A HISTORY OF SIN AND HEALING

HISTORY OF SIN AND HEALING

By The Reverend Canon Gerald Loweth

Homily, Feast of St. Luke

St. James Cathedral, Toronto, Ontario

October 16, 2005

It has become a custom to celebrate the church's ministry of healing on a Sunday near the Feast of St. Luke. Luke's writings, both the Gospel and the Book Of Acts, are rife with references to healing, first by Jesus and later by the early apostles. At a time like this, it is worth while to look again at the story of that ministry. For some people, the revival of the healing ministry is like some form of "new age," another fad. But it is not a new quirk. It was there in the beginning.

We begin not with the life and work of Jesus, but with the Old Testament. Perhaps the shining light in the Hebrew scriptures is the work of Elijah and Elisha and their healings, especially the child of the Shunamite woman. However, there is another notion about illness which permeates these scriptures. It is the notion that illness is God's punishment; that it is the result of breaking moral and religious codes. It is the punishment for sin. And this notion has always plagued the ministry of healing. One example is from the story of Miriam, Moses' sister. Because she had doubted and slandered her brother Moses, she was stricken with leprosy (Nu 2:10). When the Israelites in the long desert journey became gluttonous, God sent a plague (11:33). For other transgressions, God sent an "an itch for which there is no cure."

That's the dark side of the Old Testament readings on illness. On the bright side, in Ecclesiasticus, part of the Anglican Bible, we have the wonderful description of God at work through physicians and medicines. This was consistent in the secular world at that time. Medicine was alive in fourth century Greece B.C. through physicians such as Hippocrates.

When we come to the Gospels and the life and work of Jesus, the ministry of healing is a major part of that story. Healing covers about one fifth of the narrative. And Jesus healed all manner of diseases, as you know. But just as important, He healed all manner of people. This was a class-conscious society. The rich, the upper-crust, were supposedly blessed by God and would be more receptive to healing. That's what they thought. But Jesus reached to the bottom of the social heap and healed beggars. Leprosy was a scourge which left its victims with grotesque deformities as social outcasts. It was, in the minds of many, God's curse. You were forbidden to touch them. But Jesus touched them and healed them. It was a racist society, and the Samaritans were an especially despised lot. But he healed Samaritans also. Women were second class citizens, but they got healed. He was asked about that constant claim that illness is the result of sin. The issue was raised at a pool in Jerusalem over the case of a man born blind. "But there is no way that sin could have caused this," Jesus said. It was so that God's work could be done. He healed the man. He put an end to the notion that we are sick because we have sinned! Yet, as we shall see, the notion did not die. But Jesus broke with social and religious prejudices, the same prejudices we still meet.

In the Gospels, we read of the beginning of the church's ministry of healing through the disciples. Some times they were to lay hands on the sick; sometimes to anoint with oil. We call that anointing by the title of "unction." And the Book of Acts continues the story. Peter and John healed the crippled beggar in the temple and it went on from there. Then, in the letter of James, we reach a time when clergy were part of the life of the church, and James writes that "elders," the "Presbuteroi," or priests, would anoint with oil. Healing had become both charismatic and institutional.

There followed several centuries of the healing ministry in the church. During those years, the church was persecuted by Rome, and you had to be brave and determined to be baptized. Perhaps this is one of the reason why the healing ministry flourished. People were serious about their faith. There was vitality in the church. Early writers like Justin Martyr, Origen, and Cyprian described that ministry. It was at that time that the theologian Hyppolytus wrote about liturgy, including a service for the "Blessing of Oils" by the bishop. This became part of our Book of Alternative Services twenty years ago. Gregory of Nyssa in Greece described the healing of his sister who had been dragged by runaway mules and severely injured. Gregory's brother, Basil, built one of the first hospitals in the Christian world.

There were problems. The most formidable was the movement called Gnosticism which came out of Greek philosophy. The Gnostics claimed that the material world is evil. We need to be more "spiritual" as Christians. So healing the body didn't matter as long as you were pure. Then, on top of that, the vitality of that early church disappeared when Christianity became a state religion. It was the thing to do to be a Christian. About 600 A.D. Pope Gregory the Great wrote a book on pastoral care and claimed that illness is God's work. There was no mention of healing or anointing. Here we are back to the Old Testament. Anointing with oil was to be done only at the point of death. It was a final cleansing before death. It was called "The Last Rites." Thomas Aquinas, the great theologian in the thirteenth-century wrote that the miracles of Jesus were only intended to make people believe in Him. When the Protestant Reformation came along in the sixteenth century, Luther and Calvin said much the same. There was no revival of Jesus' healing ministry. It was far more important to the reformers to convert people and save souls. Luther pursued a doctrine of "Dispensationalism," which is that healings were only for Jesus' time. I guess he read no history books.

The 1549 Book of Common Prayer had a prayer for healing. But it was dropped in the second book of 1552 presumably because of influence of the Protestant reformers. The Anglican Church followed Pope Gregory. Illness is God's work. The 1918 Canadian Prayer Book had a statement to be read to the sick person: "Know you for certain that this illness is God's visitation." Not a happy thing to hear, is it?

But this ministry cannot be suppressed. When priests could not anoint for healing, there were still shrines such as Canterbury Cathedral where the sick came to pray at the tomb of Thomas A Becket. The stone around the tomb was rubbed into a furrow by the knees of those who knelt in prayer. And the stain glass windows that are left in that chapel depicted healings. The puritans destroyed many of them. They had no use for healing.

George Fox and the Society of Friends were deeply devout and healings happened. But nobody paid attention. The Friends were held in contempt and called "Quakers" in derision. Mary Baker Eddy founded Christian Science in the nineteenth century. But she felt that if you used medicines or physicians you did not have faith. Ecclesiasticus was not in her Bible.

It was only in the late nineteenth century that healing began to be restored. In the Anglican Church it was James Moore Dickson, a Church of England layman and a friend of the Archbishop of Canterbury who, led by the Archbishop and the Anglican bishops began the restoration of that ministry in 1908. In the 1930 Lambeth Conference a statement was produced. "The power to exercise spiritual healing is taught by Christ to be the natural heritage of Christian people." All prayer books were now to include a "Liturgy For Healing". Lay people such as Dorothy Kerin in England and Agnes Sanford in the States gave talks and wrote books on the subject. An Episcopal priest, John Gaynor Banks, gave parish conferences and founded the Order of St. Luke to further this ministry. This ministry is now in all Anglican prayer books world wide. With the emergence of the charismatic movement in the 1960's, we have returned to the Biblical and early church pattern of both spontaneous and institutional ministries.

There is no longer the erroneous notion that sickness is the result of sin. It is no longer in our books. However, there are people who still believe that. AIDS has been called God's punishment. But officially, we have returned the ministry of healing to the way Jesus did it. It becomes the fruit of an overflowing grace of God which reaches out to all especially to the outsider and the unwanted of society.

We are here to give thanks for this ministry and to pray that it many continue to grow and flourish among us.