‘Go; your faith has made you well’.
(Mark 10.52)
The current debate around assisted dying raises important and difficult questions for Christians. To my mind the debate is challenging for a number of reasons.
First, it’s difficult because it’s complex. Shying away from complexity is always a temptation, as is turning complexity into a simple binary choice: this debate isn’t about whether we’re pro-life or pro-death; it’s much more complex than that.
It’s also difficult because there’s no single Christian response to it. There’s a majority view, which expresses serious concern at the change in legislation that has been proposed. As it happens, I share that concern, but it’s not the only Chrisitan response, and it’s important to recognise that.
It’s also a debate that’s hard to enter into because it doesn’t concern a distant hypothetical topic, but one of which many have very direct and real experience – caring for a loved one with a terminal illness is the hardest of vocations, and the voices of those who have had that experience need to be heard alongside others.
Finally, for me, it’s a hard debate for Christians because the church often struggles to articulate the relationship between faith, sickness, disability and healing, and it’s that particular aspect of the debate that today’s Gospel speaks into, and that I’d like to reflect on for a few moments this morning.
‘Go; your faith has made you well’.
Most of us probably don’t identify with the sort of TV evangelist who performs spectacular life-changing healing miracles in front of vast audiences. We’re far too respectable for that sort of thing. And yet we do belong to a Christian tradition that prays for healing. Every day in this cathedral prayer is offered precisely for that reason. It’s central to our mission, and it’s an aspect of our ministry that I’d like us to develop. That being the case, what are we to make of the many healing miracles that fall from the pages of the Gospel, not least that of blind Bartimaeus which we have just heard, miracles that appear to resemble more closely the ministry of the TV evangelist than they do our expectations when we pray for healing?
Leaving aside the longstanding debate between science and religion, which asks whether miracles are ever possible in the first place, this is a difficult and emotive subject, because the healing stories of Jesus can be experienced today by people with long-term illnesses and disabilities not as comforting but as ‘texts of terror’. Let me try to explain what I mean.
First, people with incurable and disabling conditions can find themselves being told, or thinking, that they haven’t got enough faith, and that if only they had more faith then they would healed. Some Christians, inspired by texts such as, ‘Go; your faith has made you well’, emphasize faith as a prior condition for healing, with the result that people can be left feeling guilty if they are not physically healed.
Second, because of the connection that is sometimes made between sickness and sin, they may also feel responsible for their condition. Throughout the history of Judaism and Christianity, some have interpreted sickness and disability as the consequence of sin. Even in the service for the Visitation of the Sick from our own Book of Common Prayer the priest tells the patient: ‘whatsoever your sickness is, know you certainly, that it is God’s visitation’. Perhaps unsurprisingly, that didn’t find its way into Common Worship!
And then, third, healing stories can be used to imply the non-acceptance of people as they are. They are treated as imperfect or unclean until they are healed.
So, then, it is unsurprising that, for some, healing stories are perceived ‘texts of terror’. But are they inherently so, or are there other way of reading and interpreting them?
Certainly the success of medicine without miracles has changed our expectations. Society expects perfection, and is intolerant of imperfection and weakness, thus making it difficult to have anything but a negative view of ourselves and others as vulnerable, wounded, and dying. In relation to the assisted dying debate, this attitude helps to explain why, for some, accelerating the dying process is to be preferred to improving palliative care.
Looking back to the time of Jesus, rather than excluding people with incurable conditions from society, they were a very visible part of everyday life. The blind, the lame, the mentally or physically ill were present, not hidden.
And in contrast to the prevailing contemporary attitude that struggles with the acceptance of imperfection, and believes that it should be possible for everything that is not right to be put right, a clear distinction was drawn between the curable and incurable. As far as the gospel stories go, the whole point of them is that Jesus could do what no-one else had the right to do, curing the incurable.
So where does that leave us? For me, the healing miracles in the gospels do not provide a scriptural warrant for the physical healing of anyone who is sick, injured or disabled; they are not about finding the right formula to put things right and live happily ever after. Rather, the important thing to notice in these stories is the element of surprise: the surprised reaction of the one who is healed, who, in the case of Bartimaeus, follows Jesus on the way; but also, as in other healing narratives, the surprised reaction of the onlookers who rejoice that, in the God-man Jesus, all things are possible.
These stories, then, are statements about the exceptional nature of Jesus’ ministry, and demonstrations of the response of faith that leads to transformation and salvation. The blind beggar Bartimaeus and all the others whom Jesus heals are important because they provide role models for everybody. They are signs of hope for everyone – and not just the chronically sick or the disabled.
If we think of the healing ministry of Jesus in this way then, rather than it being a faith healer’s magic show, it can become for us a solid, realistic, spiritual foundation on which to live our own wounded and vulnerable lives, and to pray for our own healing as well as for the healing of others.
As signs of hope, these stories point beyond the often painful reality of this world to a transformed world order. They reveal how the God who in Christ shares our flesh, is with us in every circumstance and situation, and in every circumstance and situation offers hope.
Here, then, is good news for all. Here, if we see the healing ministry of Jesus as exceptional rather than everyday, these miracles become exemplary for everyone, not texts of terror or sticks with which to beat the blind and the lame.
In the coming weeks, as the assisted dying debate begins in Parliament and we are challenged to think again about where we stand in relation to it, let’s not forget what Bartimaeus and the other healing miracles in the Gospels teach us.
The Body of Christ here on earth is blind, lame, diseased and disabled. It has cancer, AIDS, dementia and Parkinsons. It is very vulnerable. It is also very beautiful. In Christ, we are all part of that Body; and in Christ, there is hope that all may be saved, healed and made whole.
‘Go; your faith has made you well’.