It seems that we receive good news on the medical front almost every day. Did you know that fewer men are dying of heart attacks today, particularly young men? It appears that our concerns about exercise, diet, and cigarette smoking are beginning to pay off. I know that there are some of us will never give up our bad habits. We identify with Robert Maynard Hutchins who wrote:
"I never run when I can walk.
I never walk when I can stand still.
I never stand when I can sit down.
I never sit when I can lie down.
Whenever I feel the urge to exercise,
I lie down until it goes away."
There may come a day in the future that the only illnesses we need to face will be self-induced. It has already been estimated that a majority of illnesses today fall into that category. That is why our current scripture lesson will never be out of date. There is a healing far more powerful than the wonders of modern medicine, and it is a healing of which we all stand in need.
In today's lesson we find a woman who had suffered with a blood disorder for 12 years. That is the way she is introduced to us. We know nothing about her background or social status. But that is the way it was with Jesus. We are told that the German Philosopher Nietzsche hated Christianity for encouraging kindness. He accused Christian love of draining strong people by making them kind, causing them to waste their energies on lepers, cripples, and oppressed people. If we were to rid the world of faith in the Christ, and thus of love, said Nietzsche, we might once again produce supermen. The strong would get stronger and the weak would die out. (1) Of course, it was Nietzche who influenced Hitler.
Thank God, Nietzsche is now dead. But some of his hard-hearted followers are still around. I know the issue is complicated, but doesn't it hurt when you hear of someone who was denied help at a hospital just because they were poor?
Jesus never turned away anyone who needed help. He certainly did not turn away this poor woman with the blood disease.
I like what Mark says next about her. In the King James translation it reads like this: "And (she) had suffered many things of many physicians. . ." I'll bet she did! Can you imagine the primitive state of medicine in those days? But these next words sound all too modern: ". . .and had spent all she had. . ." Medicine has always been expensive. But the physicians had only lightened her purse, not her misery: ". . .and (she) was nothing bettered but rather grew worse."
And so she came to Jesus. She was too humble or too timid or perhaps too ashamed to come to Him directly. But she thought to herself, "If I can only touch the hem of His garment, I shall be made whole." Now isn't that a beautiful statement of faith? Jesus thought so, because after she touched His garment and felt the healing take place within her, Jesus confronted her and said, "Daughter, thy faith hath made thee whole; go in peace, and be whole of thy plague."
I like the way Jesus calls her "daughter." Maybe part of her healing was the recognition of her worth as a child of God. I suspect that many of us today suffer needlessly because we do not know who we are or whose we are.
When we talk about God's healing power, there are three important truths that we have to understand.
First is that sickness is not God's will. Henry B. Getz has an interesting argument that it must be God's will for us to be well. He says that if we accept, as some people claim, that "it is God's will that I be sick," or whatever, and if we want to do God's Will, then why would we ever consult a doctor, or take medicine, or pray to be healed?
Isn't that be seeking to thwart God's will?
The God that we know through Jesus Christ does not willingly afflict His children. Furthermore, there is not one single instance in all the gospel accounts where Jesus told someone that their illness was the will of God. Nor is there even one case where Jesus refused to heal someone by suggesting that illness would strengthen their character. So, God must mean for us to be healthy. (2)
In his book Dynamic Imaging, Dr. Norman Vincent Peale puts it another way. He says that the topic of our health always reminds him of something an airline pilot said while visiting with the passengers during a flight. Peale had told him that he was amazed by how such a big and heavy object like the plane managed to stay in the air. But the pilot said that it really wasn't amazing at all, since it is an airplane's nature to stay in the air. They are designed that way. In fact, it is very hard for a plane not to stay up in the air.
Dr. Peale says that God has put us together that way, too. We are meant to be healthy, energetic, creative, and dynamic people at every age, full of vitality and health.
I believe that we must start here, with the understanding that God's will is for us to enjoy good health. But there is a second truth that is becoming more obvious to men and women in medicine all the time. That truth is simply that there are mental, emotional, and spiritual elements to healing, as well as the physical element.
There is an old story about a man who was deathly ill in a great hospital. The doctors told him that they could not diagnose his ailment, but thought that if they could diagnose it, they could probably cure him. There was hope, though. A great doctor was visiting the hospital and was an expert at diagnosing unusual diseases, so he would examine the man.
The great doctor arrived, and examined the man carefully. He read the charts and performed some tests. When he was finished he turned to one of the other attending physicians and said simply, "Moribundus," which is another way of saying, "dying." But the man made a spectacular recovery. He lived. You see, he didn't know that "Moribundus" meant dying. He just thought that they had finally diagnosed his disease. And, after all, they had told him that if they could diagnose it, they could cure him. So with that one word to hold on to, he battled his ailment and won.
You are probably thinking that it can't be that easy. And usually isn't. But such phenomena happen often enough that we should never give up hope.
In 1964, a researcher named Greenblatt described a patient suffering from advanced cancer who was admitted to the hospital on the verge of death. He had heard that the drug Krebiozen might be a wonder drug, though, and it was given to him in the hospital. His improvement was dramatic, and after a short stay in the hospital he was discharged and sent home. But then the man read a report that Krebiozen was probably ineffective, and he suffered a severe relapse. He returned to the hospital where the physicians restored his faith in Krebiozen, and he was given a number of injections. But the injections that he received were not Krebiozen at all, but a simple saline solution. However, he once again improved sufficiently to be discharged. Finally, though, he was exposed to the information that the American Medical Association denied completely the value of Krebiozen. He lost all hope, was readmitted to the hospital, and died within 48 hours.
Jesus said to the woman with the blood problem, "Daughter, your faith has made you well." Who could deny the truth of that proposition? The great missionary physician Dr. Albert Schweitzer phrased it this way.
"The witch doctor succeeds for the same reason that all other doctors succeed. Each patient carries his own doctor inside him. But they come to the doctor not knowing that truth. Human doctors are best when they give the doctor who resides within each patient a chance to go to work."
A physician resides within all our bodies. I don't want to mislead anyone, because there is a lot more to healing than simply willing yourself to be well. But your mental/spiritual/emotional makeup is certainly an important factor in healing.
Therefore, we can easily see how important our relationship to Jesus Christ may be to good health.
For example, Dr. Carl Simonton has studied the combination of traits that make some people especially vulnerable to disease. Simonton listed these characteristics as, "First, a great tendency to hold resentment and marked inability to forgive; second, a tendency to self-pity; third, a poor ability to develop and maintain meaningful, long-term relationships; and fourth, a very poor self-image." Simonton maintains that these negative emotions make us prone to disease. He also says that malignancy is simply despair expressed biologically. In other words, it is despair at the level of the cell. (4)
Resentment, self-pity, and a poor self-image. That sounds a lot like a person without Christ. Jesus told the woman to go in peace. Inner peace is critical to both prevention and healing.
Beyond prevention, however, there is also prayer. Some of you know what it's like to reach out and touch the hem of His garment. You want to know that it is more than simply mind over matter. You believe that there is help available beyond the power of both your inner physician and your outer physician. You long for the healing touch of the great physician. A careful reading of the scriptures, as well as the testimony of people who have experienced such healing, cry out to us that His help is indeed available. Ours is a healing God.
We cannot know, and we cannot understand, all the elements involved in the healing process. But we do believe that God's will is for health. We believe that healing is a mental/emotional/spiritual process, as well as a physical one. We know from scripture and experience that our relationship with Jesus Christ can play an important role in both the prevention and the cure of disease.
(1) Lewis B. Smedes, Love Within Limits, (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1978).
(2) Sharing"”A Journal of Christian Healing, "A Case for Christian Healing," January 1985, pp. 15-17.
(3) Robert Rosenthal and Lenore Jacobson, Pygmalion in the Classroom, (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Inc., 1968).
(4) Bruce Larson, There is a Lot More to Health Than Not Being Sick, pp. 138-139.