Wholeness and Healing
I’m sometimes struck by media headlines that reach for biblical language to describe events. Do you remember the release of the Chilean miners in 2010? The Times called it: The miracle of San Jose; The Guardian went with: World rejoices as Chilean miners rise up from the deep. The Daily Mirror chose a one word headline - it simply said: Salvation! The Sun of course went at it from a different angle – its headline read: The freed hot chile fellas. But that was the exception. It seems that when you’ve got a really good news story it’s natural to reach for bible language to describe it.
The Hebrew word we translate as ‘salvation’ has as its the basic mean ‘space’; ‘to bring into a spacious environment’. It’s freedom from limitation - salvation is a walk in the Lakes or along the South Downs. It’s ‘deliverance from things which constrain and confine’ us. Think of Psalm 18.19: [God] brought me out into a spacious place; he rescued me because he delighted in me. Or Psalm 31.8: You have not handed me over to the enemy but have set my feet in a spacious place.
Salvation is about freedom from limitation; deliverance from the things which constrain and confine us, things that stop us being what we were made to be. Freedom is God’s purpose for his creation in every aspect, personal and corporate. Eugene Peterson says that God’s salvation is: comprehensive, intricate, patiently personal, embracingly social, and insistently political. [It’s] the work of God that restores the world and us to wholeness. ‘Kingdom of God’ is Jesus’ term for it.
What was the central message of Jesus’ earthly ministry? Mark tells us that Jesus went into Galilee proclaiming ‘The time has come, the kingdom of God is near. Repent and believe the good news!’ Jesus’ message was about the presence and the availability of the kingdom to everyone, everywhere. He invites us, through faith in him, to actually live in the kingdom now.
God’s kingdom is the place of God’s action. When we pray ‘Your kingdom come on earth as it is in heaven’; when we pray for the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, we are praying for God to be at work in our lives here and now - lives that are deeply marred by sin, by inner weakness, by battles with outside forces, oppression and unjust structures. Salvation is our rescue from that domain. It’s God in action, restoring the world and us to wholeness. It’s comprehensive in scope, it’s concerned with the details of our lives; it’s about wholeness in body, mind and spirit and community.
For many years the church lost this scope to salvation, consequently the Church’s healing ministry has been a fringe activity. Way back in 1978 the Lambeth Conference stated that: to neglect this aspect of ministry is to diminish our part in Christ’s total redemptive activity.
Times have changed. Every diocese now has a healing ministry advisor; we are rediscovering that Jesus calls us to preach the gospel and to heal the sick by seeing salvation in its broadest terms. And this ministry includes the biblical warrant of the laying on of hands in prayer for healing. To take seriously the ministry of wholeness and healing we need to remember that our authority comes from the very highest level (from Christ himself); that the resources we call on are mighty beyond measure and that the channels through which it flows are many and various. Some are very ordinary, seemingly prosaic ways – it might be a listening ear over a cup of tea at the back of church; or a bereavement support group, or a marriage counselling session just as much the wonderful things that can happen through prayer ministry in Churches and Healing Centres.
Anything that communicates the reality of Jesus Christ personally to you or to me, will be a channel of Christian healing and a service like this, with worship and space for the Spirit to move can be wonderfully meaningful. Bishop Morris Maddocks gives a very helpful definition on Christian healing: Jesus Christ meeting us at our point of need. When Jesus meets us in all his oneness with the Father and the Holy Spirit, that encounter will never be a non-event. Something will happen. Jesus will make a difference and that difference is the essence of Christian healing. We cannot predict what that might be but we know that he can touch any part our lives – bodies, minds, spirits, attitudes, relationships, and memories. It might be to give renewed strength to bear a weakness, to overcome a fear, to relieve a hurt or heal a physical condition, completely or partially. It might be to hear and receive God’s forgiveness and let go of guilt and condemnation. It’s all the work of God.
Romans 8 reminds us that as children of God, led by his Spirit, we live at the interface of the old and the new creation. But we are heirs of God, co-heirs with Christ, if indeed we share in his sufferings in order that we may also share in his glory. Our wholeness and healing are a work in progress yet to be completed. We are God’s new creations partaking in God’s new life for us but this remains incomplete in us until it includes the whole creation and death itself is destroyed.
Whatever our circumstances, whatever testing we may be experiencing, may we know God’s power to save, may we in our prayers reach out to God and trust that he will never leave us or forsake us but meet us at our own point of need.
