If you were to place the world and the human beings in it on a doctor’s examination table, you would soon realize through that examination that there are parts of that body that profoundly need healing. While the body itself might go on and while humanity might continue, there are nevertheless parts of that body that are broken and need restoring. We all know about the physical challenges of echo degradation, we know about the problems of the distinctions in the world between the rich and the poor, but there are also spiritual problems that need healing.
One of the spiritual problems that need healing is the factionalism and the violence that seems to characterize our globe. From Paris to Baga, Nigeria, to Belgium, to Germany, places that you would almost think would be Utopian in their beauty and their serenity and their history, have signs of the brokenness for all to see. In response to this, the Moderator of the United Church wrote a lovely letter, after the events in Paris, asking us to call on God for healing and for peace in the world. But, a colleague in the United Church who does not necessarily believe in God wrote a letter trying to contradict him. In her letter she suggested that it would be beneficial if all talk of religion and faith and belief was removed from the public square.
I have thought about this over the last few days, and in many ways I think that what that person proposed was like taking an ingrown toenail that is causing a lot of pain and deciding to cut off the foot and never walk again. It might seem like it solves the problem, but it doesn’t get to the heart of it at all. Indeed, the world needs healing at a profoundly spiritual level. Rather than just walking away from any talk about God or faith, it seems to me that a more rigorous, thoughtful, compassionate discussion about God is needed, for people will have their beliefs and cultures will have their identities, and there will always be those who have faith and beliefs. It is what those faiths and beliefs are, and how we relate to one another that really matters.
There is a saying in French and I have thought about it a lot over the last few days: mieux folle avec tout le monde que seuls saine – it is better to be mad with the world than to be sane alone. I think in many ways when people join hands in the midst of the insanity and madness of the world, they realize that they need each other, it is no good just being sane alone, for indeed the world doesn’t change if the sane alone do not engage in it, rather there is a need for a profound engagement with that world wherever it is fitting, and wherever it needs healing.
I draw my inspiration from our text from the Book of Acts, for this passage is a microcosm of everything that we believe. When people say, “What do Christians believe? Can you give me a short example?” I will say, “Read Acts 10!” – and this incredible passage – for there is so much here that I think helps us come to terms with who God is and what God wants to do with the world, and has done for the world. It is a story that was actually born out of a conflict between two very extreme ideas. One of them was the view of a man called Cornelius, who was a Roman. Cornelius had experienced healing and restoration in his life through the message and the power and the presence of Jesus Christ and his Holy Spirit. As a Roman, he wanted to invite followers of Jesus to his home for dinner. Peter was one of those invited, but Peter was a Jew.
As Jew, because of the dietary laws, he could not have dinner with Cornelius and so he didn’t go. But Peter changed his mind when he came face-to-face with the ministry of Jesus and thought about the ministry of Jesus. Peter declared there is no partiality in God. It doesn’t matter then if you are Jew or a Gentile, because of the ministry of Jesus Christ there is no partiality, there is no ethnic exclusion. Peter and Cornelius came together. Maybe in Peter’s mind there was the great prophet Isaiah, who in Chapter 49 of his great book said, “Maybe Jerusalem and Israel will be a light to all the nations.” Not just a light that is kept to itself, but a light that is shared.
From that moment on Peter saw the powerful mission, not only to the Jewish people from whom he had come, but also to the Gentile world. He preaches about this, and explains how this ministry of Jesus is reaching beyond the bounds of Israel. He sees it expanding. He recognizes that Jesus’ ministry has grown and emerged. From the early moments in Galilee to its movement to Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria, both the northern and the southern kingdoms were all part of the ministry of Jesus. As had been predicted in The Old Testament, God would embrace the world beyond the narrow confines of those who held to the pure faith in Jerusalem.
As this ministry expanded, Peter said there were witnesses, disciples who were called by Christ to bear witness to everything that Jesus had said and done, that moved beyond the confines of Jesus’ earthly ministry right through even to the city of Rome. In the Book of Acts, it is the story of the movement of the Gospel from Jerusalem to Rome, to the utmost parts of the earth. Peter understood then that his ministry, and that the ministry of the Church that was to follow, was to take the ministry of Jesus and to apply it to the whole world.
What did that ministry of Jesus look like? Well, it was a populist ministry. It was a ministry that was very public. It was for everyone to see. Jesus wasn’t an ascetic who sat on a mountainside and had visions; he wasn’t someone who receives a book that came down from heaven for him; he wasn’t somebody who was a philosopher who debated the philosophical tenets of the day. Jesus, to put it crudely, did stuff! Jesus lived amongst ordinary, everyday men and women. Jesus’ ministry was with the people. Jesus’ ministry was for the people. It wasn’t hidden, it wasn’t mysterious, it wasn’t speculative. It was right there in the midst of ordinary, everyday people, and Peter had witnessed this.
The more Peter reflected on the ministry of Jesus, the more he realized what a profound outreach it was into the world. It is the nature of that ministry that I think we need to recapture. We need to recapture with passion and understanding, because Peter says right here in this text that Jesus went about doing good and healing people. The great Richard Bauckham, a New Testament scholar who teaches at Cambridge University, wrote these wonderful words, and they are worth repeating:
It is evident that in these deeds of power (in other words the healings and the doing good), Jesus restored people to more than physical health, he also restored social relationships, reintegrating people into the society of God’s people, Israel. We should also remember that many of these people, the disabled, the poor, people with leprosy, the demon possessed, were barred by their conditions from the early presence in his Temple in Jerusalem. This did not put them outside the loving concern of God, but it did distance them from the symbolic heart of Israel’s special relationship with their God. Jesus’ healings worked for them an experience of the God who was reaching out to abolish that distance. In the fullest sense, these healings were holistic.
If you look at the ministry of Jesus, Bauckham is absolutely correct. Almost half of the time that Jesus was ministering, according to the Gospels, he was healing and restoring the broken: the person with the shrivelled arm, the person with dropsy, the woman who was bleeding, the lame man who was commanded to walk, the blind man who was given sight. The ministry of Jesus was a healing and a restoring ministry. It was taking that which was broken and mending it. It was putting together broken people, people who by virtue of the power of evil, by sickness, by death, were barred from the Temple, were barred from social discourse. Jesus went amongst them and he healed them, he restored them, and he brought them back to life. When others stood at a distance, Jesus was involved in their lives. Whenever Jesus was involved in someone’s life, their life was changed for the better.
The great Francis McNutt, who suggests, and rightly so, that the healing ministry of the Church has been all but forgotten, and needs to be reclaimed writes this:
Scripture teaches that the wretched human condition in which we find ourselves requires God’s healing power far beyond what we humans can obtain on our own. The belief in our need for God’s help and power is central to both the Hebrew and the Christian Scriptures. In The New Testament, we see an explosion of divine healing, as Jesus spent a major part of his time curing the sick and casting out evil spirits. Nor do the Gospels present his work of healing as incidental to Jesus’ mission. The ministry was an essential part of his work – not a sideshow! He proclaimed a new era of human history. “The Kingdom of God has come!” said Jesus. The reason the Son of God appears was to destroy evil’s work. To make this glorious dream come true, Jesus in the power of the Holy Spirit frees us from our sins, from the influence of evil, and from the sickness of body and soul, that weighs us down and prevents us from being transformed into the new creation that God destined us to become.
Powerful words! And they are accurate!
The ministry of Jesus was to show no partiality: obedience to God, yes, honour and respect and fear of God, yes, but a profound sense that this God loves and restores. So, what are we to do, and what does our psyche need to be, and, what difference can you make?
Whenever the world is in its madness, I often turn to art and artists. I do so because I think that sometimes they capture the biblical message with clarity. I was looking recently at that most magnificent piece of art, Michelangelo’s The Creation of Adam in the Sistine Chapel. I was looking at it really carefully, and I observed something. In this picture, which most of you will know, you have the character of God reaching down from heaven to a very large Adam, who is pointing up to heaven. God is in God’s glory, and under God’s arm there is a woman and children. Adam is alone, pointing upwards.
Between their fingers there is a gap. Adam is reaching out to God; God is reaching out to Adam but there is space. Sometimes, I think there are people who look at that space and emphasize one or the other of the characters above the whole. Let me explain. I think there are some people who so adore humanity that they would like to remove the hand of God from the picture, so all we have is humanity reaching up. That is what that one minister who doesn’t believe in God wants: a finger pointing nowhere from humanity in need. Then there are those who so believe in God and have such disdain for human beings that all they want is a big God reaching down, and no point of interest in the human. Those are the people who so believe in God that they feel that they can eradicate human beings to exalt him.
Yet, in that gap between a reaching humanity and a reaching God, I believe there was a bridge, and that bridge was the new Adam, that bridge was Jesus of Nazareth. Jesus of Nazareth came as God incarnate to bring humanity and God together, and to show humanity in all its needs. The compassion, and the love, and the healing of God. If that is our vision of what God is like, if that is the passion that we have for God, then is it not in the public square that we should say this? Is it not amongst everybody, regardless of their religious convictions, regardless of their ethnicity, regardless of their race, to point out the power of healing desire of God to restore the broken, not to break and crush, not to result in vengeance and anger, but to result in a healing, restoring power of the Almighty.
God reached down to Adam and created out of love. Adam reached out to God in need, and God answered in his Son. I think in his Son we have so much to hold on to. For what can we do? Can we travel to the utmost parts of the earth and change the minds of those who have views other than our own? Probably not! Can we exact any meaningful powerful change in the movement? Probably not! But there are things we can do and this is why Peter told the story. He told the story because he believed with all his heart and mind, every Christian is ultimately a disciple, and if we are going to follow Jesus at all, if he is going to mean anything to us at all, in all our relationships with anybody, it is that healing and that restoring word and power that needs to be seen. It is no point pointing to him as the Saviour of the world if we ourselves do not embrace the world through the grace of that Saviour.
It doesn’t matter what the relationship is. In our city that is so multicultural, so multi-faceted, crosses so many lines, is it not in this city we can bear witness to what it is that we actually believe? Is that not healing? Is that not restoring? Is that not being a follower of Christ? If in the end, when we feel completely powerless to change, do we not as our Moderator rightly says, have one thing that is so great and so powerful that I am sure we don’t fathom its greatness? Is it not for us, who truly believe in this Jesus, to pray for the healing of the world? Rather than take those prayers and put them in a closet or in a drawer or confine them to places like this place of worship, should we not take that prayer and make it applicable everywhere? For the prayer that we find is the prayer of the life of Jesus that healed the broken, and gave sight to the blind. He forgave his enemy, loved the loveless, and gave himself on the Cross for us. He is the one in whose name we pray. Amen.