Miracle Working Faith (Midweek Message)

Jesus heals a leper, Rembrandt pen and ink drawing c. 1655-60
Amsterdam, Rijksprentenkabinet

Miracle Working Faith

Fr. Tony’s Midweek Message

August 8, 2018

One of the major parts of Jesus’ ministry was healing, whether of mind or of body. In the story of Jesus healing the leper, we see him pursuing this call even as he approaches and engages the ritually unclean. The gospel stories of Jesus healing the sick tell us that the ultimate purpose of God does not include disease, suffering, and death. Jesus’ ministry of announcing the in-breaking of the reign of God focused in large part in healing physical and mental suffering. This tells us that God doesn’t intend such ills or like horror and disappointment for us any more than we do.  But does this mean that all we have to do is pray and have faith, and we too will automatically have healings? No it does not. That is not the world we live in. 

Several times in my life I have wished that the world were as simple as what I was taught in Sunday School: pray with faith and God will grant it.  Despite prayers and fasting, dear friends in college lost their newborn son to a horrible genetic illness; my wife’s mother died of cancer; my father died from Alzheimer’s disease.  Yet I have also seen prayers answered in wonderful and miraculous ways, sometimes quickly, sometimes gradually: a deadly disease stopped in its tracks and healed, broken relationships mended and strengthened, mental illness managed. I am sure that most of you have had similar experience where we have seen or suffered great pain, but also seen miraculous alleviation of pain. But it is not a simple mathematical formula. 

The former Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, talks about this in his book Tokens of Trust: An Introduction to Christian Belief (Louisville / London: Westminster John Knox Press, 2007). I found what he has to say on this subject very helpful. It coheres with my experience both of prays answered and prayers seemingly rejected. 

Rowan says that God’s ultimate purpose does not include disease, insanity, and death. Yet unfortunately the world as it is currently constituted does include these things that oppose God’s ultimate purpose. Citing St. Augustine, Rowan notes that the miracles of the Bible are most often simply the natural processes sped up a bit. Jesus turns water into wine—but this recapitulates a natural process where water, sunshine, grape vines, given enough time, produce grapes, then juice, then wine. Miracles are not so much the supernatural overturning the natural, but rather when God’s ultimate intentions break into our current time frame. We cannot force this, or expect it as a matter of course—we are talking about miracles here, not magic. This is about the Lord’s book of blessings, not a book of spells.  But we can perhaps do things that make it just a little easier for God’s ultimate purposes to have their way now. 

“God is always at work, but that work is not always visible. God is always at work, but sometimes the world’s processes go with the grain of his final purpose and sometimes they resist. But if certain things came together in the world at this or that moment, the ‘flow’ would be easier and more direct. Perhaps a really intense prayer or a really holy life can open the world up that bit more to God’s purpose so that unexpected things happen. We’re never going to have a complete picture on how that works, because we don’t have God’s perspective on it all. But we can say that there are some things we can think, say or do that seem to give God that extra ‘freedom of manoeuvre’ in our universe. And whether we fully understand what’s going on or not, we know that it’s incumbent on us to do what we can to let this happen. We pray, we act in ways that have some chance of shaping a situation so that God can come more directly in. It isn’t a process we can manipulate; miracles aren’t magic, and we could never have a comprehensive manual of techniques for securing what we pray for. It would be very comforting if we knew the formula for success, but we don’t. All we know is that we are called to pray, to trust and to live with integrity before God (to live ‘holy’ lives) in such a way as to leave the door open, to let things come together so that love can come through.” (p. 45) 

Jesus showed us the path here. He healed lepers, disregarding purity rules in the interest of helping others.  He teaches us to pray and to serve.  We need to reach out to others and see the people in front of us first and foremost as people. We are called to help broken people, and—truth be told—often broken people’s lives are messy and ridden with uncomfortable amounts of drama.  We need not fear contamination or condemnation, or be put off by disorder or bad smells.   We should amend our ways when we oppress others, and work to overcome all forms of such abuse of God’s creatures. We should pray, sometimes fast, and work to make the world and our lives a little more congruent with what God’s ultimate purposes are. For what God wants for all of us is good indeed.

Grace and Peace,

Fr. Tony+

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