Healing in the Bible

Theological Insight for Christian Ministry

Frederick J. Gaiser

• Publisher: Baker Academic
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9780801031014
• eBook ISBN: 9781441213709
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Criticism & Interpretation

In the midst of an ongoing debate about health care, what does the Bible say about healing? Here a respected scholar reads biblical texts on health and healing with care and imagination, engaging the reader in lively conversations with the text and with questions of contemporary theological and pastoral concern. Gaiser offers close readings of fifteen key Old and New Testament passages, considering their significance for the church's understanding of healing and its ministry today. The book examines such significant matters as God's role in healing, the relation between sickness and sin, healing and prayer, God's healing and medical science, and healing under the sign of the cross, offering fresh insights for anyone interested in Christian views on healing.

1

Introduction and Method

Because parts of this book began to take shape in Africa, I start with two stories from one of my tours of teaching in Zimbabwe.

For southern Africans, the winter of 1996 was uncommonly cold. Snow brought hardship and death to South Africa, and, according to the news, parts of Zimbabwe experienced the coldest temperatures in eighty years. Although, as a Minnesotan, I was sometimes amused at what counted as cold, the suffering of people unprepared for freezing weather was real. On one of the coldest nights of that cold season, I was invited by a friend, an African pastor (of a tradition quite different from my own), to participate in a crusade that he and his congregation were holding in Hatcliffe, one of the bleakest of the “highdensity suburbs” of Harare (these were the black ghetto areas under Rhodesian apartheid). At the end of the service, the pastor asked any who desired prayers for healing to come forward—healing of body or mind or spirit. At first they came in a trickle, but then in droves. Despite the cold night and the late hour, I thought that they might never stop. My friend asked me to assist him in laying hands on the sick and praying for them or with them, which I did. The scene—standing in an open field blessing the multitudes in the name of Jesus—resembled some biblical pageant. It was a rich and moving experience. Were people “healed”? No statistics were gathered, no follow-up studies were conducted; but surely people were helped. Their willingness to brave the elements spoke highly of their expectations and their past experience. Surely, the Spirit of God moved over their troubled minds and bodies and souls.

During that same season, my brother and his family visited me from the United States. One night at a braai (barbecue), eating in the dark, my brother put a piece of meat in his mouth that turned out to be too large for his esophagus. It lodged partway down and refused to be moved. Although he could breathe, he could not swallow. Neither time nor various suggested home remedies helped. Eventually, we all went to the emergency room, but efforts there failed as well. He was admitted to the hospital, and the next day the blockage was surgically removed. Among the efforts that “failed” was the fervent and public prayer of a devout Christian, convinced that God could and would respond to the crisis with no need for surgical intervention.

Some skeptics may have muttered that what took place in that field in Hatcliffe was mere superstition. Since it happened in Africa, they may have called it “mumbo jumbo.” On the other hand, some pious Christians may have been disappointed that my brother elected to undergo surgical treatment without waiting for the results of prayer. They may have been critical of his “little faith.” It is my conviction that God was fully active in each of these scenarios: reaching out with healing through prayer and laying on of hands on the field in Hatcliffe, and employing the best tools of creation and human vocation in the operating theater of the Avenues Clinic in Harare. That conviction informs this book.

Those who would reject physicians in their zeal for healing through prayer alone would do well to consider the words of the ancient Hebrew wisdom teacher Ben Sira (himself a faithful believer in the biblical God):

Honor physicians for their services, for the Lord created them;
for their gift of healing comes from the Most High, and they are rewarded by the king. . . .

The Lord created medicines out of the earth, and the sensible will not
despise them. . . .
And he gave skill to human beings that he might be glorified in their
marvelous works. . . .

Give the physician his place, for the Lord created him;
do not let him leave you, for you need him.

There may come a time when recovery lies in the hands of physicians,
for they too pray to the Lord that he grant them success in diagnosis
and in healing, for the sake of preserving life. (Sir. 38:1–14)

Those who find no relevance for the Bible or for faith in the modern world might be challenged by the words of a twentieth-century biblical scholar, Gerhard von Rad (himself a student and product of the Enlightenment), in a sermon on the story of Balaam:

We today don’t regard ourselves in any way bound to the ancient biblical notions. We today view the world differently. But, oh, this “We today!” In its place it certainly has a good and proper use. But, just as certainly, it can in a flash become unbearably arrogant. Unsuspecting, it can set aside a knowledge of the world, of humanity, and even of God that is lamentably unavailable to us. Is it the case that the reality in which we live has only been properly understood in our own age? Let us just pose the naive question: Which side has the better realists? Is it those who always have this sophisticated “we today” on their lips? Are they the better realists? Or is our narrator out in front of them when he regards the blessing of God as a real power under which we live unconsciously day and night, so that we would be lost if we could not take refuge in it. Here is where we must make up our minds about the actual reality in which we live.[1]

God accomplishes healing in all kinds of venues and in all kinds of ways. God heals through the work of creation, through the presence of Christ, through the power of the Holy Spirit, and through the prayers and support of the people of God. The biblical healing stories are as rich and varied as present experience. I attempt, in this book, to listen to them in all their variety.

A word about the methodology employed here is in order. Those who care at all what the Bible says about healing might use a variety of responsible ways to pay attention to its voice. Among them would be an exhaustive critical exegesis of relevant texts or a constructive and thematic compilation of biblical theological topics related to healing. The present investigation is neither of those, though it partakes of elements of each. I assume here that individual biblical accounts convey a message worthy of consideration by the modern reader, and I seek to pay attention to them in all their peculiarity. The readings of the biblical texts are my own, of necessity at the outset because the initial work was done in Africa where I had no access to library or Internet. The methods are eclectic, involving tradition history, form criticism, literary structures, and regard for different historical periods and biblical theologies—and eventually I do engage other biblical scholars, albeit selectively—but finally I assume that, despite distance and difference, biblical texts, appreciatively heard in their final form, will provide the reader with significant insights, indeed, even moments of wonder. The interpreter’s task is to retell the stories to that end.

My reference to starting this work in Africa and the two stories from Africa that begin this chapter are neither incidental nor included merely to provide exotic color. The reader will find similar references scattered throughout the book. The opportunity to live and work in Africa brought an introduction to living cultures, especially in the rural areas, which, though certainly changed now by contact with the wider world, still think about health and healing in ways much closer to the world of the Bible than are the assumptions and perspectives of the modern West. Without rejecting that latter world, which is, of course, fundamentally my own, I treasure African perspectives as a gift that brought new insight into my reading of the Bible, especially the Bible on healing.

One might call my reading a hermeneutic of appreciation versus the hermeneutic of suspicion sometimes employed by critical readers.[2] For me, to be sure, such an “appreciative inquiry” of biblical texts will never jettison critical inquiry, as that is called for. Still, it is important for the reader to know that here I make no claim to provide full commentary on the passages in question.

This inquiry assumes that the biblical witness is properly brought into conversation with other ancient and modern insights into the healing process (including those within the Bible itself), and that such conversation will be mutually beneficial. While the method attempts to allow particular texts their own say, it assumes that the conversation with other points of view or with a broader biblical perspective can come at any and every stage of the investigation. In other words, the conversation is open.

This conversational inquiry into the biblical texts does several things:

• it recognizes that, for the time being, center stage is given to a particular biblical voice, which is listened to for its own story and its own claims;
• it suggests that such a particular voice has its own legitimacy, even if it stands somewhat off the beaten path of a broader biblical view or even over against other biblical witnesses;
• it is open to any or all critical understandings of a given text, but it recognizes that a fruitful conversation with the text might be initiated on one day by one insight, on another day by another.

Practitioners of such a conversational approach to developing biblical theology will, I believe,

• listen intently and with historical, grammatical, and literary care to the particular biblical voice as a partner in conversation that has the potential of speaking a meaningful word;
• be willing to be shaped by the conversation, ascribing to the texts the proper respect and authority discovered over generations and centuries of use by the people of God;
• recognize that this particular biblical voice is not the whole; even as it contributes to a broader “biblical view of healing,” it must also be examined and tested in light of that broader biblical witness;
• read and hear texts theologically, asking: What is God doing here? What has this to do with God’s revelation in Christ? How will interpreters develop present theological reflection on a text that is faithful to its original witness?
• confront the broader biblical witness and the subsequent theological tradition with their need to take account of the specificity of the claims and observations of a particular text;
• let the conversation with the word be real; the interpreter will both listen and speak, both argue and defer, as one with something to say and something to learn, claiming a legitimate voice while observing an appropriate humility in this encounter with the messages of Scripture;
• work in community; the interpreter will read texts in conversation with the voices of the church (locally and ecumenically), the voices of the Christian tradition, “prophetic” voices over against the tradition, the voices of biblical scholarship, responsible voices of human vocation, and voices from science, literature, and the arts, both inside and outside the church, attempting to give each of these its appropriate place in determining the meaning of a text.

This book uses this method in examining a variety of biblical texts in something of a case-study approach. What can we learn from this text as we consider healing in the Bible and broader issues related to healing? The reader will quickly note that not all biblical healing stories are included here. I have chosen texts that seem representative and that deal with or suggest matters of ongoing theological interest. No doubt, other stories could offer other insights. Having studied the individual texts, I seek to make some general comments on healing in biblical perspective, culminating in a set of theses that draw together the insights gained through the several chapters and occasionally from material not directly included there. The summary theses have been formulated and reformulated to draw the broader, overarching ideas out of the particular stories.

The goal of this book is to explore the ways in which the Bible amplifies the claims and the promises of both Testaments—“I am the LORD, your healer” (Exod. 15:26); “Jesus went throughout Galilee, teaching in their synagogues and proclaiming the good news of the kingdom and curing every disease and every sickness among the people” (Matt. 4:23)—and then to think about all of this in our own cultural perspective.

2

“O LORD, Heal Me”

The Primal Witness of Psalm 6

Behind the artistically structured poems and liturgies of the biblical psalms lie the joys and terrors of primal human experience. In the middle of the night, when the telephone rings with the news of grave illness or tragic death, no one has to be taught to cry out in the typical outbursts of the biblical laments: Why? How long? If only! Help me! Similarly, when the call is from the doctor, saying that the tests show the tumor to be benign, no one has to be told that “Praise the Lord!” is an appropriate response or that it is okay to break into a dance step or two (Ps. 30:11). These are the cries and actions of primary human experience, found among people everywhere. The psalms have molded this experience into the ordered form of poetry and prayer. They bear the marks of the artist and the liturgist and the theologian. But without the background of primal experience, the psalmists would have had no working material, and unless they rendered that experience truthfully, their poems would have had neither merit nor longevity.

In the psalms of lament and thanksgiving, the Bible presents us with its most fundamental witness to the experience of illness and healing. Both illness and healing are basic to human life, and both are given voice in the Bible beneath and behind any attempt to explain or tame or order them in theology and story. Any study of biblical healing must begin with these simple but basic observations: The people of the Bible fell ill—good people and bad people, ordinary people and kings, young people and old. But also, the people of the Bible experienced healing—through prayer, through early forms of medicine, sometimes spontaneously, sometimes through a lengthy process. In other words, the people of the Bible were like us. They had no more immediate answers to the terrible existential questions brought on by suffering than we do. Still, even without access to the miracles of modern medicine, they experienced healing and release and celebrated life.

Candor requires admitting that the people of the Bible were like us in another way as well: eventually, they died. Such an obvious statement is essential to a book on biblical healing because it has not always been so obvious. A danger in a study of the healing texts of the Bible is that, in them, people regularly are healed. This sometimes leads to the assumption that God’s healing happened more often or was more available to people of faith then, or was more miraculous then, or is now to be expected in every case where there is faithful prayer. Of course, people are healed in the healing stories. Those are the stories we have chosen to read. If we were reading the death and dying texts of the Bible, everyone would die. In fact, everyone in the Bible did die,[1] and, as any history of medicine will make clear, they died more quickly than modern people do. In the world of the Bible, to contract serious disease or to fall victim to serious accident generally led to death—more often then than now, because the skills and possibilities of modern medicine were unavailable to them. True, biblical people prayed and experienced healing and ascribed their healing to God. We do well to celebrate that, to investigate it and learn from it, to appropriate it for our own lives; but we also do well to do so in a realistic context. Life and death, illness and healing, are universal human phenomena. The Bible bears particular witness to God’s healing, thus providing us with an important resource in our present quest for meaningful and abundant life. But we enter that quest aware of the finitude and mortality of the people in the Bible, and of our own. Healing is not the guaranteed right of certain people of faith; it is God’s surprising gift to all people everywhere. That is the broader context in which we must understand biblical healing.

In his masterful study of evil, Paul Ricoeur argued that the confessional outbursts in the psalms and elsewhere—where people cry that this life of suffering and terror is not the full life that ought to be, and, more, that they too...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Endorsements
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• List of Abbreviations
• 1. Introduction and Method
• 2. “O LORD, Heal Me”
• 3. “I Am the LORD, Your Healer”
• 4. “Moses Made a Serpent of Bronze”
• 5. “Hezekiah Wept Bitterly”
• 6. “Please Accept a Present”
• 7. “No Health in My Bones”
• 8. “What God Is So Great as Our God?”
• 9. “Hannah Conceived and Bore a Son”
• 10. “The Sensible Will Not Despise Them”
• 11. “I Command You, Come Out of Him”
• 12. “He Spat on the Ground and Made Mud”
• 13. “If I but Touch His Clothes”
• 14. “Your Faith Has Made You Well”
• 15. “Your Sins Are Forgiven. . . . Stand Up and Walk”
• 16. “What I Have I Give You”
• 17. “By His Bruises We Are Healed”
• 18. Healing in the Bible
• Selected Bibliography
• Scripture Index
• Subject Index
• Notes