Christ the Healer

1990 (Year A), 28 January /
Epiphany 4

St Peter de Beauvoir Town

The privileged position occupied by the clergy means that we are given access to a great number of lives and once there we are often admitted to those very private parts of life that are normally kept secret from all but the most trusted of our friends.

Soon, even if we’re only half sensitive we become adept at recognising words which are being used as codes for something else and seeing things which are only half said. In this way, we are aware of the joys and aspirations of many people here. We know also, only too painfully, the hardships and suffering present for so many others.

The joys and aspirations are relatively easy to cope with, we can bask in them. But in the face of suffering my insides begin to shake – and I would rather run away from the appalling forms of violence some have to endure. In the face of death, I just collapse inwardly. Increasingly, it seems to me, there are fewer and fewer words to say mostly there is just silence.

There is nothing harder for any of us to deal with in our lives than suffering. My mother used to cope with my suffering when I complained about the holes in my shoes by telling me ‘Just be thankful you’ve got feet’. That was supposed to make me feel better. Bring healing. ‘Just be thankful,’ she would say, ‘There are people much worse off than you’. Such words struck me as stupid then – I find it shocking that I can catch myself saying the same things now to my children.

We do not know why some people endure so much, whilst others have so little and why a few, but only a few, for no apparent reason are healed.

Christ the Healer, is the theme for today – Christ the healer. There is no doubt some are made well and some relationships are mended, but for the vast majority this is not so. Why doesn’t Christ heal them all – why does God let any of it happen? Part of every suffering contains some railing at the cause, more often than not people think that it’s God. They are angry either for letting it happen or not stopping it. I’ve felt some of it this week as Terry Welch died, Beryl and the rest of Terry’s family must surely have done so too. It has always been the same ‘My God, My God, why have your forsaken me; why are you so far from helping me and from the words of my groaning? My God, I cry to you by day but you do not answer and by night also I take no rest. That’s what one of the people who wrote some of the Psalms had to say all those years ago and it hasn’t changed one bit since then.

Those who do try to offer words of comfort do so in most peculiar ways – ‘Look on the bright side they say, every cloud has a silver lining’ – ‘All you have to do is have faith then things will soon get better’. Such platitudes rightly cause anger, for they bring yet more pain whilst at the same time denying the reality of the pain presently being endured.

St Paul in his own inimitable way has this to say – it’s one of the sentences which can be read out at a funeral service. ‘I am sure that neither death nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, not things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, not anything else in creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord’. These are not cheap words spoken simply to make us feel better – they speak of fundamental things. There is nothing, absolutely nothing at all, not even death, which in the end can separate us from God for our end is God, and in him there is wholeness.

Even the cross, with all its pain and suffering was not the end. The end was and is God and in God there is resurrection, and in him there is life. The pain of the cross was endured right up to and through death – it wasn’t taken miraculously away – but there was and there is, resurrection.

Thanks be to God who does bring healing, for everyone of us has need of it. It may not be in the way we either want or expect but it will come. It is a most gracious gift of the Divine. It may not mean that we will all be physically well. But it does mean that no matter what may happen ultimately we can never be separated from God. AMEN