Family Service Sunday 12th October – led by john Wainwright
This week we seemed to be in need of healing, with prayers for members who had had falls, or surgery for back problems, so the reading from Luke 17 about Jesus Healing Ten Men seemed particularly apposite.
John started with an anecdote about grandchildren (or nephews and nieces) who you only seemed to hear from when they needed money. So often it seemed, there was a lack of gratitude. So it must have been wonderful for Jesus that at least one person came back to thank him for the healing that he had received. And typically, it was a Samaritan. John thought he had probably experienced an extra benefit – a new wholeness in his life.
The reading told us of God’s power to heal, as indeed did many other passages from the Bible. And Luke as a doctor would have been particularly interested in the kind of healing that Jesus was doing. One of John’s favourite miracle stories was the one where four men had brought their paralyzed friend to Jesus but couldn’t get to see him because of all the crowd of people in the house. So they’d gone up onto the flat roof, made a hole in it and lowered their friend down to Jesus.
In contrast to many of his contemporaries who regarded illness as a punishment for wrongdoing, Jesus had seen illness as something that belonged to the world of Satan – something to be fought against, and something from which people needed to be delivered. And it wasn’t just Jesus who healed. In Acts we could read about Peter and John healing a beggar outside the temple gate. And James talked about the need to pray earnestly for those who were sick, that they might be healed.
John wanted to focus on today’s world. The power which was mediated through Jesus to the apostles was still available to us today. When we prayed for the sick, we shouldn’t do it in a half-hearted manner, not really expecting anything significant to happen. Our God was a God of healing, and He could bring healing to us today.
There was a sense in which all healing was divine, since God had put it into the human body. There was a power within the human body, which could help to fight infection and repair injury. The Huguenot physician Ambroise Paré had written, “I dressed the wound, but God healed it”.
The healing ministry of Jesus belonged to a different order – supernatural demonstrations of God’s power. And John had been privileged to experience such a healing at a Christian Convention where a person’s deafness had been healed. But such events were not common, and John thought that to suggest that they were, could create unfulfillable expectations. He knew of a case where people had prayed for the healing of a fellow member with cancer. It didn’t happen, and there were one or two whose faith had been really challenged by this.
But John believed there was a healing, but it was not always physical healing. It might be a new wholeness, a new attitude to life. Christians knew physical death was not the end – they were going on to something better. The fact that somebody had not received physical healing didn’t mean that the prayers had not been answered, just not answered in the way that we, with our limited knowledge, and our love for the person, wanted them to be answered.
God often had a far bigger purpose, which we couldn’t understand. Sometimes, our friends, our loved ones would not get better in this life. But our prayers would release divine power, which would give that person a new wholeness, a new sense of being.
John believed that even on the darkest days, when we might struggle with our own health – whether it was physical, mental, or emotional health – and perhaps want to conceal it from others, God would know about it and be ready to give strength to overcome the difficulties. So it would be his prayer that we would be open afresh to God’s healing power.
Though we might be physically well, we also needed our spirits to be healed afresh from those things which would hold us back from being the kind of people that God wanted us to be.
Might all of us, this morning experience some of that indwelling power afresh, find a fresh wholeness, and be able by God’s grace, to offer healing hope to those we came into contact with.
Potters Bar United Reformed Church 