Healing. Mary Healy

praise, and gratitude in those who witness them.²⁵

       He Healed Them All

      Reading the Gospels one gets the strong impression that Jesus was not only willing but eager to heal. The Gospels repeatedly affirm the unlimited scope of his healings.

      They brought him all the sick, those afflicted with various diseases and pains, demoniacs, epileptics, and paralytics, and he healed them. (Matt 4:24)

      [He] healed all who were sick. (Matt 8:16; cf. Mark 1:32)

      Jesus went about all the cities and villages, teaching in their synagogues and preaching the gospel of the kingdom, and healing every disease and every infirmity. (Matt 9:35)

      They sent round to all that region and brought to him all that were sick, and begged him that they might only touch the fringe of his garment; and as many as touched it were made well. (Matt 14:35–36; cf. Mark 8:56)

      All those who had any that were sick with various diseases brought them to him; and he laid his hands on every one of them and healed them. (Luke 4:40)

      All the crowd sought to touch him, for power came forth from him and healed them all. (Luke 6:19)

      Everywhere Jesus went he was besieged by the sick and infirm. Nowhere do the Gospels record that he instructed a person simply to bear the suffering assigned to them. In no case does he indicate that a person is asking for too much and should be content with a partial healing or no healing. He invariably treats illness as an evil to be overcome rather than a good to be embraced.²⁶

      Jesus does not always respond immediately to the demands of the needy crowds. On a few occasions, he withdraws to be alone with the Father in prayer and then to move on to his next destination (Mark 1:35–38; Luke 5:15–16). It is also reasonable to infer that Jesus did not heal every sick person within reach. At the pool of Bethesda, there lay “a multitude of invalids, blind, lame, paralyzed” (John 5:3), but the Gospel mentions his speaking to and curing only one lame man. In Acts, Peter and John heal a crippled man who was a well-known beggar at the temple gate (Acts 3:1–10); presumably Jesus had passed by him many times at this gate and had not healed him. He left something for his apostles to do! There are also instances in which Jesus initially seems to refuse a request, but then in response to persistent faith does perform a miracle (the Canaanite woman in Matthew 15:20–28, the official with a sick son in John 4:46–53, and Mary at Cana in John 2:1–11).²⁷ However, the Gospels record no instance in which a person asks Jesus for healing and is categorically refused.

      This evidence from Scripture ought to challenge our accustomed ideas about the Lord’s will to heal. Have we too easily accepted the idea that sickness should simply be embraced? Do we too easily assume that if a person is ill, God wants her to remain that way for her good? Could our resignation to illness or infirmity even sometimes be a cloak for unbelief? Scripture does not say that the Lord will always heal in response to our prayer if only we have enough faith. Jesus instructs his followers not only to heal the sick but also to “visit” them (Matt 25:36), and Paul’s letters refer to cases where sickness remains, at least for a time, despite his own charism of healing (Gal 4:13; Phil 2:26–27; 1 Tim 5:23; 2 Tim 4:20). However, it is reasonable to conclude that the Lord desires to heal far more often than we think.

       Healing on the Sabbath

      It is well known that Jesus often healed on the Sabbath, provoking the fury of scribes and Pharisees who regarded healings as work, which was prohibited on the Sabbath (Luke 13:14; John 5:16). A less well-known but striking fact is that every healing that Jesus himself initiated was on the Sabbath. Jesus responded to requests from sick people, or their parents or friends, on any day of the week. But wherever the Gospels record healings he did apart from any request, they are on the Sabbath. On the Sabbath Jesus restored a man’s withered hand, straightened the back of a woman who had been bent over for eighteen years, cured a man with dropsy (water retention), made a crippled man walk, gave sight to a man born blind, and delivered a demon-possessed man.²⁸

      This pattern is no mere coincidence. Jesus’ evident preference for healing on the Sabbath is, like the healings themselves, a sign giving insight into who he is. In response to the Jewish leaders who complained that he was breaking the Sabbath, he revealed something else about his identity: “the Son of man is Lord even of the sabbath” (Mark 2:28). This claim does not mean only that he has authority to interpret the Sabbath laws, to decide what does or does not count as work. Rather, Jesus is revealing that he is the Lord who instituted the Sabbath in the first place and who fulfills its deepest meaning.

      The book of Genesis records God’s establishment of the Sabbath as a day of rest (Gen 2:2–3), the day when human beings cease from work to enjoy their unique privilege of relating to God. It is also the day when God’s people remember that they were once slaves in Egypt, but the Lord set them free (Deut 5:15). The Sabbath is therefore far more than a time to rest up so as to get back to work with renewed energy. The Sabbath is a sign of our highest dignity — our covenant relationship with God — and of the freedom and joy that come from communion with him. The fact that Jesus chose to heal especially on the Sabbath signifies that he is “lord of the sabbath” (Matt 12:8; Luke 6:5) in the sense that he has come to inaugurate the new creation by which human beings are restored to the fullness of life that God intended from the beginning.

      Jesus’ inaugural sermon in the synagogue at Nazareth, quoted earlier (on page 27), reveals the same truth in a different way. The last line of the passage from Isaiah says the Messiah would proclaim “the acceptable year of the Lord,” or in other translations (such as the New International Version), “the year of the Lord’s favor.” As the audience would have well understood, Isaiah was referring to the jubilee year, one of the sacred celebrations decreed by God in the law of Moses (Lev 25). The jubilee was to be held every fiftieth year. During the jubilee, all debts were canceled, all slaves were set free, and all ancestral lands that had been sold off due to debt or impoverishment were returned to their original owner. The jubilee was a time of freedom, joy, and celebration. Isaiah was prophesying that the coming of the Messiah would be the ultimate jubilee — a jubilee that would never end. By saying “This passage has been fulfilled in your hearing,” Jesus proclaims that in him, that never-ending jubilee of the Lord has arrived.

      The Gospels thus invite us to understand Jesus’ healings in light of God’s original intention for human beings, created in his image and likeness. Sickness and disability were not part of God’s plan for creation but are outward symptoms of the damage caused by the Fall. God designed human beings with bodies meant to radiate the splendor of divine life present within them. He endowed us with not only the physical senses but also marvelous spiritual capacities to see, hear, and relate to him. Original sin caused our bodies to become corruptible and our interior faculties to be disabled, resulting in a communication block between God and humanity. Jesus’ healings of people who were deaf, blind, lame, and paralyzed are a sign of his restoration of humanity to wholeness and unbroken communion with our Creator. Although that restoration will only be complete at the resurrection of the dead (1 Cor 15:42–53), already by the grace of Christ we are able to hear God’s voice in our hearts, see him with the eyes of faith, walk in friendship with him, sing his praises, and proclaim his mighty deeds.

      As St. Irenaeus wrote, “The glory of God is man fully alive.”²⁹

       The Cost of Healings

      As the story of the leper suggests, Jesus’ works of healing and deliverance came at a cost. Although he healed people for free, those healings were at the cost to himself of his own bodily sacrifice. The Gospel of Matthew explains that this cost was all part of God’s plan, revealed in Scripture:

      That evening they brought to him many who were possessed with demons; and he cast out the spirits with a word, and healed all who were sick. This was to fulfill what was spoken by the prophet Isaiah, “He took our infirmities and bore our diseases.” (Matt 8:16–17)³⁰

      Matthew is quoting from Isaiah 53, the fourth song of the suffering Servant of the Lord. Early Christian tradition recognized this passage as the most