What Ails Us

If you've ever read from the synoptic gospels (Matthew, Mark, and Luke), you surely have noticed how much of Jesus' ministry is healing.  He heals people on a regular basis.  Other times he performs exorcisms that I suspect most of us would consider healings nowadays.  After today's healing of a woman with a hemorrhage, Jesus says to her, "Daughter, your faith has made you well."  But in other places the same word is translated "saved."  In fact, the word "save" that so many associate with Jesus means to rescue, to make whole, to heal, and such.

That stereotyped evangelism question, "Have you been saved?" seems to define salvation quite narrowly.  At least in my encounters, it refers to getting into heaven.  That certainly could be a meaning of salvation, being rescued from some other fate.  But given how often saving in the New Testament is associated with healing, I wonder if most of us don't need to broaden our notion of salvation.  I wonder if we don't also need to ask, "Have you been healed?  Have you been made whole?"  And as with the question of being saved, this raises the question of saved from what, healed from what, made whole from what sort of brokenness?

What is it that ails us?  What healing do we need?  Because Christianity is so often understood as right beliefs that get you on the heavenly invitation list, people sometimes don't ask such questions.  Southern comedian and devout Southern Baptist Jerry Clower once said, "Some people are so heavenly minded, they ain't no earthly good."  And I think this narrow view on salvation is largely to blame.

Jesus came healing and teaching, calling people to a new way of life in anticipation of God' coming reign, and this Kingdom is not the same thing as heaven.  Rather it is the transforming of life on earth.  And so it seems to me the big question for Christians shouldn't be have you believed correctly, but have you been cured of what ails you so that you start experiencing the Kingdom and living in it/for it now?

My tradition has long spoken of sin as the problem that ails us.  Sin here means an inherent predisposition as opposed to bad things we do.  It is a human nature turned in on itself, self centered and constricted in such a way that I matter more than God or neighbor.  In this understanding of sin, part of what ails me is that I am highly individualistic, measuring the worth of all things based on how they impact me.  Notice how at odds this is with Jesus' call to deny oneself and willing suffer loss for his sake.

In his devotion for today, Richard Rohr talks about true spirituality being more about subtraction that addition, about letting go of things rather than acquiring more.  But in our consumerist culture, we often approach faith and spirituality as something we add, that we acquire.  And so our spirituality ends up suffering from the same basic problem that ails us to begin with.  Maybe this is what Jesus needs to heal in us.  Maybe this is where we need to be rescued and saved.

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