The Road to Healing

The Road to Healing

A few years back, a priest friend of mine, Mother LaRaeRutenbar, told me that in her parish, she had a 19 year-old woman with cerebral palsy. The doctors thought they could at least improve her eye-sight so she had surgery which was intended to help her failing vision. But something went wrong and she became completely blind. Not long after the surgery, the young woman was talking to Mother LaRae and she said to her, “Remember when Jesus healed the blind man on some road. Where is that road? Can I find that road?”

The young woman was referring to a story contained in Matthew, Mark and Luke. While each of those three Gospel writers has a slightly different version of the story, two facts remain consistent: Jesus healed a blind man, and that healing closely —if not immediately —preceded Jesus’entrance into Jerusalem. I don’t think the time or place was coincidence. The root word from which “healing”comes means “wholeness”, and through Christ’s self-offering in Jerusalem, we are all healed, we are all made whole, we are all made to see where true life is to be found.

Soon after entering Jerusalem, Jesus shares a last meal with his disciples. According to three of the Gospels, it was a Passover meal. It was held on this night —the night before he died —which the Church now knows as Maundy Thursday, and that meal has become our Eucharist. It is a meal in which Jesus talks of offering the gift of himself: “This is my body given for you; this is my blood shed for you.” On this night, through bread and wine, Jesus’actions foreshadow what he will accomplish with his body on the cross. And among other things, he will heal us and make us whole.

Through Jesus’self-offering on the cross, we are healed of so many things. We are healed of our fear of worthlessness, for in and through his death, it is concretely evident that we are worth all the world to God. We are so valued that there is nothing God won’t do for us. Through Jesus’self-offering, we are healed of our perceived need to merit God’s love, for God’s love continued in the midst of our sins —including the killing of God Incarnated —when we merited nothing but punishment for “while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.”Through Jesus’self-offering, we are healed of our fear of death for, in Jesus’offering his life for us, we are shown that death is not an end but a beginning.

But above all, it seems, we are healed of the mistaken belief that our life consists in looking out for ourselves rather than offering ourselves to God and one another —as Jesus did on this night and as he will do tomorrow on the cross.

Rabbi Harold Kusher has said that he doesn’t believe dying is people’s ultimate fear. Rather, he says, we are afraid of something far more tragic that that, far more tragic than dying. We are afraid of “never having lived. We are afraid of coming to the end of our days with the sense that we were never really alive, that we never figured out what life was for…” (When All You Ever Wanted Isn’t Enough, p. 156)

We want to live a life that means something —and during this week in particular, God in Christ shows us how that’s done. Christ shows us in a very real way that those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for his sake will find it. Our lives are given meaning —and true life is found —in giving ourselves for others, and our lives are lost when they become solely about us. Nothing makes that clearer than Holy Week.

Look at the disciples on this night. Bent on saving their own skin, they desert and deny the one who has loved them unconditionally. On this night, the disciples, figuratively, lose their lives. They lose sight of who they are meant to be and what they are called to do —because they are intent on saving themselves. Ultimately, they’ll end up hiding in fear, behind locked doors —with no life at all. Afraid of living and afraid of dying.

Self-offering, living a life for others rather than looking out only for ourselves, is a central tenet of our faith —but it is no more popular with us than with the disciples. Think of some of the most popular books and magazine articles in our culture today: How can I be a success? How can I be happy? How can I attain fulfillment? It’s all about “me.”

And some churches along the way have picked up on that. The idea of self-offering has gotten so lost that many of what are called the “seeker friendly churches”refuse to have a cross anywhere in their church because a cross —that ultimate symbol of self-giving —offends people. It infringes on their “comfort zone.”

But I don’t think Christ is concerned about our comfort zone. He is concerned more about the quality of our lives: the depth and scope and meaning of our lives. And our lives are given depth and scope and meaning, not by looking out for ourselves but by looking out for one another. Our attempts to avoid risk and self-offering rob us of living, because fear of those things always turns into a stingy, cautious way of living that is not really living at all. Like the disciples, we become afraid of living and afraid of dying.

The Christian life is about living the kind of life exemplified in Christ’s life: a life that matters for others. This may be anything from picking up groceries for a sick friend to —as we’ve seen recently on television reports —rushing to help victims of a terrorist attack. However we live it out, the Christian life is a a life that, as author Barbara Brown Taylor has said, “spends itself…knowing that there is always more life where our own life comes from, and that even when our own lives run out, God will have more life in store for us, because our God is a God who never runs out of life.” (The Seeds of Heaven, pp. 56-57)

Sadhu Sundar Singh was a Chinese missionary. Once, he and a companion were traveling through a high mountain pass in the Himalayan Mountains in the midst of a snow storm, when they came across an injured man lying in the snow. Singh wanted to stop and help, but his companion said that, if they burdened themselves with the injured man, they’d never make it. The companion went ahead, but Singh stayed to help. He lifted the freezing man on his shoulders and with great effort, slogged though the storm.

And then an interesting thing began to happen. The heat from Singh’s body gradually began to warm up the half-frozen man he was carrying on his shoulders, and eventually the man revived. After a time, both were walking together, side by side, helping each other find their way through the storm. Suddenly, they stumbled over something in the snow. It was Singh’s former companion, dead, frozen by the cold. In risking his own life, in offering himself for another, Singh found life —literally —for himself and for another.

Like the young woman at the beginning of this homily, we’re all looking for the road to healing and wholeness —and tonight we find it. On this night, when Christ says that his body and blood are given for us, we are reminded what it is that heals us and makes us whole: Christ offering himself to us and our offering ourselves to him and to one another.

We are reminded of that by One who pours out his life for us, who puts us on his shoulders and carries us home by way of a road which leads through Jerusalem to a hill called Calvary, the place of ultimate self-giving. But it is also a road which finds its end —and beginning —in an empty tomb with new life, real life, for us and for the world.

Mother Liza Spangler, Assisting Priest

Church of the Holy Spirit, Orleans, MA

Maundy Thursday, 2016