Leadership Journal

When I was a child, my teachers in the faith said that the healing stories of Jesus were merely attempts to illustrate "deeper" spiritual truths. Various diseases and physical debilities, I heard, were merely pictures of sin, and the Lord addressed them only because he wanted to highlight the awfulness of sin and his power to overcome it.

When I began to grow in my appreciation of Jesus, I grasped a bigger idea: that the incarnate Christ was not only attuned to humanity's sin problem but was remarkably sensitive to the physical and social issues he faced on the streets every day of his public life. For him, it was not either-or, but both-and. He not only hated sin; he hated human suffering.

Aware that I do not write with the exactitude of a professional theologian, let me say what's on my mind this way: in his day and within the limits of his earthly mission, our Lord did far more than simply engage the spiritually curious. He had an eye for the physically desperate, and he left a stream of healed people in his path. It occurs also to me that what he did was without preconditions. Healing was in his nature. In other words, he didn't say, "I will heal if you join my movement, or get a job, or send me a monthly check." He healed not to illustrate a spiritual principle but because he is by nature a healer. In so doing, he appears to have said that a truly converted person looks at the world through the eyes of a healer.

Throughout history, this healing idea has been the trademark of the Christian movement: bring to the human predicament whatever resources you have, be it a scalpel or five breadsticks and two fish. Thus, a marvelous tradition of Christian healers and comforters whose love and respect for humanity has led them to care even at the risk of death.

In his thoughtful book, The Rise of Christianity, Rodney Stark claims that the secret of expansion in Christianity's earliest days is explained far more by the sacrificial care that followers of Christ demonstrated in crisis moments for their neighbors than all the words that were preached. In more recent times, similarly caring Christians have employed the resources of modern medicine and healing technique to convey Christ's love to the world. The global network of hospitals, clinics, missionary doctors, nurses, and care-givers has been a remarkable part of Christian history. Century after century we have tried to be a people who, like Jesus, believe in bringing to the human situation whatever we have: prayer, loving presence, generosity, education, medicine. Often this has resulted in people going on to discover the Christ who redeems and offers eternal life.

All of this, then, makes me curious as to why my people (the Evangelicals) seem so quiet in the debate on health-care and why the matter has been (fatally?) abandoned to the politicians and those who have a financial position in the matter. Isn't the national discussion on health-care simply an enlargement of the act of helping needy people to find healing?

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