When healing is just the beginning......

It makes a great deal of sense that when  you are burdened with a physical/mental/spiritual/social problem......that absolutely no one seems to be able to solve.......that should healing come, should you experience wholeness once again........you will be filled with gratitude.  I expect for days you will find it hard to actually believe that the long wait and all the worry are over.  Before the healing, you could only look down the road one day at a time.  Now a whole future stretches out before you.  There are all kinds of possibilities.  I think this is rightly called HOPE.

Yet let us consider that the gift of healing is only the beginning.  It offers to each of us the opportunity to start again.  Now that the great burden of our broken bodies or spirits is no longer our reality, we have a chance to begin again with a new reality, and to live out that reality in new and different ways.  That is, the gift of healing is also the gift of a new tomorrow......and that tomorrow could and just maybe should be different from today.

Because after today, you will be a person who once was oppressed or imprisoned by a problem that was beyond this world's ability to solve. Now you will be a walking example of the unpredictability of grace, poured out on you and your life.  You might even call this salvation.

And you just might want to tell someone else about this miraculous, life changing, life giving experience.  You just might want to tell someone else about how it all came about.  In the case of the three people healed by Jesus in the 8th chapter of Matthew, each one just might end up telling their story of new life.....and pointing to the Jesus who made it all happen.  Those who were healed would now also be witnesses......to the salvific power of Jesus, to the joy of restoration, to the gift of unexpected healing.

Healing takes many forms:  a broken relationship restored, a disease which disappears, an invitation to an outcast, a meal for the hungry, a mind which is whole again.  Any and all of these can turn our lives in a new direction, one of gratitude but also a life of witness as well.  The verb  sodzo is Greek and is translated as 'to heal' 'to make whole' or 'to save'.  In this one word is wrapped all these notions of release from disease, wholeness of body, mind, spirit and the new life that is discovered in the end.

Healing is the beginning of a journey of salvation: new life that springs up like living water in those who have been made whole through powers unknown by mere humans.  Sure, some of that healing comes to us through modern science and practice.  That doesn't make it any less amazing, or, to think about it, leave us any less thankful.

From healing to witness.  New life springing up.  Salvation lived today.  Forgiveness that takes the broken and makes it whole.   I bet you have a story about how your life has been changed.  If we share that story with others, they just might reach out to the one who wants to heal them as well.

Am I worthy?

It is the question that nags at the deepest corner of our heart "Am I worthy?"  It is rare that you will catch an American phrasing it quite that way (it goes against our cultural grain) but when you approach someone certain that they will turn away from you, that is what you are thinking: Am I worthy?  To get an autograph?  To be chosen for the team?  To be asked to the prom?  To get the promotion?

When Jesus begins healing folks in the 8th chapter of Matthew, he encounters three people who, for one reason or another, are not considered worthy.  They are outsiders: a leper who is a Son of Abraham, a centurion soldier, and Peter's mother-in-law, in bed with a fever.  The leper has been set outside his own community because of his disease.  He is an outcast among outcasts.  The centurion is a Roman, a soldier in an occupying force, and he wants healing for a sick servant!  Then there's Peter's mother-in-law (notice we never learn her name) who was born on the wrong side of the gender divide.  These three have been found 'unworthy' by their own communities for one reason or another.

They came to Jesus because there was no where else to go.  Lepers were rarely healed; I expect the centurion would have been loathe to ask favor from a Jewish rabbi.  Every Jewish woman had heard the prayer uttered by the men, "Thank you God that I was not born a woman" (this is, in fact, an actual Jewish prayer).

It is not hard to hear these folks saying to themselves, "I am not worthy"  In fact, the centurion utters these words aloud, "I am not worthy for you to enter my house, only say the word and [the servant] shall be healed."  These are the folks that Jesus heals.  These are the ones Jesus finds worthy.

The leper, who has been separated from his family and community, can now show himself to the priest - see?  I am healed.  I am OK.  Now, I can be included once again.

The centurion has nothing to lose, it would seem.  He is asking for a servant to be healed, but I would have to imagine that this is a beloved individual for him to do this kind of leg work, humbling himself before Jesus, to receive a healing.  There may be more reasons than first imagined for him to demur from Jesus entering his house to heal the servant, but none the less, Jesus heals from a far.  Clearly this Jesus has power over powers rather than just power over people (like an officer commanding other soldiers).

Then of course there is Peter's mother-in law.  It may have been a nothing fever, and she is healed only to set up and serve the men lunch, but on this day the rabbi Jesus made her whole again.

Am I worthy?  This question echoes in the depths of our souls, for in some way, each of us is an outsider.  But not to Jesus......to Jesus we are beloved children in need of new healing.  That is the definition of grace.......and Jesus pours it out on each of us.