DEAR CHARITY

Part 7

Dear Charity,

Hey, I am so very sorry to hear about the health issues you’ve been forced to deal with.  I’ve been praying for you earnestly and I hope you are finally on the mend.  I totally hear you when you said you felt like Job.  Your comment was interesting about the fact that Job didn’t let loose with his lament until after he’d been afflicted physically.  Never really thought about that before.  Skin for skin, yeah?

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking and studying and meditating about healing since I read your email.  You raised some really good questions, and you made me look at the healings in Mark 5 a whole lot differently, that’s for sure.  And by that I mean that I came up with a boatload of questions of my own that have always been easy to overlook when all I was doing was trying to soak up the “Jesus loves you and wants to be nice to you” vibes.  Not to say that’s a bad thing, necessarily, it’s just that it let me put on blinders to other things.  Like, was God really more willing to heal people when Jesus walked the earth, or do we not see miraculous healings today because of lack of faith and belief?  I mean, Mark tells us in chapter 6 that Jesus couldn’t do any remarkable deeds in His home region because of the people’s unbelief.  But then that gets into the crazy dangerous territory of telling people that they aren’t being healed because they don’t have enough faith.  Definitely DO NOT want to go there.

So what’s the link between faith and belief and healing?  People were all over Jesus all the time to heal them.  Was their faith and belief a prerequisite for God to heal them?  The woman in Mark 5 truly believed that just touching a small bit of Jesus’ clothing would heal her.  And she was right.  But I gotta wonder, what in the world inspired such belief?  Was it the stories she heard?  Did she talk to someone who had actually been healed?

But then there’s the guy who was possessed by a demon.  He didn’t ask to be healed and he certainly didn’t seem like he had the mental faculties to believe his own healing could even be possible.  Yet Jesus healed him anyway.  Does that mean we don’t have to be willing participants in our own healing?  Maybe not in cases like that where a person isn’t even capable of asking to be healed.  What does that mean for those of us who are capable and do ask and yet nothing seems to happen?

I have to go back and look at the three healings in Mark 5, especially the woman who was healed from her physical ailment.  I don’t know how many times I’ve read that story and heard it preached on, but it wasn’t until this read through that I noticed something I’d sailed right over every other time.  Mark says that as soon as she touched Jesus’ clothes, her illness was cured and she knew it.  So why did Jesus say this to her after she had been cured?

“My daughter...your faith has rescued you.  Go in peace.  Be healed from

your illness.”

Yeah, so if you look at the Greek words in those statements, Jesus tells her that her faith has delivered her, and it’s the same word that’s translated “saved” or “delivered” when referring to what happens when we become part of God’s kingdom.  The second word, “healed,” is a word which deals with the idea of making someone whole, which reminds me very much of shalom, the idea of God making us whole and granting us soundness and well-being (which, in my opinion, is a much better way of looking at peace rather than it just being a lack of conflict).  Jesus spoke to everything about her, not just what was wrong with her physically, and not just what was wrong with her from a mental, emotional, or spiritual standpoint.  He made her truly whole in every sense of the word, which is why He made that statement after her physical illness had already been taken care of.

And that’s the truth I see in the healings of Mark 5.  They seem kinda random at first, but I really think that Mark put them together for a reason.  I might add that I think Matthew included the story of the paralyzed guy with these three healings with a distinct purpose in mind, as well.  Jesus dealt with these people where they were at, and every single one of them was bound by something.  Demons, sin, physical illness, and ultimately, death.  I think Mark and Matthew were demonstrating that Jesus addressed every single thing that keeps us imprisoned and chained up, granting true healing to each person.  He didn’t just get rid of something, which is what I admit I’ve always thought of healing as being.  In truth, that would only have been eradicating the symptoms without dealing with the actual issue.  No, Jesus always got to the root of the problem and that meant His healing did more than cure diseases, it made people whole human beings.

So back to my question about when we ask for healing and nothing seems to happen.  I wonder sometimes if what we’re really asking for is cessation of symptoms instead of real healing.  Do I really want to be healed, or do I just not want to hurt anymore?  It may not seem like it, but a lot of times there’s really a world of difference between the two.  One is about feeling good and being free of anything that causes me pain.  The other is about being an actual true human being who is rightly reflecting my Creator.  If I pray and all I want is for God to wave His wand and relieve me of my symptoms, what am I really asking for?

Now, I know from dreadful experience that what I just said could be interpreted as “God wants us to suffer because there’s more holiness in suffering than in feeling good, that’s why He doesn’t heal us sometimes” and I must shout from the rooftops that there is absolutely zero truth in that statement.  Yes, the Bible says that we will suffer as disciples of Jesus, but hear me when I say that such suffering is NOT, NOT, NOT, NOT, NOT God sitting in heaven saying, “Hmmmmm, Charity isn’t quite holy enough, yet, so no healing for her!”  If that were true, I don’t think Jesus would have healed anybody.  He would have gone around telling people to suck it up and get on with their suffering because God was making them more holy.

You know me well enough to realize I’m not saying this, but I guess it never hurts to repeat the really important things, so I feel I should also take a second to stress that I’m not in any way saying that you’re dealing with health problems because you have some unconfessed sin, which is sometimes how people look at the healing of the paralytic.  People like us always go there right off the bat because we’ve been taught that so ridiculously unbiblical idea that if we have any kind of illness or ailment, God has inflicted it on us in the hope that we’ll get what He’s doing and confess that thing that we’ve buried in some dark, dank hole.  NOT TRUE.  As my friend and mentor recently said, if you are a true disciple of Jesus and God needs to do something in your life, you will most definitely know it’s Him.  He doesn’t do things on the sly and then leave us to figure out whether or not it’s Him acting or something else going on.  That being said, the crucial caveat is that we have to be true disciples of Jesus and really be listening to God.  Because it’s equally true that He doesn’t generally whack us upside the head with a 2x4 just to get our attention.

The absolute truth is that God desires to release us from whatever binds us.  Jesus was proclaiming freedom from human tradition, from mental and emotional and physical bondage, and ultimately from death itself.  Here’s the thing, though — while He healed anyone who asked, I don’t think He wanted them to walk away with their symptoms cleared up and continue toodling along through life without a care from that point on.  He wanted to deal with the whole person.  And I think He knew those who were willing to let Him do that.  Like the woman who touched His clothes.

I still marvel at her faith and belief, you know?  I have to ask the question again, where did it come from?  Why was it so strong in her?  Was it desperation?  Mark gives the heartbreaking detail that she’d been to doctor after doctor after doctor, spending every cent on them with no joy, actually getting worse instead of better, so did she see Jesus as a “what else have I got to lose” proposition?  I really don’t get that sense from how Mark describes her determination.

This beautiful woman’s story brings up another thing that I’ve been thinking about a lot.  Jesus was surrounded by an awful lot of unbelief, and while I’ve always simply thought of that in terms of people not believing in God in general, I never considered the toll it must have taken on Jesus emotionally never to be believed.  How devastating it must have been to be surrounded by people who didn’t really believe or understand you.  It’s no wonder He often went off by Himself.  His family thought He was looney tunes.  He was followed by men who didn’t truly get Him even after seeing Him do some pretty astounding things (see Mark 6:51-52; Mark 8:15-21).  And all the crowds wanted was to get something from Him.  But did any of them truly believe Him?

And when it comes right down to it, what does it mean to believe in Jesus, anyway?  I mean, I know the line we’ve always been taught from day one in church, but what do people mean when they say, “I believe in Jesus”?  What do I mean when I say it?  What did it mean that the woman believed in Jesus and His ability to heal her?  Well, I would have to say that I know what belief is not.  It’s not what people often mean today, which is, “I intellectually agree or acknowledge that someone or something is real.  As in, not fictional.”  Or, “I intellectually agree or acknowledge that some fact is true.”  Those things don’t necessarily change your life.

I guess what it comes down to for me is this question:  What is it that guides people’s actions?  Answer:  Belief.  Plain and simple.  What you believe determines how you live.  If you say you believe in Jesus but have no problem with cheating on your taxes, then I have to wonder what you really believe in.  Because true belief, biblical belief, will inspire righteous, ethical, moral action.  Not in a “preach the Gospel all the time and if necessary, use words” kind of way.  More in a “make your actions line up with your words like Jesus did” way.  Actions don’t speak louder than words.  Actions either confirm or betray words.  Saying you believe in Jesus and acting in a way that doesn’t reflect Him betrays your words.

That sort of dovetails nicely into what Jesus said in Mark 7 about the fact that it’s not what goes into the body which defiles it, it’s what comes from the heart.  When you speak, you’re speaking from what’s stored up in your heart, and by the same token, when you act, you’re doing the same thing.  Because God doesn’t really make a distinction between the two (which, I think, is the point James was making about faith and deeds).  We live in a world that constantly insists that you can divorce your words and actions and still be a good person.  But God will have none of that.  Seems to me that’s one of the reasons Jesus got so flaming mad at the Jewish leadership.  They were in many ways exactly like leaders today, both civil and religious, who claim to be Christians while in reality reflecting anything BUT God.  Jesus reserved His harshest words for those leaders of His day, and I’m pretty sure God hasn’t changed His mind about people like that.  Jesus quoted Isaiah and said, “Well did Isaiah prophesy of you hypocrites, as it is written, ‘This people honors Me with their lips, but their heart is far from Me.  But they worship Me in vain, teaching as doctrine the commandments of men.’”  Your actions will either confirm or betray your words and reveal what is truly in your heart.

Jesus got confronted a lot with the darkness of people’s hearts and the burden of the effects of evil in this world.  There’s a word Mark uses that on its surface doesn’t seem very comforting, but I’ve come to embrace it as one of my favorite words in the entire Gospel.  I can’t even come close to pronouncing the Greek but it’s often translated as “groan”.  When He heals the blind man in Mark 7, He looks to heaven and groans.  He knew how badly the world had been twisted and bent as a result of what Man and Woman did in Eden.  And it absolutely wrecked Him.  Looking at the suffering of His brothers and sisters produced a reaction from Him that, more than just about anything I can think of, makes me understand how deeply He felt our devastation and despair.

Paul continued with that idea when he wrote about what happens now that Jesus is back at God’s side.  In Romans 8:26, he says that when we can’t even express all that’s going on in our hearts, the Spirit pleads with God on our behalf with “groaning too deep for words.”  And yep, it’s the same word used in Mark.

I gotta say, my sister friend, on top of everything else you’re working through, it stinks like rotten eggs that you’re having to manage physical illness as well.  But if you’re ever tempted to think that God is taking a siesta while you’re over there suffering in agony, just remember that word.  Jesus well understood extreme pain and anguish, and it made Him groan.  And His Spirit is still groaning...not only for us but with us as well.

With you all the way,

Beth