righting of wrongs and healing of wounds to the eschaton.

But of course, other parts of the church in other parts of the world are not so satisfied or resigned. There are churches that unapologetically focus on healing, exorcism, wild and charismatic manifestations of the Spirit. They focus on all the parts of the gospel of Matthew that people like me tend to read around or skip past. Indeed, these are the parts of the global church that are actually experiencing numeric growth. I don’t want to romanticize the church in the global south—I have heard from some leaders there that the church is “a mile wide and an inch deep.” And perhaps they are inclined to skip past the parts of Matthew that people like me are drawn to. Again, we all create and curate the Jesus we prefer.

I’ve been thinking specifically about healing today. Why don’t we talk and preach more about healings? Why don’t we pray for it?  Or, if we do, why do we hedge our bets, praying for safe things like “comfort” or “peace” in the midst of suffering? From my perspective, there are at least three broad categories of reasons.

1. Intellectual. The supernatural realm is not something that we can apprehend with our five senses, so it’s pretty easy to believe that it doesn’t exist. We can’t prove it, right? And we love proof! It can feel primitive and unenlightened to believe in all this stuff. Surely we’ve moved past all this now and should simply approach faith as a coping strategy in a hard world, and an inspiring moral template upon which to base our lives.
2. Biblical/historical. In Scripture, the stories of miraculous healing and deliverance from the demonic realm exist squarely alongside their opposites. Clearly, not every person who came within the blast radius of Jesus experienced healing. Most of the disciples suffered and died young. And, of course, at the very centre of our faith we have Jesus himself praying to be delivered from suffering and yet having to go the way of the cross. The story of Jesus and his first followers, the early church, and the church ever since is undeniably the story of the gospel advancing in the context of faithful suffering. At the very least, it is impossible to read the story of Jesus and the early church as some kind of template for every affliction being healed this side of eternity and so we are cautious about praying this way.
3. Experiential/existential. This one is by far the most potent, in my estimation. I suspect anyone who has kept company with Jesus for any length of time has prayed for healing for themselves or for someone they love. For deliverance from the demons that seem to afflict themselves or someone they love. Many of us have pounded at heaven’s door for long years with no evident response. Many desperately want to believe in a God who heals here and now but have grown exhausted and defeated by heaven’s silence.

It can be disorienting, even frustrating, following this Jesus who heals some and not others, who holds out the hope of the supernatural crashing into our present and also the reality that the healing of many of the wounds of this world will be deferred to the age to come. We long for black and white, not grey, for formulas, not the more demanding imperative to trust in the midst of what we can’t see or understand. We long for a faith more manageable and predictable yet Jesus stubbornly keeps saying, “follow me, follow me, follow me, even when I lead where you’d prefer not to go…”

In the end, I don’t want a Jesus in my own image, even if there are parts of the gospels that make me scratch my head and that I would prefer to avoid. A Jesus in my image is no more or less inspiring than me and I am not particularly inspiring. I want the Jesus with the radical social agenda, the Jesus with the clarion call for justice. I also want the Jesus who heals the lepers, opens the eyes of the blind, and binds and casts out the demons. I want the Jesus who embodies love and peace and compassion, and I want the Jesus who names sin for what it is and tell the uncomfortable truth about our uninspiring selves. I want the Jesus who names the many and myriad ways in which we idolize ourselves and I want the Jesus who insistently directs us Godward.