What is salvation? The term salvation is central in the dynamics and definition of religion. We heard today that “not every one who says Lord, Lord, enters the kingdom of heaven—in other words finds salvation. Instead, hearing the Lord’s words and following them is the fundamental way to healing, justice, safety, and freedom, as the Beatitudes tell us.
The great early Christian teacher Cyril of Alexandria described the way of the world as self-assertive deception and desire. We could add, manipulative. The gospels teach us that this attitude will not hold up through crisis, illness, tragedy and in the end, the final judgment. Under the guise of building one’s self up, becoming what I want, and one way or another getting all I think is owed me, it only leads to destruction. This is a house built on sand and without a foundation, though in some cases that state may not be so obvious for quite a while.
It may take a lifetime to make the rock of Jesus’ word the foundation of our life and faith. Trusting in this word opens the door to being alright with God and neighbor, with the earth and with ourselves. This is the working out of salvation, the process of the final healing of the world, as Christ brings us into the promised kingdom. This means profound healing for the body and the mind; that includes our heart and soul, clear thinking, and awareness of higher things; it includes our relationships and affects society and the earth itself.
Right after speaking on that hill, Jesus runs into a leper, who with deep respect and extraordinary confidence, asks Jesus to heal him. And so Jesus does. With authority and compassion, he breaks cultural and religious taboos when he confidently places his hand on the man.
For us, healing can mean just getting better or finding a cure for the cause itself. The poet John Donne wrote, to cure the symptoms is a great work, to cure the disease a greater one, but to cure the body, the root and occasion of sickness, is for the Great Physician only, by glorifying their bodies in the next world.
We often use the saying, physician heal thyself. And we can read about those who have been able to find healing for themselves, whether in silence, or in prayer. We can find healing through holiness, or through the law or by the knife, sometimes with herbs, medicines, and sacred words, or even by dancing and singing. Physicians bring cure to individuals, and some saints can heal all the faithful.
The African Kalahari bushmen, the Kung people, have the regular practice of the entire tribe dancing together to bring about healings.
A Hasidic master was once described as dancing with energy flowing from his joyful movements, and every step a powerful mystery for healing.
Centuries ago a Buddhist monk named Jeevaka was taking his final exams with the task of bringing all the local non-healing plants, animals, and minerals back to the Teacher. His entire class took tools for uprooting, trapping, and chiseling, cutting, scraping, cleaning and drying stuff. A week later they came back with cartloads of flowers, seeds, stones, resins, and scat. Some had baskets full of trapped animals and birds. Jeevaka had nothing. The others were mystified by this, and the teacher asked whether he had given up the search.
Jeevaka said that he had learned with the teachers help that everything in nature is filled with healing power—plants, animals, minerals, the wind, sunlight, rain, birdsong, smells, and even the moon and clouds—some for human healing, and some for animals. Its easy to see this was the right answer, and he went on to became a model physician.
I recently read that a person who is healthy is actually already living in paradise. It certainly can feel as if you have fallen from that good place when you become ill. Suffering is sometimes seen as an opportunity to be purified, to repent, of thoughts and offences, because this is the aim of our life.
In Islam when someone inquires about a person’s health, I am told people might reply, “Al hamdulilláh,” somewhat like the Hebrew “halleluia.” — “How are you?” “Glory to God for whatever my state of being is right now.”
In the 1800’s some of the Pennsylvania Dutch developed a system called powwow healing from the Native Americans. They might say or write the name of Jesus or a secret prayer and give a physical blessing. A mother will pick up a crying child with a scraped knee and say, “Come on love, momma will powwow it for you and make it well.”
This past Thursday I attended my nephew’s wedding, and he and his bride said the traditional vows, “to hold and to have,” “in sickness and in health,” “to love and to cherish.” They pledged not just to tolerate illness but to find love in its midst, to flow with it, to find in it a gift of closeness, deepened perspective, and freedom from the isolated self, “till death do us part.”
As a last word, from the ancient Greek poet Aeschylus, who wrote, “O healer death, do not, I pray, disdain to come to me, for you are the physician of ills that have no cure. After all, pain lays not its touch upon the body of those who have died.”
May we contemplate this in faith and in the hope of the resurrection and the life of the age to come.
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