Our “I Am…” series has already been off to a wonderful start. We have explored our identity as being rescued, named, formed, and healed by God! As we move through Lent, members of Saint Luke will continue to share reflections about who we are in Christ here on our blog. These thoughtful prompts will also gather us together and lead us into a weekly time of connection on Zoom.
Sparky Lok continues our series with his reflections on being healed by God.
I Am Healed
What comes to mind when we consider Jesus’ ministry on earth? Along with preaching, teaching and miracles, healing those sick or injured in body or mind was a great part of Jesus’ ministry. Illness and early death were facts of life in first-century Palestine, and the stories of miraculous physical healing by the man from Nazareth surely helped to attract the crowds that gathered whenever He and the disciples stopped to rest. The New Testament has many accounts of Jesus restoring sight to the blind, making the crippled walk or ridding tortured souls from the demons of mental illness. We think of the ailments that Jesus healed as injuries or diseases of one kind or another.
At the base of Christian faith is the assurance that Jesus suffered and died to redeem us from sin. I confess that until this Lenten season, I had regarded Jesus’ great act of redemption as altogether separate from His acts of healing. But in my reflections this week, it seemed more and more fitting to imagine sin as a chronic, incapacitating and even fatal disease and Jesus’ sacrifice on the cross as His ultimate act of healing. Like many diseases, sin debilitates. It keeps us from being who we want to be and from acting as we should. Like Peter in Romans 7, we lament that “The good I would do, I do not, but the evil I would not, that I do.” Sick people long to be well, to be whole again and to be who they were meant to be. Viewed in that light, sin is a disease for which we desperately need healing.
Our lessons for this week refer to symbolic or sacrificial acts of atonement that saved sinners. The first takes place when the people of Israel were nearing the end of their wandering in the wilderness and their entry into the promised land. They were weary and afraid. As they often did at such times, they were grumbling and near the point of rebellion against their leader Moses and their God. In keeping with Peter’s letter to the Romans where he preaches that “the wages of sin is death”, Numbers records that God sent a plague of poisonous snakes to punish the people for their sinful rebellion, noting that many were bitten and died. Many of us share an innate dread of snakes and so this punishment, among all the trials of the Israelites, seems particularly horrifying. It must’ve been so to Moses’ followers, for they quickly repented and begged forgiveness. On hearing this, Moses had a snake of brass made and placed on a pole that was elevated so that all the people in the camp could see it. Moses told the people that they had only to look at the brazen snake and they would be healed from the fatal effects of the snake bites. As Pastor Karl would say, “And so it was”! It’s noteworthy that from antiquity to the present, the image of a snake coiled on a staff (the Aesculapion of the ancient Greeks) has become a symbol of the healing professions.
Our New Testament scripture from John 3 records Jesus’ conversion of the Pharisee Nicodemus. This passage is rich in meaning for Christians, containing as it does Jesus’ admonition that we must be born again of water and spirit and the beloved passage, John 3:16. This week we reflect on later verses where Jesus connected with Nicodemus by quoting the Torah from Numbers 21 recounting the lifting up of the brass serpent. Certainly Nicodemus would have known these passages by heart. Jesus goes on to foretell that He, the Son of Man, would also be lifted up as a means of expiating the sins of all humankind. Thus, the ancient symbol of healing was brought forward to presage Jesus on the Cross. It is searing in this light to imagine the scene recorded in John 19 where the little group of mourners clustered around the foot of the cross have their eyes upturned to Jesus, who is lifted above them. How right it seems then to regard Jesus sacrifice as His ultimate act of healing. Through this we are truly “Healed from Sin”.
My faith looks up to thee, thou Lamb of Calvary, Savior divine:
now hear me while I pray, take all my guilt away,
O let me from this day be wholly thine. Amen
PONDER & SHARE
To whom do you look up for healing?