WE CAN HEAL EACH OTHER

aUGUST 26, 2007

In the fifth chapter of John's Gospel, we are told that as Jesus went up to Jerusalem, he came to a pool at Bethesda. Around the pool, we're told, "lay a large number of ill, blind, lame, and crippled." They waited for the waters to be stirred, and then they would enter, hoping to be cured. One man was there who had been ill for thirty-eight years, and Jesus, seeing he'd been there a long time, asked him if he wanted to be well. The sick man answered him, "Sir, I have no one to put me into the pool when the water is stirred up; while I am on my way, someone else gets down there before me."

The man's infirmity was his first problem, but this problem has not been taken care of because of a bigger problem. The man didn't have anyone who cared about him enough to help him.
Disease or disability comes to us all sooner or later, and these are dreaded conditions, but perhaps it is because of the deeper problem involved: not disease or disability, but prejudice, indifference, and fear on the part of the healthy.
As another example, the man born blind in John's Gospel was left to beg in the streets. The authorities had no compassion for him, because they viewed him as suffering punishment for sin. When Jesus healed on the Sabbath, attention was often not given to the wonderful cure, but only to the legality that the Sabbath rest had been violated.
These stories show that what really needs healing, in other words, is not just a given illness, but the inhumanity and warped priorities of a callous and insensitive world that is too far removed from suffering to feel compassion.
Jesus also encourages the sick to participate in their own healing. For example, he praises the faith of the woman with a hemorrhage who touches his garment for healing (Mk 5:25-34l). He likewise praises the friends of the paralytic who lower him through the roof to be healed (Mk 2:1-12).
The healing power we seek from Jesus goes beyond our ailing bodies or disturbed minds, because sickness is not just biological or psychological. It touches every level of our human existence: physical, emotional, social and spiritual. That is why we need more than just the healing professions. We need the insight into the mystery of illness that only religion can provide, and we need the kind of healing only God can supply.
Healing entails a strong trust in God's power and love and the determination to gain access to it. The Bible does not encourage sick or disabled persons to be passive, but to have a firm conviction of their God-given dignity and to work actively in seeking healing and new life.
Not everyone is cured in the Gospel dramas. Sometimes God allows illness in order to draw from it some other good, which is not seen or understood at the time. Also, all suffering conforms us into the pattern of Jesus' own suffering, death and resurrection, and so joins us intimately to him. In this way, suffering has great redemptive value.
From this point of view, everyone has access to healing, that is, access to fullness of human life in the sight of God, even if his physical or emotional distress remains. Faith is the active commitment to seek and find life. It is the living conviction that God, who is the source of all life and healing, walks with us and will indeed raise us to wholeness.
In each of the Gospels, Jesus entrusts to the disciples his own power of healing. In fact, all healing activity is a participation in God's own work of restoring health to a broken creation: the intervention of a surgeon, the guidance of a counselor, the work of a legislator to insure adequate health care funding, a parent's love for a teenager in trouble, the physical therapist working to restore strength to weakened limbs, sympathetic listening to someone else's troubles, the social worker's striving for human dignity among the poor, visiting a shut-in, an addict, or alcoholic struggling to regain equilibrium, the emotionally or mentally distraught working hard to restore inner peace. All these and other acts are participation in Jesus' own ministry as healer.
In some mysterious way, none of us has full health. We are stooped over in body or spirit. In some way we're broken. We limp. But, wounded though we may be, we are all called to be healers. What God asks of us is to trust that he'll lead us through our suffering to new life, and to work according to our vocations and abilities to see to it that absolutely no one ever has to say again, "I don't have anyone..."

+Bishop Raymundo J. Peña

last updated 05-Jun-2008 9:48 sitemap