How can we know when we are healed?

How can we know when we are healed?
Mark 1:29-39

Lord God, take my words and speak through them, take our minds and think through them, take our hearts and set them on fire with love for you, you who are Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Amen.

Lourdes
Most of us will have heard of Lourdes, the Roman Catholic shrine in southern France. It’s said that, 150 or so years ago, the Blessed Virgin Mary appeared to a saintly young woman named Bernadette there.

Pilgrims, hoping to be cured of their ailments, continue to visit the shrine in large numbers. Over the years, many thousand have left behind their crutches as witnesses to the Lord’s power, to make them well.

Nothing new
This sort of thing is of course nothing new. Pilgrims throughout the ages have made their way to sacred places, such as Compostela and Walsingham, in the hope of finding healing, wholeness and well-being.

Many people dismiss such journeys of faith as piety gone astray, and as especially inappropriate in an age of medical advances such as our own. They say the time would be better spent visiting medical experts.

Yet many people have also come to the realization that healing is an essential element of the Gospel message. Christians have long treasured the scenes of healing found throughout both the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures. Surely, the Lord will not disappoint those who today come seeking his power and favour in their own lives.

Jesus’ ministry began with healing
The ministry of Jesus began with healing. Think about the first chapter of the Gospel of Mark. No sooner had Jesus called his disciples to his side than he cured a man with an unclean spirit (Mark 1:23-26).

Then, leaving the synagogue, he entered the house of Simon-Peter and his brother Andrew only to find Simon-Peters mother-in-law in bed with a fever. Our Lord took her by the hand and lifted her up. The fever left her, and she got back about her life (Mark 1:29-31).

A second chance
For those whose lives Jesus touched — whether they were perfect strangers gathered on the street outside the door, or whether they were close to him and his disciples like Simon-Peters mother-in-law— for all of them, healing meant a second chance, and hope where there had been no reason for hope.

In an instant, healing brought freedom from physical ailments, as well as inner change and transformation. It’s no wonder “the whole city was gathered” at Jesus’ door. The scene was probably not so very different from contemporary Lourdes at pilgrimage time.

Not an end unto itself
But in the ministry of Jesus, healing wasn’t an end unto itself. In the first words Jesus spoke, as recorded by Mark, he proclaimed, “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near” (Mark 1:15). Healing heralded the coming of a kingdom that transcended this world of pain and death.

And most importantly, this kingdom was within anyone’s grasp, not in some far off place. It offered lasting spiritual integrity in a world of human weakness and sin.

All need healing
We are all still in need of healing, even at the peak of our physical vitality. You only need to turn on the television or open a popular magazine to find the latest fountain of youth or miracle cure touted and sold like kitchen knives at a market. But makeovers and the latest fad diets can’t assure us of happiness and fulfilment.

Real transformation, as understood in the Gospel, will never be a passing fancy. For paradoxically, the Gospel makes us acutely aware of our own ultimate frailty and death. Even those cured by Jesus became sick again at some point and eventually died.

In the moment of healing we come to experience God at work within our lives, but only if we recognize our utter dependence on God and the kingdom. We have no power to make ourselves well. Jesus’ message wouldn’t have resonated with the people of his day, much less our own, had he not first led them to embrace their own vulnerability and need for God’s love.

For Jesus, healing was not so much about breaking the laws of science, as it was about the power of God to change lives and make all things new.

Same etymological route
In our own English language the words “healing”, “health”, “wholeness”, “wellness”, and “holiness” all share the same etymological root, meaning “full” or “complete.”

At whatever stage of life we may be — whether child, adolescent, middle-aged, or elder — we recognize implicitly our own deficiencies and lack of completeness. We experience our need for something or someone beyond ourselves. We need the Lord’s strength not only to make us well, but also to make us whole.

Jesus cast out demons
Jesus “cast out many demons” (Mark 1:34). For some today, the quest for inner harmony and wholeness is undermined by the contemporary demons of addiction and other behaviours that lead to ruin and self-defeat, sometimes even to death itself.

But for those in pursuit of the kingdom, wholeness comes only in oneness with God. And healing, however or wherever experienced, makes that oneness possible. Jesus took Simon-Peters mother-in-law by the hand and raised her up from her sickbed, and she was made well.

Seldom was Jesus’ healing such an intimate and personal act. She came to realize, as no one else, the meaning of the kingdom and oneness with the Lord. But that closeness and oneness is ours to have as well.

How can we know?
How can you know when you have been healed? Seems like an odd question. For many, the answer is obvious: when the pain is gone, the fever has come down, and the disease is no more.

A better answer
But the Gospel gives a better answer. “The fever left her,” we are told of Simon-Peters mother-in-law, “and she began to serve them” (Mark 1:31).

As she was healed, she immediately began to serve others. Her focus changed from her own needs, to the needs of others.

When we can once again focus outside ourselves, when we’re ready to help others in their need, we’ll know that we too have been healed. We’ll no longer be slaves to our hurts and resentments. We will at last be made whole. And we shall live.

Amen.