[This sermon was preached on 19 August 2018, 13th Sunday after Pentecost / 3rd year, ELCF Lectionary]
Last Monday I returned to work from my five-week holiday. When I opened my email, there was a pleasant surprise waiting for me. A woman from our congregation wrote me with some very good news. The doctor had discovered a suspicious growth in her body the size of a thumb. He had told her that she would need surgery to get it removed. But on the day she had to see the doctor again, they took a new scan, only to find that the growth had disappeared completely. When the doctor gave her the good news, she said: “Hallelujah! Praise the Lord! That is the power of Jesus working in me. He has delivered me before, and he has delivered me again.”
That was a very encouraging story. And it is enticing to use stories like this when preaching on the topic of Jesus the Healer. But there are numerous other stories of unanswered prayer, where people did not recover.
One is from my own family. My parents had to wait for ten long years before their prayers for a child were answered. But two days after their first baby boy was born, he got a brain hemorrhage. The rest of his life he would be severely handicapped physically and mentally. My father told me once how, day after day, he would go on his knees to ask God for a miracle of healing. It took seven long years. Then, my oldest brother died.
That’s perhaps more like the reality most of us experience most of the time. We believe in the power of God. We belief that Jesus healed countless people from all kinds of diseases in the few years of his public ministry. And yet, most of the time we see unanswered prayer in our own lives and all around us.
And how do we cope with this distressing discrepancy between what we believe and what we see?
A dear friend of mine used to say over and over again: “You must pray more! You must have more faith! God will answer your prayer if it is lifted up in faith, without a shade of doubt.”
I have heard another friend say to people with severe illnesses or with loved ones suffering from cancer: “There must be some sin in your life. That is why God brings sickness and suffering. That is why God does not hear your prayers.”
I disagree. I will be the last person to question the truth of what the Bible says. But I don’t buy that. I see the Bible say a lot of things about healing and prayer and faith and sin—a lot of very different things. We need not go further than the three Bible readings we read today. Let me say three things about the healing power of God in our lives.
First, I want to look at the relationship between sin and sickness. Secondly, I want to look at the relationship between faith and healing. And thirdly, I want to look at the true purpose of sickness and healing.
The Bible can sometimes be quite confusing. It looks at one question, and in different situations and contexts gives different answers. Sometimes those answers seem to be contradicting one another.
That’s the case also with the relationship between sin and sickness. We see numerous examples in the Bible where God punishes individuals or even a whole people for their sin by bringing sickness and death on them. In fact, the Bible ascribes the existence of sickness and death on earth to the sin of the first human couple Adam and Eve. God had threatened that if they ate from the tree of knowledge of good and evil, they would certainly die. But they did not believe God and ate. The Bible reminds us time and again that rebellion against God was the cause for sickness and death to enter God’s perfect Creation.
But there are also concrete examples where sin is punished by sickness. For example, Miriam, the sister of Moses and Aaron, spoke defiantly against the men that God had chosen to lead the people. As a result, God punished her with a skin disease that made her physically impure. It forced her out of the camp, away from the people, so that others would not catch it also.
In the life of king David, we even see an example where a child is punished for the sins of its parents. King David had sexually exploited the wife of another man. The woman got pregnant, and David solved the problem by having the woman’s husband killed and then marrying her. When the baby was born, it got seriously ill. David fasted and prayed for healing, but God refused. He made it clear that this little baby boy had to suffer illness and die for the sins of his father.
But this is not the rule. All of humanity is under the power of sin. We all have sinned and, therefore, we all deserve to be under constant attack of sickness and death. And, in a sense, we are. But for specific individuals, the correlation between sin and sickness is not so direct—not so black–and–white. I know wicked people who are very strong and healthy and never need to see a doctor. I know very good and devout people who have hardly seen one healthy day in their lives, and who need to bear with one disease upon another.
Also, today’s Bible readings make it clear that there is no fixed connection between the sin of the individual and their health. If Naaman’s skin disease had been the punishment for his military hostility against the people of God, the Bible would certainly have mentioned it. The prophet Elisha would have called Naaman to repentance. But instead, the Bible gives an entirely different picture. It speaks about the king of Aram and his officers and army as instruments that God used to punish Israel for its sins. So, things are in fact turn upside down. Naaman’s skin disease has nothing to do with the sin in his life. Instead, there is a greater purpose for it. I will come back to that later.
In John 9, Jesus says emphatically that sin has nothing to do with the beggar’s blindness. He was born blind, so it is obvious that his own sin could not have been the reason. But there was a deep-seated belief among many Jews that sickness was always the punishment for some concrete sin. Jesus emphatically denies that on the part of this particular man: “Neither this man nor his parents…”
It is sad that in many Christian circles and churches there is a spirit of judgmentalism. Whether it is about sickness, or about other forms of misfortune, the first reaction is that there must be some very serious sin in your life, and you better confess it immediately, not just to God, but to the church, or else… And even if it is not spoken out in public, many people think that way about the one who suffers. Losing your job, seeing your marriage and family disintegrate, getting expelled from this country, going bankrupt…—you name it. When we see people suffering like that—and virtually all of us have issues going on in our lives—our first reaction should be compassion, not judgment. Just as Jesus had compassion on the beggar born blind, so we should have compassion on those who face hardship and seek to support them whenever we can.
Next, let me touch on the relationship between faith and healing. Again, the Bible does not steer us away from confusion. Quite on the contrary! In the Gospels, we see Jesus ask people in distress, whether they really believe that he can help them, before healing them. But again, that is not the norm. Surely, there are many people coming to Jesus for healing because they believe he can do it. And it is not easy not to believe that, because Jesus has a reputation of healing the sick and driving out demons.
But the blind beggar in John 9 does not show any sign of faith in Jesus before his healing. The crippled beggar at the temple gate in Acts 3 does not show any sign of faith before he is on his feet walking and dancing. Naaman in the Old Testament reading needs to be constantly pushed and persuaded by his slaves and servants in order to go along and try his luck.
But the prophet Elisha had faith. What is more, he had a calling to do what he did. The apostles Peter and John had faith. They were commissioned by Jesus to go out to heal the sick and drive out evil spirits in his name.
You may have great faith and yet remain unhealed. The apostle Paul, who healed many people and even raised someone from the dead, speaks about this when he mentions a “thorn in the flesh”. It is obviously some physical ailment that causes him great pain and discomfort and that hinders him in his apostolic mission. He says how he prayed to God in faith to have it removed. It seems that he even argued with God, explaining how it would a win–win situation to have this hindrance for ministry taken away. But in the end, Paul becomes convinced that God is not going to answer his prayer. The “thorn in the flesh” will serve a purpose in his life that only God knows. And Paul’s proper response will be to accept it from God’s hand. Just as Job said to his wife: “Shall we accept good from God, and not trouble?”
Faith and prayer are not a guarantee for healing or for having our prayers answered in general. For sure, there is a relationship between faith and healing. But it goes in the opposite direction. And that brings us to our third point: the true purpose of sickness and healing.
You may or may not believe that everything has a purpose. And it may not always be very fruitful to try to figure it out. It is too easy to become obsessed by our quest for purpose in everything that happens to us. But sometimes sickness has a clear purpose. And God’s miraculous act of healing always has.
In the second book of Kings, the purpose of Naaman’s skin disease becomes clear to us when we look at the story in its historical context. We see how God uses the king of Aram and his forces to put pressure on Israel. His hope and purpose is that Israel might realize that they need God on their side. And for God to be on their side, they must return to him, to get rid of their idols, to restore social justice in the land, and to worship him as their only God.
But it is easy for the people in Aram to misunderstand what God is doing. They may see it as a sign of weakness of the God of Israel. They may become convinced that their own gods are more powerful.
Here we see a chain of events unfolding. First, the Jewish girl being captured and enslaved by the Aram military and moving to Naaman’s household. Then Naaman getting ill. Then the events which we read in the Old Testament reading for today. And in closing Naaman’s confession of faith: “Now I know that there is no God in all the world except in Israel.” That is the message he takes home with him to the court of the king. The king needs to understand that his dominance over Israel is not because God is weak, but because God uses him for his own purposes.
The first and foremost purpose for miracles of healing is to instill faith in God and in Jesus. Naaman believed, the blind beggar on the side of the road believed, and the crippled beggar at the temple gate believed. They all become witnesses of God’s power. They all worshiped and praised God for what he had done in their lives. That’s what Jesus means when he says that “this happens so that the works of God might be displayed in him.”
But not everybody is ready to believe and worship when they see God’s healing power at work. In John 9, the Pharisees enter into a fierce debate with the healed man and his parents. They want him to renounce Jesus. They want him to call Jesus an evil sinner instead of a man from God.
In Acts 3, right after the healing of the crippled man at the temple gate, Peter and John are arrested and cross-examined by the Jewish Council. They are told to be quiet about Jesus and stop healing people in his name.
Obviously, it is not so self-evident that God’s healing power gives birth to faith in all who witness it. It is easy to shrug your shoulders at the display of God’s power and goodness and go on with life as if these things just happen. That is a sign that we need God’s healing on a much deeper and more existential level.
Jesus accused the Pharisees, not for being blind, but for being able but not willing to see. The Gospels speak many times about the problem of spiritual blindness. Spiritual blindness is when we close the eyes of our heart to what God wants to show us. Spiritual blindness is when we look the other way. It is an act of the will, not a handicap.
In the story of the Good Samaritan, Jesus gave us a good example of spiritual blindness. When a priest and a Levite passed the place where a Jewish traveler lay at the side of the road heavily wounded, they looked the other way. They looked ahead towards the temple of Jerusalem, where they had been called to serve God in worship. What they refused to look at was the man whom they were called to help with compassion. God said: “I want compassion rather than worship.” But those words were lost on them.
We all have our blind spots. There are things in our lives, in our church, in our world, that we simply don’t want to see. We close our eyes, we look the other way, when God puts them right in front of our eyes. We put our fingers in our ears when God speaks about them. We just don’t want to face them. Negative attitudes, distorted relationships, dubious business practices, unsustainable lifestyle, lack of compassion, it could be anything.
Jesus said: “I am the light of the world.” He calls us to draw nearer to that light every day with our eyes wide open, so that we could see him, and we could see ourselves, our neighbors, and our world in the light of his truth—and live and act accordingly. Amen.
