“He took our infirmities and bore our diseases.” (Isaiah 53:4)

In 1917 during the Bolshevik Revolution a painting by the artist known to us as Rembrandt called “Christ with Arms Folded” was confiscated from the home of Russian Count Alexander Orloff Davidoff of Petrograd. Ten years later, the painting was again stolen from the Pushkin State Museum in Moscow and ruthlessly vandalized, slashing and scarring the canvas. The painting remained missing for four years before it was found buried in a sealed can with other stolen art in 1931. In 1933 Louis and Charlotte Hyde, founders of The Hyde Collection, purchased the Rembrandt painting and brought it to their Glens Falls home. Despite its dust, dirt, and slashed canvas, the painting, as seen above, was beautifully restored.**

Restoring a painting is often a painstaking process. It takes patience, skill, and much love. Paint and canvas can suffer from decay, aging, dirt, grime, disintegration, and a white haze called “bloom” from being stored in damp conditions. While a restorer can remove dirt, touch up paint, and re-sew canvas, the painting never appears exactly as it was in its original conception. But it can be restored into a new and even more beautiful form that honors the original.^

This is the secret of restoration. Restoration is not just a skill but an artistic endeavor. It requires an artisan’s hand, an artisan's eye, and an artist’s heart.

So, some would say, do the “medical arts.” The best doctors are not just those who have become experts in learning the book knowledge of their field, but those who in practice have learned the “skill” of diagnosis and the “art” of healing, of restoring people to health, wholeness, and often, to life. In fact, one could say that the primary difference between a mere “physician” and a “healer” is that the one treats, but the other restores. One treats ailments, but the other restores life. True healers know that health and wholeness come from healing the whole person –body, mind, and spirit. That’s why the best hospitals employ chaplains, psychologists, sociologists, even hairdressers to work in teams on behalf of a patient engaged in “restoration” of health.

Restoration is in many ways a learning process. One never travels backward to one’s original condition in one’s journey from illness to health, but one is “restored” into a new and different condition, often having experienced and learned much along the way about the meaning of health, wellness, faith, and life.

Those of you who have survived difficult illnesses know what I mean by that.

Restoration is re-creation. It means restoring a person into a state of new and improved “wholeness.”

In the case of Hezekiah’s illness, as we read in our scripture for today, health and wholeness were restored for 15 years. The “clock” was re-set, and Hezekiah was gifted another 15 years of physical life. But his restoration was not just physical. Not only was he healed of his illness, Hezekiah was also healed in faith and in spirit, as his song of praise attests. Hezekiah’s spirit is lifted into a song of joy. And his faith is renewed and restored in the God of his ancestors.

Hezekiah was not promised an eternal life on earth. He was not promised that he would never die. He was promised an additional course in this life, in order that God might be praised and revealed through him!
A similar story appears in Jesus’ healing of Peter’s mother in law. In the gospel text, we read the following:

4 When Jesus entered Peter’s house, he saw his mother-in-law lying in bed with a fever; 15 he touched her hand, and the fever left her, and she got up and began to serve him. 16 That evening they brought to him many who were possessed with demons; and he cast out the spirits with a word and cured all who were sick. 17 This was to fulfill what had been spoken through the prophet Isaiah, “He took our infirmities and bore our diseases.” (Matthew 8:14-17)

In this short passage from the gospel of Matthew, we learn that after being healed of her illness, the first thing that Peter’s mother in law does is to begin “serving” Jesus. The result of the kind of healing that Jesus effects on us is joy, worship, praise, and service! For Jesus’ healing is not just physical healing, but a healing of mind, body, and spirit. It is a “restoration” into covenant with God, a restoration of relationship, in which we understand intrinsically and intuitively, instinctively and undeniably, that Jesus is our Savior, the Healer of our EVERY ill, as the famous hymn goes.

Illness, pain, doubt, death are all states of separation from the wholeness that God promises us, not just physically, but spiritually and emotionally. When we are in pain, when we are ill, when we are facing the worst times of our lives –these are the times when our faith is most challenged. And it’s the time that we need Jesus the most to “heal” our fissures, to "heal" our doubts, and "to heal" our fears, so that we might be restored in faith, and prepared to rise up and praise God with our loudest and most passionate voice.

In every healing story in the scriptures, healing is followed by praise to God, and a revelation of God as our ultimate healer and restorer. And the ultimate in restoration is the restoring of God’s people in relationship and in faith with God our creator.

The word used in Greek for health and healing in the scriptures is “soteria” (salvation in Latin). The word is a rich one, meaning not only health and healing, but also restoration, and saving. For to be healed is to be saved. To be saved is to be restored.^^ In the first translation of the Greek into English, William Tyndale translated what Jesus did for us on the cross, not as "salvation" but as "healing."

In Hebrew that word takes on even greater meaning. For the word for health, healing, restoration, and saving in the Hebrew translation of soteria?

“Yeshuah.” The very name given to Jesus (Yeshuah), Son of God, and great Physician. Restorer of covenant and gifter of eternal life.

Yet unlike the story of Hezekiah, Jesus does not just treat the symptoms of our sin, our doubt, our pain. He does not just lift us up into a temporary state of physical reprieve. But Jesus offers us the ultimate in healing and restoration –Eternal Life. Jesus does not seek merely to return us to our former state of health, but He saves us and restores us to the way God made us.  In Him, we enter into a new and restored kind of condition, in which we are new and improved, re-formed and re-created into the beautiful creature God designed us to be.

In Him and through Him, the original image of God in us is restored, and our spirit redeemed.

Jesus is the Supreme Artisan of Restoration. Yeshuah is the great Artist of Life and Master of Miracles.

In the painting by Rembrandt, Jesus stands looking at us with arms folded meaningfully across his chest. His expression described as accessible yet enigmatic, Jesus appears here as Divine Healer, with the power of God within him to heal and to save. By placing his hands upon both heart and lungs, Jesus reminds us that He is restorer of our heart, and breather of our Holy Breath.

He embodies both the Mystery of Life and yet the compassion of a God who walks beside us, puts hands upon us, and seeks to be with us in a kind of intimate and loving relationship that defies all human logic.

And no matter how tattered our image of Jesus may become, no matter how we discard him, tear him down, or disdain him….no matter how sin-stained or dirt-soiled our lives can become, Jesus can restore us.

In and through our restoration, He will live forever. His beauty will be ageless and timeless, and through His image, God’s grace, eternally and hauntingly real.

Can you hear those words like never before?

"I am the Lord who Heals you." (Exodus 15:26)

*Painting by Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn, “Christ with Arms Folded,” 1657.

**”Hyde Collection’s Rembrandt Has Colorful History” by Doug Gruse, The Post Star, May 18, 2014.

^For information on restoration, see www.oldworldrestorations.com and www.theconservationcenter.org.

^^See Strongs #3444 Yeshuah (rescue, restoration, health, saving health)

Based on the Story Lectionary

Major Text

Hezekiah’s Illness (Isaiah 38)

This Week’s Passage Emphasizes Jesus’ Healing of Peter’s Mother in Law (Matthew 8:14-17)

Minor Text

I Am the Lord Who Heals You (Exodus 15:26)

I Will Take All Sickness Away from You (Deuteronomy 7;15)

The Suffering Servant (Isaiah 53)

The Promise of Healing (Isaiah 40)

Jesus’ (God’s) Mission of Healing and Restoration that HE Would Declare in Nazareth (Isaiah 61)

Healing (Proverbs 3:7-8)

Psalm 103: Healing and Restoration

Psalm 118: Restoration

Jesus Begins his Ministry in Capernaum, and then Teaches and Heals Throughout Galilee (Matthew 4:23-7:28; through 8:23).

Jesus Begins His MInistry in Capernaum Teaching in Synagogues and Rebuking Unclean Spirits. He Heals Peter’s Mother in Law and then Continues His Ministry Throughout Galilee (Mark 1:29-39)

Jesus Begins His Ministry in Capernaum, Heals Peter’s Mother in Law, and then Continues His ministry Though the Synagogues in Judea (Luke 4:31-44)

Jesus Begins His Ministry in Capernaum (John 2:12)

Peter Heals and Proclaim Restoration (Acts 3)