Curing, Healing and Wholeness
Curing, healing and wholeness
Trinity 12. 22nd August 2010
Hebrews 12.1-8; Luke 13.10-17
Today’s Gospel weaves a rich tapestry of colours, mingled, subtle and vibrant all at the same time.
We can picture the Lord Jesus in a crowded synagogue when a crippled woman appears at the edge of the throng.
Luke portrays her vividly, ... bent over... and quite unable to stand.
Our Lord is teaching. To do so requires concentration. When we address others, our attention is centred on what we are doing, how we are doing it, and how it’s being received. To be honest we don’t welcome interruptions. Not so here with our Lord. What we see, is his teaching, giving place to healing. Jesus calls the woman, and gently lays his hands on her. She is made the centre of attention. She straightens, her face lights up. She cries out in joy and praise.
We can imagine the crowd responding with admiration; maybe they clapped and cheered.
The ruler of the synagogue kept trying to say something to them. He’s trying to make himself heard above the hubbub.
What we hear him say is harsh and cold, and in direct contrast to the warmth of Jesus’ actions and words.
Out come the words: “There are six days on which work ought to be done; come on those days and be cured, and not on the Sabbath day”.
This healing on the Sabbath presses all the buttons of collective neurosis among the guardians of Jewish religion.
Jesus is doing more than breaking the rules; he is acting with an authority that belongs to God.
We can then almost feel a sudden deep silence before Jesus answers with the lash of his tongue:
“You hypocrites....” he points out that even an animal would get better treatment. He turns again to the woman. We can almost see the sympathy in his eyes and hear it in his voice, when he speaks of the eighteen years of illness as long years. In the same sentence he gives her a dignity she had probably forgotten, if she had ever experienced it, “Ought not this woman , this daughter of Abraham... be set free...?”
By calling her a daughter of Abraham, Jesus is welcoming her back to a full and rightful place in the community. A community from which in those days all sickness tended to exclude a person.
Today’s Gospel gives us more than a curing. We are witnessing a healing. In our society, where a cure is infinitely more possible than in those long-ago days, we are realising the poverty of curing without healing. Curing without wholeness.
This realisation is releasing all sorts of new awareness of what goes to make up a healthy individual; or community or society. Each of us is on that inner journey of seeking wholeness of body, mind and spirit. That lifelong quest which will only find it’s fulfilment and completion, when we are united to our Lord, at the time of our death.
Today’s Gospel reminds us that the crippled woman from today’s text, and those like her in our day are often our greatest teachers.
It is those we come across who are bent double with crippling loneliness, disease, disability, distress or unconventional identity who give us a window onto God.
These same people often awaken fear within us.
Fear of what we can say or do.
I found myself in such a situation sitting with a young couple in the Lady Chapel a few weeks ago. I had never met them before. They came to plan the funeral of their 3 month old baby.
They were doubled up in the pain of raw grief; and of anger at what had happened. As they spoke I found myself in that most uncomfortable place of having nothing to say that would make any sense.
I kept saying to myself: “Peter, just don’t say anything, just listen, just be with them, where they are.”
I want now to leave you with these words from the writer Richard Rohr.
“I thank you Lord Jesus, for becoming a human being so that I don’t have to pretend, or try to be a God.
I thank you Lord Jesus for becoming finite and limited,
so that I don’t have to pretend that I am infinite and limitless.
I thank you, crucified God, for becoming mortal,
so that I don’t have to try to make myself immortal.
I thank you, Lord Jesus, for becoming inferior,
so that I do not have to pretend I am superior to anyone.
I thank you for being crucified outside the city walls, for being expelled and excluded like sinners, so that you can meet me where I feel I am, always outside the walls of holiness.
“I thank you for becoming weak, so that I don’t have to be strong.
I thank you for being willing to be considered imperfect and strange, so that I don’t have to be perfect and normal.
I thank you Lord Jesus for being willing to be disapproved of,
so that I don’t have to try so hard to be approved of and liked.
I thank you being considered a failure, so that I don’t have to give my life trying to pretend I am a success.
I thank you for being wrong by the standards of religion and state, so that I don’t have to be right anywhere.
“I thank you for being poor in every way, so I don’t have to be rich in any way.
I thank you, Lord Jesus, for being all things that humanity despises and fears, so that I can accept myself and others in you;
so that I can love in you, that very part of me that I most hate.
“Crucified Jesus, I thank you for becoming a human being.
I want to love you. I need to love you.
(“Lord Jesus, crucified, you and I are the same.”)
Richard Rohr. (Hope against darkness. The transforming vision of St Francis in an age of anxiety)