we made the Gospel largely into “an evacuation plan for heaven.” [1] If we don’t understand the need and desire for healing now, then salvation (salus = healing) becomes a matter of hoping for some form of delayed gratification. We desperately need healing for groups, institutions, marriage, the wounds of war, abuse, race relations, and the endless social problems in which we are drowning today. But we won’t know how to heal if we never learn the skills at ground zero: the individual human heart.
For much of its history following 313 AD, the Christian church’s job or concern was not healing, but rather maintaining social and church order: doling out graces and indulgences (as if that were possible); granting dispensations, annulments, absolutions, and penalties; keeping people in first marriages at all costs, instead of seeing marriage as an arena for growth, forgiveness, and transformation. In general, we tried to resolve issues of the soul and the Spirit by juridical and “transactional” means, which in my opinion seldom work.
As priests, we felt our job was to absolve sin rather than actually transform people.
.. In the four Gospels, Jesus did two things over and over again: he preached and he healed. We have done a lot of preaching, but not too much healing.
.. Religion usually focuses on imputing and then forgiving guilt. This is much more about “sin management”
.. We too often settle for problem solving. It really is the best way to keep the laity coming back, strangely enough. Carrot on the stick theology keeps us clergy in business. I wish it did not work so well.
Christianity must first teach people how to really pray so they can relate to God as adults.
Richard Rohr: Healing Stories are Half the Gospel
Francis knew that Jesus was not at all interested in the usual “sin management” task that many clergy seem to think is their job. He saw that Jesus was neither surprised nor upset at what we usually call sin. Jesus was upset at human pain and suffering. What else do all the healing stories mean? They are half of the Gospel! Jesus did not focus on sin. Jesus went where the pain was. Wherever he found human pain, there he went, there he touched, and there he healed.
The Cross as Cure
The second sacred image that the cross echoes is the “Lifted-Up One,” and it comes from the bronze snake in the desert. YHWH tells Moses to raise up a serpent on a pole, and “anyone who has been bitten by a serpent and looks upon it will be healed” (Numbers 21:8). It is like a homeopathic symbol. The very thing that is killing the Children of Israel is the thing that will heal them! It is presented as a vaccine that will give you just enough of the disease so you can develop a resistance to it. The cross dramatically raises up the problem of ignorant hatred for all to see, hoping to inoculate us against doing the same thing and projecting our violence onward into history.
Contemplative Seeing
My life is not about me; it is about God, and God is about love. When we don’t know love, when we experience only the insecurity and fragility of the small self, we become restless, violent, and hateful.
.. Notice how most of Jesus’ ministry is about healing people (yet I grew up in a church that hardly used the word “healing”). Notice also how many of those healings have to do with blindness, chosen blindness (John 9:41)
.. “Most people do not see things as they are because they see things as they are!”