When Christians speak about healing, it is easy to assume that we are talking about physical illness and the hope that someone might be cured. That is certainly part of the Christian healing tradition. But I have come to believe that the healing we encounter in the life and ministry of Jesus is something much wider.
During my years in Christian ministry, and particularly through my involvement in the healing ministry, I have increasingly come to understand healing in this wider sense.
Perhaps one of the difficulties is that we often use the words healing and cure as though they mean the same thing.
They don’t necessarily.
A person may be cured of an illness, but still carry deep wounds within their life. Another person may continue to live with illness or disability and yet discover a profound sense of peace, reconciliation, hope or wholeness.
If we look at the ministry of Jesus, perhaps we begin to see something of this wider picture.
More than physical cure
The Gospels contain many stories of Jesus healing people. Blind people see. Those unable to walk get to their feet. People suffering from disease are restored.
But something else is often happening as well.
Jesus encounters people who have been pushed to the edges of society. He touches those whom others regarded as untouchable. He eats with people who had been labelled sinners. He restores people to relationships and communities from which they had become separated.
Sometimes he speaks words of forgiveness.
Sometimes he simply sees someone whom everybody else has learned not to notice.
Again and again, the healing ministry of Jesus seems to be about more than repairing a body. It is about restoring a life.
Perhaps this is why healing is so closely connected with the Kingdom of God that Jesus proclaimed. Wherever Jesus goes, things that diminish human life are challenged and something of God’s intention for creation begins to become visible.
People are restored.
The excluded are welcomed.
The burdened discover grace.
Those who have lost hope begin to imagine a different future.
Healing and wholeness
This wider understanding matters because otherwise Christian healing can become almost entirely focused upon whether somebody gets physically better.
And that raises difficult questions.
What happens when we pray and the illness remains?
Does that mean that nothing has happened? That the prayer has failed? That the person did not have enough faith? Or even that God chose not to heal them?
Those explanations can sometimes add another burden to people who are already carrying more than enough.
Perhaps we need a larger understanding of healing.
Christian healing does not require us to deny the reality of illness, suffering or death. Nor does it require us to pretend that every prayer will produce the outcome for which we hope.
We can pray confidently for physical healing while recognising that the healing purposes of God may be encountered in many different ways.
There may be healing in discovering peace in the midst of uncertainty.
There may be healing when a relationship that has been broken begins to be restored.
There may be healing when someone who has carried guilt for many years discovers that they are forgiven.
There may be healing when loneliness gives way to belonging.
There may be healing when someone who has felt rejected discovers that they are loved and accepted.
There may even be healing as someone approaches the end of life and discovers that they need not face it alone.
None of these things makes physical suffering unimportant. We should still care for the sick, seek good medical treatment and pray for recovery.
But perhaps they remind us that God’s concern is not simply with one part of us.
It is with the whole person.
A healing community
And that raises another question.
What might it mean for the Church itself to be a healing community?
Perhaps healing ministry is not simply something that happens at a particular service, or when somebody lays hands upon another person and prays for them.
Perhaps it happens whenever a Christian community creates a place where people can be heard without being judged, welcomed without first having to prove themselves, forgiven when things have gone wrong, supported when life becomes difficult, and reminded that they are loved.
If that is true, healing belongs close to the centre of Christian life.
Jesus proclaimed the Kingdom of God not only in words but in encounters that restored people to life, dignity, relationship and hope.
His followers are invited to continue that work.
We may not always be able to cure.
But we can accompany.
We can listen.
We can forgive.
We can reconcile.
We can welcome.
We can care.
We can pray.
And through such ordinary acts, perhaps something of God’s healing presence can become visible.
A wider faith, then, might invite us to look for healing in more places than we first imagined.
Not only in the disappearance of illness, but wherever something that has been broken begins to be restored; wherever isolation gives way to belonging; wherever despair begins to make room for hope; wherever people discover again that their lives have dignity and value.
Perhaps one question is worth carrying with us:
What might change if we began to look for God’s healing not only in the curing of illness, but wherever life is being restored, relationships reconciled, burdens lifted and people enabled to become more fully whole?
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