We have new telephones in the vicarage. My new phone is so clever I think it would be able to bake you a cake or make a wedding dress if you asked it nicely…but there are 200 pages of instructions and I haven’t got to that part yet. One button however, came in handy earlier this week. I get any number of calls wanting the parish hall or the church to consider taking out a different energy plan. ‘Good morning’ asks someone phoning from India, ‘ am I speaking to someone that deals with St Mary’s Parish Hall?’ I’m reluctant to tell a fib so I say ‘yes’, but I make sure I add that I am not the treasurer. ‘I am phoning about your energy provider…’ At that point I have a well-rehearsed and much used approach. I interrupt. ‘Thank you for your call but the hall is in an energy basket and we have no intention of leaving in the future. Please take me off your call list. Goodbye.’ Usually it works. I say ‘usually’. This week’s caller got annoyed. The phone rang again. Once in a while we have had repeated calls. The caller is having a bad day and has decided to be a nuisance. But (joy of joys), I now have a button to silence the phone. It can ring and ring but the nuisance caller goes unheard….Blocked!
When Jesus went to his home-town of Nazareth after a period of preaching and teaching around Galilee he was initially welcomed in the synagogue: ‘many who heard him were astounded.’ But this initial welcome soon soured. Rocked by his new approach to teaching and by his wisdom and aware of unspecified ‘deeds of power done by his hands’ his hearers question his background and authority. His neighbours can’t get past the fact that he grew up amongst them: to them he is just a carpenter’s son who doesn’t have a teaching qualification and his family all live just down the road. No. They won’t accept him or follow him. By verse 6 Jesus is amazed at their unbelief. And he’s been ‘blocked’. Blocked from what? Blocked from performing ‘any deed of power there’ (except, it says, ’he laid his hands on a few sick people and cured them’).
Today’s service happens to be a service at which we offer the ministry of healing and, as you know, exploring this ministry is one of our parish’s aims. What might we learn from Jesus’ experience in Nazareth about this ‘healing ministry’? What I see here is that the healing ministry needs faith to create a space for it to flourish and that it is possible for communities (churches) both to create this space…or indeed, to close it down (as the people of Nazareth did).
Firstly, let’s remember, and acknowledge, that Jesus did not heal everyone in Israel who needed healing. But then, let’s also acknowledge that God’s purposes for his people are always good: He looks on us with love and His greatest desire is to bring us to enjoy wellness and wholeness (the bible word would be ‘salvation’) . The ministry of healing was very much a part of Jesus’ ministry but he could not (and would not) force it upon anyone: faith is required somewhere in all the accounts we have of Jesus’ healing others. That faith need not always be in the person being healed (think of the man carried to Jesus and let down through the roof by his friends…or those healed ‘at a distance’ where the faith expressed is that of a parent or even a slaveowner.) But faith appears somewhere in these healing stories. As we make room in our services for people to receive the ministry of the laying on of hands and anointing with oil we are both being obedient to Jesus’ instructions in the 2nd half of our gospel reading and, faithfully, offering to Jesus space for Him to do His work.
But then I’d like you to have a look at the first of our bible readings from Paul’s 2nd letter to the Corinthians because there we have a different scenario that also raises questions for us about healing. Now a ‘heads-up’ is required because this passage is going to require quite a lot from us.
Where are we in our thinking? To summarise: Jesus healed in His ministry, healing and preaching were both important to Him. Healing ‘fleshed out’ His teaching, it embodied and made real the presence of the Kingdom of God that He spoke about. We also see that Jesus commissioned his followers to carry out this ministry as well, and they did so. And yet, as we have just seen, we have to say that even Jesus’ ministry could be restricted or constrained by the lack of faith around Him. His desire to heal could be frustrated: ‘he could do no deed of power’ (said the passage). He wanted to heal….but He couldn’t.
But the situation in the first of our readings is different. You could hardly accuse the apostle Paul of having ‘no faith’…on the faith-ometer his faith was off the scale. Indeed, he tells us in our reading that he had been granted some great spiritual experience that had enabled him to listen in to the secrets of Paradise. I have not the foggiest what this experience was and the apostle himself struggles to describe it (look again at verse 2) but what is absolutely clear is that there is faith abounding on display here. But Paul has a problem and, whilst he doesn’t explicitly tell us what it is, it seems to be something medical. Some people think it was something to do with his eyesight but we don’t really know. What we do know, is that this faithful Christian man prayed. He asks God to help him, to take this ‘thorn in the flesh’ away from him. Paul cannot be the only one who has prayed something like this. We pray for our loved ones. We pray for healing for those who ask us for our prayers. Some of us have found ourselves right on the edge with extreme pain and we have prayed, really prayed, for ourselves. ‘Three times’ Paul appealed to the Lord about his problem. (Personally, I question, ‘only three times’ – I really don’t think there is a problem should you want to pray again and again and again). But Paul asks three times…and the situation here is not that God cannot heal but that He chooses not to.
Now that is hard isn’t it? But no harder (it should be said) than praying at someone’s bedside and seeing nothing but decline. What do we do when we have faith (and more to spare) but God does not meet our faith with the answer to our prayers? For some people this experience undermines their faith. It can lead to bitterness against God, to doubt, to a sense of being betrayed by Him or let down: maybe that is you, you are hanging onto faith by your fingertips. With some people, trying to reconcile God’s goodness with illness and pain surfaces in phrases like ‘he’s done nothing to deserve this.’ Pastorally, I have heard that any number of times, and maybe you have thought or said it, not really believing that God is handing out pain and distress or that being good can shield us from illness…but it doesn’t seem fair. Paul takes us to a different place with his thinking and praying. The whole of this letter to the Corinthians is shot through with an awareness from Paul that God works supremely though weakness. This is a Gospel truth seen in the fact that we worship a man who was crucified: God’s strength is shown in weakness. And, with this in mind, Paul seems to be granted the grace to say ‘OK. This is how things are. I am not to be healed in the way I might wish but God still has a purpose for me. God is still present with me and, most especially when I am at my lowest, Christ dwells within me. For, through the grace of God it is when I am weak that I am strong. He will sustain me.’ That ‘reframing’ of our experience in the light of God’s promise to be with us has been (and continues to be) a huge strength to people who are struggling.
And so, as has been our practice for a while now, as we receive communion there is the opportunity for those who wish to receive the ministry of the laying on of hands and anointing with oil: the chance for us to say we are open to God’s healing and have faith to pray for it. But the chance also to say to God ‘if you choose to heal, I bless you. But if healing is not for me, I will bless you too, only please grant me the grace to serve you in my weakness and may Christ, come what may, be seen in me.’ Amen.
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