Healing into a New Story

Text: Mark 1:40-45
Other texts: 2 Kings 5:1-14

No one emerges from an illness the same way he or she went in. Even when cured by a miracle of the spirit or by a miracle of medicine, illness changes us.

Naaman, commander of the army, had leprosy. A vaguely defined and incurable skin disease. After much drama, hurt pride, fortunate intervention, and God’s work through the prophet Elisha, Naaman was healed. He emerged from the river Jordan with skin as smooth and pure as a preadolescent’s. No sores, no scars. He was better than new. But that does not mean the experience of being ill had been undone. Could he escape the memory of the time he had leprosy? Could he forget the looks of disgust that people must have given him? Or perhaps the looks of admiration that he had become an army commander and friend of the king despite his illness. The events of his disease would remain a part of the story of his life.

What does it mean to be healed? It is tempting to think that healing means restoring things to the way they were before. Before we were injured, or before we got sick, or before we were hurt emotionally, or before we endured a major loss. In those times, we long for suffering to just go away, as if it were a bug that might fly off, leaving us unbothered and unchanged. But we are never unchanged by illness and loss.

First, we are creatures and can never be put together exactly the same way after we are broken. Second, we are creatures who move forward in time—we age—so that even if we could be reassembled, we can never return exactly to the person we once were. And third, we are creatures who remember things as we move forward in time, so that even if it were possible to undo an illness, we could not undo our experience of it. Naaman remembers himself having leprosy and having to humble himself. The beggar remembers himself being unclean, sick, and outcast, no matter what happens to him after his encounter with Jesus.

Nor does healing mean to be made perfect. As if that were possible, as if that had any meaning to creatures who are organic and complex. None of us were ever perfect. What would that mean? What would be the standard? Are we imperfect because we cannot fly? Are we imperfect because we are soft? Are we imperfect if one leg is a little shorter than the other? Are we imperfect if we are near-sighted? If we are not as smart as the next person? If we can’t run very fast? Beside all that, we are biological beings living in a biological environment. We will always be ill, more or less. Most of the time mostly less, thank God. But there is something wrong with every one of us. Partly, it doesn’t matter very much. And partly, we are used to it.

Nor does healing mean to be resigned to one’s fate. Illness and loss make us angry, disappointed, sometimes ashamed. There is not much we can do about our condition. But it is not helpful to simply suck it up, to live with anger, disappointment, and shame. Those are not good things to live with. Not good things to carry around in our heads and hearts and bodies. The beggar approaches Jesus because the beggar sees and hopes and expects that Jesus will change him.

There was once a young man named Matthew who was in a car accident when he was thirteen years old. In the accident his spine was broken. He lost control and feeling of everything below his diaphragm, including his legs. He later wrote about his experience. He said that most of the people looking after him—his mother, the doctors—wanted him to become a person with no legs. That is, they told him that he would never use his legs again and that he had to develop really strong arms and that it would be best if he somehow disassociated himself from his legs. They would be attached, of course, but not really part of his existence. He felt they wanted him to be a new person, newly born in a way, a person without working legs.

But Matthew was having no part of this. Over time, he learned that though he could not feel his legs or move them, they were clearly part of him. When he sat up, they were a counterbalance to his torso. They affected his movement, his grace and awkwardness. Not just like they did before his accident, but in a new way. His body was one body. The different parts working together, the same as everybody’s. Not the same way as everybody’s. How they worked together was different. That they worked together was the same. He wrote that when he realized this, which took years, he felt he was healed. He was healed not by becoming a new person. He was the same person as before. But he was the same person with a new story.

Illness and loss seem to be our enemies. They are outside of us, attacking our being, distorting our existence. But healing does not eradicate them. Healing brings them into our story. Healing changes the trauma into an event in our lives. Something that happened. Healing takes away the power of illness and injury. They no longer define us and control us. They are things that have happened, or are happening, to us, just like all the other more ordinary things. Healing makes them part of our story. The story we tell about ourselves. When I was thirteen, Matthew said in his story, I was in a car accident. When I got sick, we might say. When I and my spouse separated. When I lost my job. When my grandmother died. How I became weaker, slower, befuddled. We are not made into new people by such events. We are the same people. But we do have new stories.

The healing stories we’ve been hearing in Mark are stories of power. Who has the power over us. The beggar comes to Jesus. If you chose, you can make me clean, he says. You have the power, he says, to change my life.

Healing means we are freed from the power that our wounds have over us. We cannot eliminate them, ignore them, or resign ourselves to them. We can though deprive them of their power. They don’t have to be define us or be the boss of us.

The connection that Jesus makes so often between forgiveness and healing is a natural one. Sins against us control us until we forgive them. Sins we cannot forgive make us angry and resentful and do stupid things. When we forgive someone who sins against us, we don’t eliminate the sin, or forget about it, but we do weaken its power over us.

In the same way, when Jesus promises us eternal life, it frees us from the power of death. It does not eliminate death, but it weakens its power. When Jesus tells us not to be afraid but to trust in God, it does not eliminate fear, but it weakens its power.

We can place our illness, our loss, our shame at the center of our lives. We can think of ourselves as the person who is ill, the person that something bad happened to, or is happening to, the person who has been wounded. Or we can seek out another center. We can search, as Naaman did, for God’s prophet. We can call, as the beggar did, for Jesus. We can discover a new story for ourselves.

Jesus, if you choose, you can make me free.