Many of us struggle with poor health. Some of us just have coughs and colds, scratches. Others have more serious things wrong.
Nationally, the NHS is at breaking point. We’re all living longer, and with that come more health problems. The system was never set up to handle the loads that doctors and other healthcare staff are facing.
What does the Bible have to say about our health? Unless the Bible addresses the real issues we face, Jesus is not a saviour worth following.
In Matthew chapter 8, we discover that Jesus came to heal.
Three headings to help us look at this chapter together:
Jesus healed on earth
First, Jesus healed on earth. Jesus healed on earth.
There are two healing scenes in today’s reading. One is private, the other is public. One is quiet, the other is noisy. One concerns just one person, the other great crowds. One is told in affectionate detail, and for the other we’re given a broad brush.
First we have Peter’s mother-in-law. I don’t know why, but not many people picture Simon Peter as married. Well he was, and he had a mother-in-law, and she was ill. She was in bed with a burning temperature. Probably she had Malaria. Jesus simply touched her hand, and she was better. Totally better. So much so that she immediately prepared food and drink for the guests.
If ever you’ve had a stint in bed with a nasty fever, you’ll know that it takes time to regain your strength. Perhaps you’ve not eaten much for a few days. Your legs are a little unsteady. Gradually, you build yourself back up.
Not Peter’s mother-in-law. She was so thoroughly healed that she was back on her feet, preparing and serving food.
That’s the private, quiet story, of one person: Peter’s mother-in-law.
The other scene is a complete contrast. Evening comes, and the townsfolk brought the sick and the demon-possessed to Jesus. Many came. It was like Piccadilly Circus in the rush hour. It’s a good thing Peter’s mother-in-law was feeling better. It would have been exhausting to have so many guests to the house in one evening.
What impressed Matthew was what Jesus did. He healed them. All of them. Everyone who was brought to Jesus went home better. And he did it quietly and simply, with a word. No magician’s flourish. No incantations or spells. No drama. He simply told the illnesses to leave and they did.
Today, you sometimes get people who advertise themselves as faith healers. Their meetings are well publicised and well stage-managed. But even if the promoters can find one person who can say they were healed, the attention is always on the one who was. The cameras never interview the many who left disappointed, just as ill, but with hopes dashed.
Not with Jesus. Matthew zooms in one person whose testimony can be verified. Presumably the early church knew Peter and his family. And then, lest we think he’d promoted the one success story and conveniently forgotten the rest, he zooms out to the hoards who poured to Jesus for healing, and who were never disappointed.
Jesus healed on earth.
Jesus died to heal
Second, Jesus died to heal.
Matthew knew his Old Testament really well, and he loves to point out how Jesus fulfilled what the Old Testament left you longing for.
He does it here. Verse 17: This was to fulfil what was spoken through the prophet Isaiah: He took up our infirmities and bore our diseases.
Matthew says that this fulfils what the prophet Isaiah wrote, 8 centuries earlier, in Isaiah chapter 53.
Isaiah 53 is one of the most famous passages in the Old Testament. It's quoted several times in the New Testament, because it speaks so clearly of the death of Jesus. He was the one who had done nothing wrong, and yet he was punished by God for the things we've done wrong, so that we can be forgiven.
But there's one verse in that famous chapter where Isaiah speaks of Jesus as taking not just our sin but our sickness. That's because the Bible consistently says that our sickness is caused by our sin. Not in a one-to-one kind of way, so that people who are the most ill have done the worst things wrong. Not in a one-to-one kind of way but in a general way - the only reason any of us gets sick is because we are little rebels against God. If nobody ever sinned, nobody would ever sin and nobody would ever die.
It’s a bit like global warming. Some scientists argue that the world is warming up, and this causes freak weather events. Unusually dry weather causing a drought in one part of the world, unusually intense hurricanes, and so on.
Never mind the scientific ins and outs – it goes over my head, and I’m probably not alone. The point is that if the world is warming up, and there are consequences, then we all feel the effects. The family who’s crops fail did not do something specific to contribute to global warming that caused it.
Sin leads to sickness. Not in the sense that my sin leads to my sickness – at least, not usually. But in the sense that our sin means the world is sick, means that people get sick.
Jesus died on the cross to deal with our sin. In doing that, he did what was necessary to deal with our sickness as well. Matthew says that this is what we see in these two little scenes in chapter 8. We see Jesus dealing with human sickness, because he was later to die to deal with human sin.
Jesus died to heal.
Jesus heals today
Jesus healed on earth. Jesus died to heal. And third, Jesus heals today. Jesus heals today.
This simply follows from what we’ve already seen. Jesus died on the cross once and for all. He took our sin on himself, so that we might not have to carry it ourselves.
But as Isaiah and Matthew both pointed out, Jesus death puts us back together as whole people. He dealt with our sin, and so he dealt with the sickness that follows.
There’s no promise here that those who follow Jesus will never be ill, or will always recover. Jesus has been gone two thousand years, and many of his people have died of illnesses in that time. Many of those people were prayed for.
Jesus has promised that one day he will come back. When he does so, he’ll bring with him everyone who died trusting him. They’ll be reunited with Jesus’ friends and followers who are still alive at the time, and all of us will be given the most wonderful new bodies. Bodies that never hurt, never get sick, never die again. He can do that for us, because he died to remove all the sin and all the sickness from his people, and then he rose again to show he’d done it.
There are no cheap promises of perfect health here. But we do see that Jesus heals today. He healed on earth because he was to die to deal with sin, so that he can make us whole again. He’s alive, and he’s in the business of making people whole today as well. When any man, woman or child turns to Jesus to trust and follow him, they are forgiven for every wrong thing they’ve done and will do. They’re given the certainty of a wonderful future with flawless new bodies. And sometimes Jesus breaks in miraculously and heals in the here and now as well.
Jesus heals today.
Conclusion
So what about the issue of poor health? Does the Bible have anything to say to us?
It does. This short passage invites us to respond in three ways.
Firstly, to follow. Jesus death and resurrection opened up a certain future when there will be perfect health. Jesus extends an open invitation to all of us to be a part of that future. To be there when it happens. The future is for everyone who trusts and follows Jesus. So the invitation is for us to follow. To follow Jesus, to sign up for the future he purchased.
Second, to pray. Yes, Jesus doesn’t always heal people today, but he certainly can, and indeed he does. This story must have been a great comfort for the early church. Jesus was flocked by crowds of people he’d never met. Yet for all that, he made time to heal a member of Peter’s family. This is the Jesus who cared for the family members of his people. So when we find ourselves ill, or those dear to us are unwell, we take them to Jesus in prayer.
An invitation to follow. An invitation to pray.
Third an invitation to hope. Rather than despairing when those we love aren’t healed, we hope. For all of Jesus’ people, the future is certain. Jesus may not have healed them in this life, but if they know and love him he certainly will in the next.
Jesus came to heal. To take a broken world, to take our broken lives, and to put them back together. To achieve that, he had to be broken himself, he had to die. Which leaves us with an invitation: to follow, to pray, to hope.