Healing and Wholeness
Scripture: Luke 4:31-41
Rev. Gary Demarest, January 31, 2010

I appreciate the central emphasis that Dick is bringing us these Sundays, from Luke's Gospel, on "How God loves us," the many ways in which we experience among us and within us God's present and active love.

This morning we gather around three paragraphs from the fourth chapter of Luke's Gospel that grew out of the opening days of the public ministry of Jesus, following his period of testing in the wilderness of Judea and his rejection in a highly emotional conflict in his home-town house of worship in Nazareth.

Every time I read these stories about casting out evil spirits and healing common maladies, I find it helpful to read them, as best as I am able, in their original context.

These stories are not to be read as we read the morning newspaper or heard as we listen to the evening news. Luke was neither a journalist nor a news commentator. He did not write in order to preserve the record for posterity.

I find it important to review Luke's introductory words to both volumes of his writings: the Gospel and the Book of Acts. Luke writes, not as an observer but as a passionate participant. He writes, not merely as an objective student of these events, but as a man whose live had been transformed by his encounters with Jesus and whose life was now lived in dynamic obedience to Jesus as his master. (Read Luke 1:1–4; Acts 1:1–2).

What we read was not the written or oral reporting of the events at the time, but the witness of the meaning that those events had come to have in the lives of those who had come to call Jesus savior, messiah, master many years before.

Luke is trying to convince his reader, Theophilus, and all of his readers to follow, of the TRUTH that he and the early followers of Jesus had seen and experienced in the crucified and risen Jesus, who they acknowledge as the Christ, the Son of God.

A word of caution here: do not treat the factuality of the stories lightly. As best as we know, Luke himself was a practitioner of medicine as it was then practiced. The casting out of evil spirits, let alone the healing of fevers, the cleansing of leprosy, the curing of blindness, and the restoration of life to a dead man, had to be as dramatic and unusual to Luke as it is to us moderns.

Though he may not have been an eyewitness to these healing and restoring events about which he writes, he makes it clear that he had done his work carefully and thoroughly among the eyewitnesses. He was obviously convinced of the factuality of the events of which he wrote.

This brings us to the heart of the issues raised by these stories of the healings and other supra-natural events done by Jesus.

When I was circling around Jesus in my late teens and early twenties, I'm now aware that my major problem in coming to intellectual comfort with the mighty works of Jesus was an underlying sense that I could only trust that which I could understand.

Well, that was a long time ago, and I've long since become comfortable with the fact that there may well be more things in life that I don't understand than there are that I do. I'm also aware that my understanding is often shaped by factors other than rational objectivity.

My growing love for and commitment to Jesus as Savior, Lord, Master is a process that grows out of my experiencing him through careful attention to the Scriptures , through participation in prayer and worship, and through a lifelong commitment to the community of faith.

While I have no way of proving to the doubter that these mighty of works of Jesus actually happened, I do not find them in any way to be inconsistent with the witness of the early Christian community to the meaning of his life, death, and resurrection.

If they had been drawn to him primarily because of his mighty works, which we call miraculous, he would have been little more than another of the magicians who dot the landscape in every age, including ours.

What drew men and women to him was his very being. He was the fullness of love; his teaching had a ring of truth. As Luke commented in the passage we read this morning: "They were astounded at his teaching, because he spoke with authority." He broke with rigid tradition when it was in the best interest of needy persons: the initial, as well as later healings, were done in violation of the Biblical Sabbath laws.

Thus casting out demons and healing were a full and natural expression of who he actually was. To regard him primarily as a worker of miracles is to miss the point of who he really was: GOD PRESENT IN A HUMAN BEING TO WORK DIRECTLY FOR THE HEALING AND WHOLENESS OF THE ENTIRE CREATION AND EVERYONE IN IT.

We call this SALVATION.

The central issue before us today is the question: "Does Jesus continue to heal today?"

The answer to me is emphatically, YES!!!

But this can never mean that we control the occasions on which he heals. How often as a pastor I have wished that I could succeed in getting God to answer my prayer for healing. How often I have wished that I had some special gift by which I could become the instrument for a miracle.

Taking my place as one asking for a special act of God's healing without any power to deliver it has never been easy. Crying out to God for help and being met by what appears to be silence is always painful.

So what do I do as one who believes in God's healing power but who has witnessed it on so few occasions?

I've tried to expand my understanding of God's healing. I now believe I have witnessed much more of God's healing power and presence than I have been consciously aware. I experienced healing fifteen years ago from what most likely would have been a fatal malignancy through God's gift of surgery and medication. Every form of healing is a gift from God. Every advance in medicine and psychology flows from God who works through human agency.

But what of those who do not receive healing from the same processes that bring healing to others. Does God have favorites? Is sickness ever a punishment from God?

The answer to me is emphatically NO!!!

Any such view of sickness, suffering, healing is totally inconsistent with what we know of Jesus. In the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, God made his final statement about his love for every human being and his grace and forgiveness extending to all, irrespective of their goodness or worthiness.

Why some experience healing and others do not is beyond my understanding, and now I'm back to where I started. I really don't understand.

But this I know ... written by the Apostle Paul not long before is death, having suffered more because of and in spite of his faith than any of us are likely to approach:

Who will separate us from the love of Christ? Will hardship, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril or sword? ... No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of god in Christ Jesus our lord. (Rom 8:35‑39, NRSV)

Or, to put in other words:

Do you think anyone is going to be able to drive a wedge between us and Christ's love for us? There is no way! Not trouble, not hard times, not hatred, not hunger, not homelessness, not bullying threats, not backstabbing, not even the worst sins listed in scripture. ... None of this fazes us because Jesus loves us. I'm absolutely convinced that nothing - nothing living or dead, angelic or demonic, today or tomorrow, high or low, thinkable or unthinkable - absolutely nothing can get between us and god's love because of the way that Jesus our master has embraced us. (Eugene Peterson, The Message)

This I believe and affirm ... and I'm even beginning to understand a little bit of it.