Daily Bread

While he was saying these things to them, suddenly a leader of the synagogue came in and knelt before him, saying, ‘My daughter has just died; but come and lay your hand on her, and she will live.’ And Jesus got up and followed him, with his disciples. Then suddenly a woman who had been suffering from haemorrhages for twelve years came up behind him and touched the fringe of his cloak, for she said to herself, ‘If I only touch his cloak, I will be made well.’ Jesus turned, and seeing her he said, ‘Take heart, daughter; your faith has made you well.’ And instantly the woman was made well. When Jesus came to the leader’s house and saw the flute-players and the crowd making a commotion, he said, ‘Go away; for the girl is not dead but sleeping.’ And they laughed at him. But when the crowd had been put outside, he went in and took her by the hand, and the girl got up. And the report of this spread throughout that district.

The healing stories in the gospels often leave me with a pang in my heart. The pain from bereavement and suffering resonates with our own longing for intervention and healing. How we wish, today, children could be raised from the dead or healed of chronic illness, however, I wonder if our perspective — especially in our contemporary affluent Western culture — is distorted?

Back in the late 1990s my first wife and I were supporting a group of nine orphaned children in Kigali in Rwanda. To put them through secondary school cost about £200 per year. One Christmas we received a card signed only by eight children. I asked our friend at the Mothers' Union what had happened to one of the children, to which her reply was a frank, "Oh, she died." What? Excuse me? How? When? Why? I was shocked. In my culture we had hospitals and medical intervention. In her culture, children died.

If you transported someone from 2000 years ago to today, they would be more than gobsmacked at our medicine and our ability to heal and prolong life. How could we explain antibiotics, CT scans, heart transplants, gene therapy, or mRNA vaccines? Miraculous would be an understatement.

In the rural parish in which I grew up, I found some old parish magazines from the turn of the century. In it were listed births, baptisms, and deaths. It made for some sober reading as child after child would be born, and within weeks or months, be dead. The global infant mortality rates in 1900 was 50%, today it is 3%. Again, nothing short of miraculous.

It is also sobering to think that if I lived 100 years ago, I wouldn't be here, Helen wouldn't be here, three of our kids wouldn't be here, and none of our parents would be here. We would all be dead. We live thanks to modern medicine and intervention.

God has called us to be co-creators in the world, and Jesus said we would do greater things than he, and we are. We really are. Does it mean I will stop praying for miraculous healing? No, but my prayers are more aligned with humans (created in the image of, and inspired by a wonderfully creative God) providing the solution.

Holy God
How I long to see
a world where there is
no more pain or suffering,
yet remind me to be
thankful for progress
we have made
in science and medicine,
for which many of us
owe our own lives.