My nephew recently loaned me a book, Jesus, A Revolutionary Biography by John Dominic Crossan, which is supposed to be a revisiting of the life of Christ through a modern eye, or something like that. I read the back of the cover, and I read the flap and I read part of the intro, and I was getting kind of uncomfortable with the general direction it seemed to be taking. So I went to the index and I found a passage about one of the healing miracles.
The story I found was the healing of a leper. The author went into an excellent explanation of why lepers were so worrisome to the Jews at that time. That helped a lot. And then he went on to describe the act of Jesus telling the man, the leper that he was now clean. And the author said something like, “Obviously, He didn’t actually heal this man,” and then he turned himself inside out trying to explain how Jesus could say to the guy Go now, you are clean, when He hadn’t actually healed him and he wasn't actually clean.
And I gave the book back to my nephew.
I think there is a tendency among some people to try to intellectualize religious belief, to try to take the emotion and the hocus pocus out of it. But I think, personally, that without those things, scary as they might be, you lose the essence, the true power of the belief.
A friend of mine told me once that when she was young, she went to church with the neighbors. She had not been raised in a Christian household, she was just going with the neighbors to be going, and that when they told her about God, in her young mind, God was just a man. She said that if she had tried to understand God as anything more, at that point, she would not have been able to accept it.
So I am not going to say that Mr. Crossan has to believe the same thing that I do. Or that his belief is less than mine. The good thing about Christianity is that it will meet you where you are. I am just going to say that I find his version of Jesus to be severely lacking, and I am not going to read his book.
I touched on faith healing several weeks ago, when I talked about the laying on of hands on a horse with a suspected slab fracture, and how I had not been raised to believe in faith healing. My nephew, same nephew, made a comment that there are a lot of charlatans out there saying they are faith healers.
I accept that. I recognize the whole tent show, here to get your money, “Be Healed!” show. That’s not the kind of faith healing I want to talk about.
There are several times in the Bible when Jesus healed a person. Sometimes He laid hands on them, sometimes He healed them long distance through another party. Frequently He said Don’t tell anybody about this. And the first thing they did was run off and tell everybody they knew.
My favorite one of these stories is the Bleeding Woman. I have heard a couple of very good sermons on this story, you can look at it from several different angles.
This is the one where the crowd gathers around Him, and there is one woman in the crowd who has had some kind of illness which caused her to bleed for years. She said If I can just touch His clothing, I will be healed. So she fights her way through the crowd, reaches out and touches his cloak.
And He stops. Because He felt her. This part gives me chills. This crowd is pressing Him, grabbing at Him from all sides, and He feels her touch, and He stops.
And He says to her, Woman, your faith has healed you.
Anyway, in almost every instance, He says Your faith has healed you.
“Woman, great is your faith! Let it be done for you as you wish." And her daughter was healed instantly. -- Matthew 15:28
He said to her, “Daughter, your faith has made you well; go in peace, and be healed of your disease.” Mark 5:34.
Jesus said to him, “Go; your faith has made you well.” Immediately he regained his sight and followed him on the way. Mark 10:52
I believe that faith healing works, because I believe that faith healing works. The important thing is my belief, my acceptance that Jesus meant it when He said “Very Truly, I tell you, the one who believes in me will also do the works that I do and, in fact, will do greater works than these, because I am going to the Father.” John 14:12.
At the track, we put horses on mechanical wheels, which make them walk in a circle, so they can get a little exercise or be cooled out after working. The wheel mechanism is loose enough that if they decide to stand still, it will stop, but also if they decide to run, they can do that too. The running is really not good. You can put four of them at a time on the wheel, and if one starts running, they all have to run, and someone could easily get hurt.
So one day they started running. And we were standing out there, yelling whoa and waving hats at them, and they didn’t care. They were just running. And I thought because of some of the discussions we had had in church, that if I just had enough faith, if I just knew the right word to say, I could stop those horses. So I stepped forward, put up my hands, and I yelled “Calmness”. And they stopped and looked at me, like Yes, and what can we do for you.
When I put my hands up, when I said that word, I felt the power of the Lord move through me. When I prayed for the blood to stop running in my nephew’s head (different nephew) after his stroke, when I took authority over it in the name of Jesus and stated that the blood would stop, I felt the power of the Lord make it so.
I didn’t heal anyone. I didn’t stop that wheel. My faith in the power of the Lord did it.
Jesus said to him, “If you are able! -- All things can be done for the one who believes.” Mark 9:23
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