Worship & Prayer
HEALING/WHOLENESS HOLY COMMUNION SERVICE - Bob Spiller
16/11/08
I have put together, at Julia’s invitation, my ranging thoughts on ‘healing’, which I offer to you now.Julia probably knew, full well, that if you turn to a decent Handbook of the Bible, as I have done, you will not find ‘Healing’ among the Key Themes. People are not miraculously healed on every Bible page, but there is a lot of it about…so WHY?
The Gospels depict for us many stories of Jesus. Knowing of Julia’s propensity for giving her sermons titles, mischievously I am waiting for the day when she announces “10.30am, Jesus walking on the water” followed by “6.30pm, Looking for Jesus”.
Jesus influenced the forces of nature, e.g. calming a storm; walking on water; feeding thousands; and healed physical and mental disorders in a variety of cases and individuals, the blind, deaf, dumb; those with dropsy or leprosy. ‘The feeding of the 5000’ is the only miraculous incident common to all 4 Gospels. Here comes the commercial: It’s pre-eminence may explain why it is the subject of Rev Julie Hulme’s excellent book, ‘BREAD IN OUR HANDS’, (though she concentrates on St Mark’s version).
All these stories testify to the tremendous impression Jesus must have had on his followers – and on the Gospel authors!
Ever since, down the ages, scientists, myself included, have striven, not maliciously or intentionally, to defy, debunk, rationally explain, these things- to have a ‘non-miraculous’ Jesus….To answer the HOW of these things that happened – and continue to happen – in the world, never stopping fro scarcely a moment to ask the question, WHY?
Scientific theories have continually changed, become refined, down the years. Students studying Physics to any reasonable level will know, for example, that historically, LIGHT is alternatively regarded as WAVES of electromagnetic energy, or PARTICLES, to explain its behaviour, and that the 2 ideas are not incompatible. I ceased to teach science, in the conventional; sense, way over 40 years ago, but there could be a former student of mine, lurking somewhere (they used to lurk here!) who remembers being taught that science is all about probabilities, not facts….! Exceptions do prove the general rule, and exist even now…
If you tour Universal Studios in Los Angeles, you will see a demonstration of HOW the Red Sea parted in those epic Bible films, using technology that certainly was unknown, 4000 years ago….Stand on the wall at the impressive Hoover Dam and you begin to appreciate that forces of nature could intervene to deflect, or interrupt, the courses of rivers and the location of small seas – and still avoid asking the question, in respect of the parting of the Red Sea, not HOW?’ but WHY?
If you believe in the omnipotence of a Creator God, however creation came about; if you accept the weight of incontrovertible evidence for the resurrection of Jesus, the world’s greatest miracle; then mere ‘miracles’ of healing, Biblical or otherwise, appear commonplace:
- people falling with faulty parachutes and surviving
- people found alive days after an earthquake
- people defying the gloomiest medical prognosis –
We may just have witnessed a miracle in the U.S.A. Presidential Election as profound as the Berlin Wall coming down – only time will tell … I loved the story, reported in TIME Magazine, of a Judge in Ohio who ruled that, in order to vote, homeless people could register a park bench as their address!
The reason, the meaning, the WHY?, of all this, to me, is SPIRITUAL:
MIRACLES (i) BRING GLORY TO GOD;
(ii) SHOW US HIS LOVE FOR SUFFERING HUMANITY
and, therefore
(iii) LEAD PEOPLE TO FAITH IN THE SAVING POWER OF
GOD, AT WORK IN THE RISEN JESUS AND THE HOLY SPIRIT, to render us ‘whole’ and wholesome.
‘Leading people to stronger faith’ sounds entirely within our comprehension and understanding; but do you recall the debates about whether you need a ‘modicum of faith’ in order to be healed in the first place; (remembering that, more than once, Jesus said, “Your faith has made you whole!”).
That you are here at all this morning, despite maybe having realised that you have to listen to me again in a fortnight’s time, means that I have confidence in your ‘modicum of faith’, and mine, which may (or may not) ‘tip the scales’ in favour of healing…
But, whether or not, the vital question is still WHY? , within God’s great purpose and plan…
HEALING will: enlighten our faith;
restore wholeness;
transform our spiritual service
But what about NO HEALING, those thousands of pilgrims, every year, to Lourdes, Knock, and other renowned sites…?
NO HEALING, in the obvious, conventional sense, will
challenge our faith;
mean God loves us as we are and what we are
nevertheless able to do, in the name of Jesus