I note this is a man of wealth and privilege. And it is a healing at a distance. So it parallels the healing of the centurion's servant.
The healing is at Jesus' word and not dependent upon the official's faith. We hear the official left believing Jesus and in obedience to Jesus but we are told the healing took place in the hour Jesus had spoken and not when the official believed.
I think this important. A lot of spirituality depends upon our mindset and not God's timetable. If I feel distant from God I interpret this as God's absence and not my tiredness, distraction, worldliness, or other. And this plays out over and over in popular religiosity.
When I was -- maybe fourteen -- our family on a long trip stopt by a shopping mall one summer. When I got tired and could find no bench I returned to the car and sat on the bumper to relive my feet that were aching. A woman saw me there and noting my disability came and offered to pray for me.
I consented -- though at the time I was in my teenage way -- seeing myself as an agnostic and shading towards atheist. She prayed for at least two minutes. And my parents came cross the parking lot and I started to squirm in embarrassment.
"Oh,well," she said. "You don't have enough faith to be healed." And she went on her way.
I wish this story were unique but there are few disabled people who do not have similar horrors to recount and I know of at least one other person who has sworn never to enter a church on account of such a story.
God's time not ours. God's work. Not ours.
3 comments:
Hi David. Interesting point about when the healing took place ... often in these healing stories, Jesus says something like "Your faith has healed you." which makes me wonder if the healings I ask for but don't get fail because my faith isn't strong enough.
About your personal healing story ... I have one too, equally cringe-worthy but in a different way :-). When my vision deteriorated to the point that I could no longer drive, I started to take it seriously. I wasn't a christian yet but I was desperate and willing to try anything to get better. I overcame my shyness and fear of traveling alone and took a plane to LA to visit (groan) a christian "paychic surgeon" who had been recommended by an aquaintance. It was hard to find the little church where he practiced and there were lots of people in line before me and I was scared. It didn't work and actually seemed to make my vision worse for a while. I was pretty bitter after this.
Decades ago, I had a coworker who kept trying to urge me to have faith that I could be healed, from some chronic pain in my leg joints (which I still have). I couldn't get beyond wondering why I should expect to be healed of relatively minor chronic pain, when a friend of mine who was a much better Christian than I had cerebral palsy. If God were going around instantly healing whoever had faith, shouldn't she be healed first?
Lynn Gazis-Sax
thank you for sharing those painful stories, it couldn't have been easy. Its such a shame that those seemingly well-intentioned persons who offered to pray for disabilities went so horribly wrong in blaming others for their lack of faith -- how could anyone be so cruel?
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