[AI translation] In recent times, all over the world, including in our own country, the Church has become increasingly preoccupied with one issue: the question of sickness and healing. In this connection, certain sects and fanciful ideas are gaining a foothold among believers, opinions and teachings that are contrary to biblical revelation. Although I spoke about the same problem here a few years ago, now is a good time, on this Old and Sick Sunday, to look at what God's Word says about sickness and recovery from sickness.1) The common human understanding is that health is a natural condition and sickness is an unnatural condition of man. But from the point of view of faith, we must see it the other way round, that is, that sickness is the natural state, the natural state of man who has fallen into sin! Thus it is written, "The wages of sin is death!" And Jesus was not saved from physical death. So sickness is the germ of bodily death in man. In every sickness the greatest sickness is death in some way. Every sickness is a warning that we are mortal, and every cure is in fact a prolongation of the great debt we owe: death. Someone once put it this way: a sick man is a man addressed by death! In other words, we are what we always are, only we forget it when we are healthy. So, through sickness, the Lord is warning us that life on earth is short, that we have no city to stay in, but that we are looking for the future.
Moreover, sickness is not only an announcement, a knock on the door of impending death, but also a sign of death already present and at work in man. It is a kind of expression of the source of all sickness: the fact that our life has been torn from its vital ground, from communion with God, from its state of perfection. Disease is therefore not only a biological process, not only a structural and organisational disturbance in the body - but a sign pointing to a deeper metaphysical disturbance, to the fact that man is existentially sick, depraved, sinful! So there is a link between sin and disease. But of course, we should never understand this in the sense that if someone has, for example, a child-paralysis, we start looking for the cause, the specific sin that caused the illness. Jesus Himself rejects this kind of search for a connection when He says of the man born blind: "Neither he sinned, nor his parents, but that the things of God might be made manifest in him." It is not, therefore, such a connection between sin and sickness, but, because human existence is separated from God, the living root, by sin, its whole nature is consequently confused. That is why I said that man's natural state is sickness, and a mortal sickness at that, because man is mortal because of sin, because he has in him the necessity of death, of dying. Being human and being sick are two things that cannot be separated. It is only God's all-embracing and all-pervasive universal grace that restrains death - hence the existence of relative health among men on earth. So we must first see this clearly.
2) Since there is such a connection between sickness and sin, it follows that there is a connection between salvation from sin and healing from sickness. This is why it is that around the person of Jesus, who came to redeem from sin and its consequences, sick people were healed one after another. In the person of Jesus was centered the kingdom of God, which is nothing less than the restoration of what sin has corrupted. That is why the power of Satan and death flee from Jesus - that is why many have been healed - because in the coming kingdom of God, where the powers of redemption are fulfilled, there will be no more sin, sickness and death. The healing of the body must therefore be seen as a sign, a promise of the redemption, the full redemption, which will be completed in creation with the second coming of Jesus.
The healing of the body is therefore a sign, a promise of the coming redemption of our bodies. It is not the final redemption of the body, since even after the most miraculous healing a person can fall ill again, and even a healed person must die of something at some point. Jesus may have conquered death, he has power over it - as the resurrection of Lazarus and his own resurrection prove - but he has not yet destroyed it. So here we are still living in the shadow of death, even though the light of the resurrection is already shining through. In any case, in the recovery from an illness, there is already at work that redemptive power which will finally triumph over death! This means, in practice, that every healing is a miracle, a miracle of the grace that has been made manifest for us in Jesus. For it was He "who bore our sicknesses, who carried our sorrows, by whose wounds we are healed". And this is true even when healing is not by faith. The saving power of Jesus not only works in, by and through believers in Him in this world, but also reaches out to those who do not follow Him. So Jesus' redemptive power works even when the medicine the doctor recommends works. In other words, all healing is a miracle, part of the one miracle that Jesus is in this world, that is, God's mercy on oppressed, broken human life. Every healing is a sign of God's redemptive power at work in the world. It is not the doctor who heals, nor the medicine, just as it is not prayer or faith that heals, but God! The doctor, the medicine, prayer and faith are only the means through which God reaches out to work His power in our powerlessness. A
Christian patient sees the doctor and the medicine as God's instrument in His healing work. That is why he does not run from doctor to doctor, but accepts God's healing gift from the doctor whom he has accepted in faith as God's instrument.
Of course, it can also happen that someone - not out of contempt for medicine, but in the certainty of God's omnipotence - renounces direct recourse to medical science and waits and asks God directly for healing. But if he does this truly out of faith, he does not call unbelievers those who do not do so. No, for he who truly acts by faith knows that bodily healing is only temporary and secondary to the one need. It is a gift, but where the gift is over-emphasized alongside the Giver, one quickly goes astray.
3) This is also clear from the instruction that the Apostle James gives to the churches in case one of them falls ill. "Is there any sick among you? Call for the elders of the church, and let them pray over him, anointing him with oil in the name of the Lord." In other words, sickness should not be a private matter for the sick person, but a matter for the church. "Who is sick, that I also am not sick?" says the Apostle Paul. In the church "if one member suffers, all the members suffer with him". In sickness, the believer is usually under the strongest temptations, and it is necessary that the church should be with him for his strengthening. The sick person should not be left alone, the church should surround him with prayer, help him to ask the Lord for his strength, help him to believe in the Lord. That is why the apostle says to pray over the sick. But here again we must be careful: it is not that prayer is some good method, or cure, or spiritual means by which man can influence God, doing with him what he wishes. Prayer for the sick is not magic, not a reading, but a faithful seeking and happy finding of God's will. It is an immersion in the hand that gives grace, and also has the power to help the sick, to give help to the suffering person. It is easily possible that this help will be greater than bodily healing: perhaps the soul will have such fellowship with the Lord that, in spite of the patient's bodily suffering, he will be more to the glory of the Lord than if he were healed.
Indeed, this is very often the case, that is to say, that God does not want to glorify Himself through healing, but through sickness; He wants to make sickness a source of blessing both for the sick person and for those around him. I have said that all healing is a miracle, but it is an even greater miracle when, in sickness, the human soul is formed into a unity of will with the will of God. It is a great thing when a man is healed, but it is even greater when in his suffering he can lean on the Father's hand with the obedient child's love and say, "Thy will be done." It is a greater thing still when the words of the confession of faith are uttered with precious confidence, "In life and in death I am the property of my faithful Lord Jesus Christ." It is a greater miracle to accept suffering with the humility of faith than to clamour for healing with the miraculous expectation of doubt! It is a greater thing if one can say, "But even if he does not..." (Dan 3:18a) This is also the meaning of the Apostle James' saying to anoint the sick with oil. According to the Scriptures, oil always meant an anointing for service, a consecration to God. So the anointing with oil was a sign that the sick person, whether by his healing, his sickness or his death, was to proclaim the goodness and glory of God!
For the greatest miracle in this world is Jesus Himself, His person and all that He represents: the bending of God's love, the miracle of the forgiveness of sins, the miracle of redemption. Spiritual healing through the forgiveness of sins is always of greater value than being able to walk the paths of life on earth a few years longer. And that is why Jesus came into this world in the first place: to reconcile us to God. He came to bear God's wrath for us, to take away the burden of our sins, so that we might stand before the judgment seat of God as righteous in the grace of forgiveness! This is the supreme gift of God to sinful man. That is why Jesus died, rose from the dead! This is the one necessary thing: a life reconciled to God for the sacrifice of Christ. What good is it if a man dies healed and whole in the judgment? But if he has received forgiveness of sins, he can receive no more and no greater. And if he receives healing on top of that, that is really just extra! The Lord can heal anyone physically, because he has the power to do so, but then it is not the physical healing that is the main goal, but what James says: "And even if he has sinned, he is forgiven."
So the real help - whether healing happens or not - is where a relationship with Jesus is established. And that is where we can help our sick brothers and sisters. Our love and prayer must be such that it almost expresses, visibly and tangibly, the contact between the Lord and the sick person. And would that the Lord Himself would teach us now to love and pray in such a way that our brethren, who cannot be with us because of illness or infirmity of old age, may feel the forgiving, comforting powers of Jesus and thank the Lord of Life with us!
Amen!
Date: 16 June 1962 Old and Sick Sunday
Lesson
Jn 9,1-7