Praying with icons - March 2, 2025

Jesus the healer

How can we best understand Jesus as a healer? We might begin by taking a look at the word Catholic. It comes from the Greek meaning according to the whole. To be Catholic is to be conscious of the whole and to support a way of life that leads to wholeness. That's why for early Christians, it became a a good name for themselves.

They saw themselves as a people with new wholeness in their lives with God at the center. And Jesus was the one who made things whole. His deep oneness with God empowered his sense of catholicity and awareness of belonging to the whole and the whole belonging to God. He lived out this wholeness, going all over Galilee teaching, healing. His law of love is the law of the whole.

His acts of healing expresses God's compassionate love for the wounded. He came to show us that God wants to free us from suffering, wants to make us whole. In a sense, that's what he's asking when he encounters people. What do you want me to do for you? God's desire for wholeness must be our desire for wholeness.

God always desires wholeness for us. But God cannot prevent the brokenness we experience in our lives. And it is overwhelming at times. At times, the only prayer we can offer is 'God, please do not abandon me.' And yet, with God, our brokenness can be healed.

Healing begins at the place where we hear God's voice and realize we are being held in God's embrace. Jesus never stopped listening to the Father, to trust that God was beside him, holding him, weeping with him, strengthening him. Such a faith opens us up to accepting the wounds that come about because we're trying to live love in the world. And if we can do that, we'll discover there is defeat and victory and confusion. There is new clarity.

And in every death, there is new life. But we have to surrender ourselves to being held, to open our busy heads and our shutdown hearts and our defensive and defended bodies. Jesus said, we're the light of the world. We see him as light, but not often, we fail to see that that light is in us. And it is that light, the knowledge that we are being held, that helps us to become whole.

Only when we can lay aside our fears of being abandoned can we truly answer the question God puts to all of us. Do you want to be healed? Do you want to be whole?

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