This evening’s readings invite us to reflect on the place of healing in the Church’s ministry to-day. It so happens that those of us who work with the chaplaincy at the Royal Free Hospital met this week for training, and to share with one another some of our more challenging experiences. One of my Catholic colleagues had been called to the bedside of an Irish woman whose much abused liver was finally giving up the unequal struggle against repeated doses of alcohol. Her five daughters, faced with the removal of the one stable factor in their lives, were squabbling angrily about what to do. The wonderfully steady no-nonsense nurse had to restrain them from adopting their normal procedure, which would have been to slap her about the face until she came to. Anthony’s prayers were the next resource. When these were seen to have no discernible effect, they called for Padre Pio’s glove. Padre Pio, who died in 1968 and was canonised in 2002, always wore a glove to cover the stigmata – the marks of Christ’s passion on his hands – that he had received, and one of his gloves is kept in London. It was rushed up to the hospital in a taxi, and set down in its glass case on the woman’s tummy. The youngest daughter gabbled the prayers. Still no effect. So they turned again to Anthony. Perhaps it would work if he did it. Anthony was not at all comfortable about the way he was being used, but we are taught to be there for our patients and their relatives as they are, rather than as we might like them to be, so he took the prayer card, got some degree of peace and quiet around the bed, and read the prayers with emphatic interpolations of ‘if it be Thy will’. Still no apparent effect on the sick woman, who died an hour or two later. I’m not sure what he and the nursing staff did with the squabbling family. Our senior Catholic chaplain, with longer experience of the relevant culture, said he would have exploited to the full his old-fashioned priestly authority to quell the family’s riotous behaviour, but that’s not the point for us. The point for us is surely the contrast between their simplistic attempt to manipulate God by means of a quasi-magical appeal to the power of formulaic prayers and sacred gloves, and the true, steady faith of Jairus, or the woman with the haemorrhages.
Before we reflect further on our own attitudes to faith healing, I think we need to ask ourselves whether we believe that miracles of healing do still occur, or whether the miracles of faith that we read about in the gospels have long since given way entirely to miracles of medicine? There have of course been enormous advances in both our understanding of illness and our treatment of it over the past 2000 years, and we thank God for that, but that does not mean that God is no longer needed in the healing process. Therapeutic medicine has indeed made enormous advances, but we have also come to understand better that ill health is not always just a matter of an organ that is no longer functioning efficiently, and needs fixing. Quite apart from any psycho-somatic symptoms that may have their roots in traumas with a spiritual dimension, modern medicine recognises ‘network pathologies’ in which there is an imbalance or dysregulation of a whole system or of interconnected systems. The healing that flowed from Jesus was rarely if ever simply physical; He was always concerned for the whole person who needed to be spiritually restored as well as physically healed – you could say that he seems to have practised, as a matter of course, what we would now call holistic care.
Take this evening’s Gospel reading as an example. Here we have a woman who had suffered from haemorrhages for twelve years. Apart from the illness itself causing anaemia and weakness, she would have been deemed unclean and excluded from temple worship. In all likelihood she would have been abandoned by her husband and family and would have felt utterly abandoned by her God and her fellow human beings. Certainly there was noone in this story ready to speak up for her. In her view, the healing power of Jesus offered the only means of escape from her dreadful predicament. Since she could not approach him openly in her condition, her only hope was to surreptitiously touch Him, yet she did so in great fear because of her unclean status and the consequences if she was discovered. Imagine her horror, then, when Jesus asked who had touched Him, and the courage that was needed to come forward. But He had asked the question, not to expose and shame her, but because of his wish to complete his healing work. She was in an instant healed of her illness by the power flowing from him. Yet, for the healing to be complete, Jesus needed to prove to her, and to those around her, that she was no longer an outcast but a fully accepted and loved member of the family of God. He calls her ‘Daughter’, and praises her faith, sending her on her way both healed and at peace. Just imagine what those words of love and acceptance must have meant to her after her long ordeal. When we think about healing, we should always remember that true healing is something more wonderful and more expansive than even the best of hospitals can deliver.
There are risks in any healing ministry, ranging from the disillusion that may result from reliance on the quasi-magical effects of holy relics like Padre Pio’s glove, to the equally damaging sense of guilt that may be engendered if people are made to feel that their failure to be physically healed, despite the prayers of their friends, must be the consequence of some sin that they have not adequately repented. Such attitudes have been known to add the burdens of guilt and rejection to the trauma which a patient is already suffering, and we have to be very careful not to fall into either trap. On the other hand there is evidence from epidemiological studies that participation in religious activity brings significant health benefits. Although exposure to religious environments that engendered guilt or fear had a deleterious effect, church attendance and especially active involvement in prayer and meditation was found to be conducive to good health. As a correspondent in the Guardian put it some years ago, ‘God is good for you’
One important objection to the continuing exercise of God’s power to heal is the sense that it is unfair and therefore immoral. If God, who loves us all as his children, can be persuaded to intervene to heal one person who cries out for healing, why does He apparently ignore so many others who appear to be equally worthy of his compassion and his healing power? We all know of heart-rending cases, where God seems to have been deaf to all entreaties. We get angry and frustrated when He fails to do what we think He ought to do. Yet for my part, I am attracted to what Mother Julian of Norwich wrote: “Some hold that God is all power and can do all manner of things, some hold that He is all wisdom and may do all manner of things; but that he is all Love and will do all manner of things – there we fail.” We need to leave more room for God to be God.
It is this steady, unconditional faith that links all the characters in this evening’s Bible readings. Abraham certainly took steps to facilitate the provision of a suitable bride for Isaac, but he and his servant trusted God to identify Rebekah for him, and he was not disappointed. The faith of the woman with the haemorrhage was sufficient to cause her to risk shameful exposure and vilification if she was caught, whilst Jairus’ low-key but confident request, and his patience whilst Jesus allows himself to be distracted by a woman of no standing in the community at all, gives eloquent testimony to his humility as well as his faith in Jesus’ power. His heart must have sunk when news came that it was already too late, but Jesus understood exactly what he was going through, offering him at once the quiet reassurance he needed, just as later he would be the first to see, unprompted, that the child, restored to life, needed something to eat. In both these stories Jesus responds with the most tender compassion to the needs of people who were ready to put themselves in his hands. With Mother Julian I am persuaded that his Love still reaches out in the power of the Holy Spirit to those who put their trust in him, simply and unconditionally, not demanding a miracle, simply trusting in his power to help and heal, in his own time and in his own way.
St Paul reminds us that if we live, we live to the Lord, and if we die, we die to the Lord; so then, whether we live or whether we die, we are the Lord’s (Romans 8.14). If that is the spirit in which we are able to pray, whether it be for ourselves or for others, I am confident that our prayers for healing – whether of body, mind or spirit – will be heard and answered. Not necessarily in the way we think we would like them to be answered. Not often with the dramatic physical effects reported in this evening’s gospel readings. But always with the tender compassion that flows from the heart of God, enfolding us in His love, and allowing us to rest in peace, even as we weep.
Jesus said to Jairus: Do not fear, only believe.