What are your thoughts on Jesus as a “Healer”?

I guess it’s been on my mind, this facet of the Christian faith, this facet of a fundamental part of Jesus’s identity that the Gospels lay out. I’ve been trying to tell people about miracles more, and the truth is that I have a friend who was crippled, and I’ve seen her run. I saw before and after she received complete healing, and, in a sense, I don’t know what to do with that. On the one hand, it’s totally consistent with how God works in the Gospels. On the other hand, I just think that it’s really weird and strange that that happened. I also think there’s even something uncomfortable about it, because it’s just the world in which I live as an intellectual, but it’s easy to intellectualize Christianity in certain circles. And that isn’t opposed to this other part, but also there are these very strange things that happen. So I have this friend, and she was crippled. She couldn’t walk, and then I saw her run. So I think I just want to tell people about that, that God healed my friend Therese.

If you ask around, there are probably a lot of people who’ve had an inexplicable event or a healing that they knew of or that they themselves experienced. It’s also one of the things that I like about the gospel – not that anybody needs to know what I like about the gospel – but one of the exciting things about the gospel is that the gospel writers give an account of Jesus’s healing miracles, which also seem to be about sin and about healing from sin. I’m excited by that too, that Jesus wants the lame to walk and the blind to see and the deaf to hear, and he’s also going around in the Gospel accounts forgiving sins.

He often heals leprosy in particular. The sickness of leprosy, and also the story of the woman with the hemorrhage – these diseases made it so those people couldn’t participate in temple worship. So they’re excluded from the religious life of their people, from the temple, because of their sickness. I think that’s a great way to think about sin – as this thing that keeps us out of communion with God and communion with the church more broadly. Jesus wants to heal both of those – the physical sickness and the spiritual sickness. The images like leprosy or the withered hand or the hemorrhage or blindness are also good images of what sin does to us. It’s important to talk about the act of the healings as well as what they tell us about Jesus, what Jesus came to do about sin – the worst sickness of all, the worst wound of all. 

I think a lot of times when we submerge ourselves in more intellectual studies, especially theology, those are wonderful endeavors, and they still might have an innate, curious desire to know our Creator more. That’s a beautiful thing. But also, Christ talks a lot about child-like faith, which doesn’t require that much of the intellectual side. I think you see that a lot with the faith of miracles, because they just logically are not coherent or consistent. That’s the beauty of a miracle. Have you thought a lot about the correlation between child-like faith and focusing more on Jesus as a healer?

It’s very immediate, and it’s very simple. The people immediately ask for healing. It is an act of telling what you see, and they are seeing miracles, right? There’s something so immediate about that, and that doesn’t invalidate the intellectual pursuits at all – it’s almost like for some people in the gospels, healing is prior to the intellectual. It’s like, boom, healing, and then they ask, “Who is this Jesus?” And then they go pursue Jesus and come to know him. And so that healing provides a kind of encounter. 

There is something so beautiful about child-like faith. I know on one hand we can idealize children. Children are just humans, but they don’t have a lot of the hang ups that adults do. My one year old, she likes to pray, but she doesn’t really understand what she is doing – she just knows that we do it together, and then she’s excited about it. My eight year old, though, will pray for healings for people. She’ll pray that so-and-so who’s sick would get well, and some of those prayers have been answered with a yes. She doesn’t overthink it. She just asks the same way she asks me for stuff all the time. Children are demanding in a way that’s a good model for us as adults. Anytime my daughter wants anything, she just comes to me and says, ‘I want this.’ She asks me for all kinds of things that I’m not going to give her, but some things I will. She comes to me confident that I’m dad and that I’m the guy to whom you go to for asking things. So at the very least, that childlike model of prayer is a real challenge for us as adult Christians, because, in reality, do I myself pray like that, like my daughter? Sometimes I do. Sometimes I feel like my faith is strong enough to ask for big things, but sometimes I wonder if we ask as much as we could. I think there’s a lot of room for us to ask like children for stuff from the Father. So you’re right about the child as the model there. 

How can viewing Jesus as a healer correlate with other ways of viewing Jesus, for example, as a strong defender, an arbiter of justice, or as meek and gentle? How does that fit a more holistic lens?

The thing that comes to mind for me is when Jesus says “I’m the way, and the truth, and the life.” I think all of those are in some way connected and that they could be connected with healing. Here’s what I mean by that. It’s underlying a lot of our sins, which are often influenced by lies we believe from our enemy, the devil. There’s the world and this old tripartite division of the world, the flesh, the devil. All three of those things tell me lies. The devil does, the world does, and my flesh does. My flesh tells me I won’t be happy unless I have that third Snickers bar, but that’s a lie. I know that’s a lie, and that sin is a type of wound. If we act out of those lies we’re going to live in such a way that we will be wounded and we will wound others. We’re going to be in some way spiritually sick and maybe even physically sick because not all sin is obviously connected. Not all illness is obviously connected to sin, but there are certain sins that are more likely to lead to certain illnesses. There are ways in which, if I am selfish or lustful or gluttonous or unforgiving, it actually takes a toll on my body. And that begs the question, who is living according to the Truth, and what is True? Who is God the Father? Who is Jesus, his son? Who am I in light of who I was made by and who I was made to be? Living in truth is a way out of sin. It’s a way of living out of those lies that we believe and that lead us into sin. And once we’re living more in the Truth, then we’re living. We’re walking the Way. Every day is a life lived, and there is life that follows that. So I think Jesus as the Way, the Truth, the Life is an answer to that problem. I think that truth is part of healing. If I believe lies about who God is, if I believe lies about who I am, or if I believe lies about what will make me happy, then I’m going to sin, and I’m going to be in error. I’m going to hurt other people, and I’m going to hurt myself. And so he wants healing there. And then he wants me to walk according to that truth in the way. And then he wants me to have eternal life. I think that makes complete sense. 

Could we circle back to something? 

Yeah, absolutely.

I thought of an objection that would make a good question, actually a critical question: what do we do when Jesus doesn’t heal? My daughter does ask me for things that I say no to, and I think this is a very serious potential objection to seeing Christ as healer, and it’s also a potentially serious objection to Christianity since it deals with the problem of evil. So it would be worth trying to think about how Jesus can be a healer and yet there are times where he doesn’t seem to heal or doesn’t heal right away. Have you heard that objection before? How would you respond to it?

I’ve definitely heard that objection before and wondered about it. I think that the Father’s plans are infinitely more complex than we could possibly imagine, and part of having faith is knowing that His plans are still good, regardless of our understanding of them. If we pray for healing, and He says “No,” that still denotes His goodness in the sense that he has a plan to bring good out of that.

There’s this preacher that I came across who was born without arms or legs. Of course, he prayed his whole life asking God to give him arms and legs. And the Lord didn’t give him arms and legs. But now he’s able to be a preacher and stand up on the stage and inspire so many people through his story, and he and the Lord are bringing good out of that, an observable, physical good, and people can see his faith despite his circumstance and have faith of their own. But sometimes there isn’t any observable good. God’s “No” can’t always be logically explained, and then it comes down to knowing that we live in a broken and fallen and sinful world and that that is not the way that it was originally intended to be. So if we’re not blessed with the ability to see some possible good come from God’s “No,” there is still hope in the future of all things being made new and wonderful in the Second Coming, because we are not living in the final state of the world. So that’s the consolation that I’ve always had when it comes to that question.

That’s a good answer. I have my spiritual director – he’s a layman. He’s a fellow Christian who’s sort of like my spiritual father. He accompanies me, and it’s like discipling. He says, “God doesn’t ever say no, but he gives three answers. The three answers God gives are ‘yes,’ ‘wait,’or ‘I have something better.’” That’s been a helpful thing for me to think about. And St Paul says in Romans 8:28, “We know that in everything, God works for good for those who love Him, who are called according to His purposes.” That speaks to your point of, ‘whatever is happening, God is working some good out of it, even though I can’t see it right now,’ and I agree with you on that. Even in scriptures, you can see this. There’s one healing where it doesn’t happen right away. There’s the blind man, and Jesus heals him and asks what the man can see. The man says, ‘Oh, I can see, but it’s just figures moving around.’ And Jesus prays again, and then the man can fully see. Obviously Jesus is God, so he’s capable of healing this blind man in a nanosecond. But it was important to his process and to the faith of the believers who read that story in the gospel that there was actually a process of healing that took time. 

So that’s something else for us to remember, thinking about what’s the healing process that God might have for us. If you want healing from addiction, God might heal you immediately. Or he might say to you, ‘let’s walk through this process, because along the way, I’m going to heal you of so much more, of so many of these underlying things that are rooted in this addiction.’ And so there might be a process of healing like there was in that biblical episode. Obviously in that story it was a quick process, but it was still a process. And that’s a good model for us. 

And then there’s also what you said about the Second Coming. Will there be sickness in heaven? No, there won’t be. My father died of cancer in 2024. I could say that Jesus didn’t heal my father of cancer, or I could also say that actually he did because my father is with the Lord and doesn’t have cancer anymore. So there’s that very mysterious eyesight of faith where we see healings that can really only be seen by faith, but there are also those healings that we can see with our eyes. I just thought that that objection needs to be aired.

Yes, and there’s St Paul, who has the thorn in his side that isn’t removed. He doesn’t know why it’s not removed, but his faith continues, and then his work continues. He asks the Lord to remove the thorn, but the Lord doesn’t. And we can now read that story and have our faith increased and encouraged by it 2,000 years later. 

That’s a great example.

Well, to conclude, do you have any words of advice for students on how they can focus on Jesus as Healer more in their daily spiritual disciplines and in their daily life, or for when they are submerged in their studies?

Yeah, my first is awareness and attentiveness. Here’s what I mean by that. I’m involved in prayer ministry, and I’ll offer to pray with people, even just strangers. I’ll ask them, ‘Hey, is there anything you’d like me to pray for? I’m a follower of Jesus,’ and about one out of five say, ‘No, I’m good. I really can’t think of anything I need prayers for.’ Obviously, what’s going on there is they’re just uncomfortable, right? But to say, ‘I don’t need healing, I don’t have any requests, everything in my life is perfect’- I mean, for me personally, I have a really, really good life. I have a happy family, and the Lord has blessed me, but boy, do I have a long list of prayers, right? I have so many things I need. So number one, you need to be honest with the Lord. Maybe even prior to being honest with the Lord, we need to be honest with ourselves. Ask yourself, ‘Where do I need healing?’ We live in a prosperous country, so we have good nutrition and good medical care, but there’s lots of sickness and lots of need for physical healing. We might also need emotional healing. We might need healing from sin or trauma. There’s lots of things that need healing that aren’t as extreme as leprosy. Nobody in America gets leprosy anymore, really, but we need healing nonetheless. So the first thing is to be honest with ourselves, and that’s even something we can ask the Lord for help with, as to say, ‘Lord, where do I need healing? What do I need? You know me better than I know myself. You see through things that I don’t see or don’t want to see. And so you can reveal to me what I need.’ So that’s the first thing: awareness and willingness to recognize where we need healing. 

The second thing is to ask God – nothing is too small. My daughter, I’m sure she’s prayed for healing from her paper cuts and scrapes – those hurt, and she’s little, and those aren’t unimportant. God cares about healing those too, and he did through, in this case, natural means – her body. He created her body to heal paper cuts and scrapes, and so He answered that prayer with a yes. So simply ask God for the big, and ask God for the small. He does draw our attention to places we need healing. 

And then this is super important: pray with other people for healing. So often we say, ‘I’ll pray for you.’ And sometimes we will remember. I forget a lot of times though. If I don’t do it right away, then I’ll just forget, right? Or sometimes I’ll pray, ‘Lord, I pray for everybody that I was supposed to pray for today but I just can’t remember who.’ But if you look at scripture, you see how the New Testament Christians lived. They pray in community. They lay hands on each other. They ask the Lord to do his healing work. And there’s all those good scripture verses that say essentially, ‘Wherever two or more of you are gathered in my name, there am I with you.’ So if we can pray with our friends for healing and ask for big things, not only is it very consoling to be prayed for, but it’s also a terrific witness to the world to see people praying. And then doing it enough times, there’re going to be miracles. As for my friend Therese, she shows an example of a miracle, because she was crippled but now can run. I think that’s wonderful. I think that’s one of the greatest joys of our walk as Christians.

Dr. Kelly Franklin is an Associate Professor of English at Hillsdale College.

Photo by Chloe Noller.