Suppose for a moment there is such a thing as divine healing. Suppose it is a mark of the presence of Jesus, a downpayment towards the later, greater transformation of the world. The world is much more complicated if that is true than if it isn’t.
If it weren’t true, you’re sick, you get on with it. If it is true, there’s a kind of lifeline flung down from the skies. But that lifeline is elusive.
I think a lot about this because I am a Christian and I am someone who credibly can be said to have made unanticipated recoveries from fatal events. One morning my heart stopped and had to be electrocuted repeatedly until it returned, as it were, to the beating path. Two years later I spent a month in a coma. As readers of this blog already know. And I think about healing a lot because body parts still malfunction and because now I have started a new part-time job which is all about responding to the ill-health of others. And also because people around me, some Christian, some not, some sort-of, some maybe, fall sick or their loved ones do and what does healing mean in all those situations?
I’m beginning to conclude it’s about peace with God and the wellness of your soul in his presence. There’s a Sunday-School staple of a woman called Hannah, who was childless, who went to the temple to pray for a child. The priest saw her lips moving and said, more or less, go easy on the sauce, lady. She told him she wasn’t drunk, she was praying, and he said ‘Go in peace then’ and she went and the account tells us ‘her face was no longer sad.’
I have to say that’s been important for me almost every day through the last decade. When she left the temple, Hannah wasn’t pregnant, nothing had changed, but ‘her face was no longer sad’. Everything had changed! The heart of the thing had changed. She had found peace with God in the moment.
That’s why I believe healing is instantaneous, or at least a thing that happens in the moment. It is peace with God for now. Healing is also a walk, sometimes a walk for the rest of your life. It is a walk where every day, or maybe every hour, or maybe sometimes every few minutes, you refresh yourself with God’s peace. As you string these moments together, hours, days, you are healed. The shape and orientation of your life is transformed, yes by the illness, but more by the companionship of God.
The Bible is a treasure-chest of this stuff. The Psalms, for example, on my reading, are repeated swings of the pendulum between pain and peace–hymns and anthems on which we can be carried.
What about when you are mentally ill, trapped in your own mind? What about chronic terrible pain? What about uncertainty and waiting? All these are hard places from which to find a settled peace with God. I agree but I don’t have any other remedy unfortunately and would prescribe the same medicine, with the proviso that we don’t do this alone: a community can help bear the load. And (even if we don’t believe in him) God is sovereign, greater than us, for us, and personally attuned to our darkest corners.