Thursday, January 13, 2005

14 January 2005

Jurgen Moltmann comments on the healing power of Jesus.



Sinner are, in the gospels often defined as people who are sick.

Out of the darkness into which they have been banished, so that no one is forced to see them, they come into the light of Jesus and seek the healing power of his physical presence.

...These healings are always associated with the expulsion of 'unclean spirits', demons. this is a way of saying that Jesus' vital power was to an extraordinary degree infectious life: it was vita vivificans - life that gives life. When Jesus comes, life comes into a sick and frightened world.



Unclean spirits is not just a way to refer to people who have a physical sickness. We would to well to see unclean spirits as that which grabs a persons heart and life and changes it from being beloved and thus loving into something else. Therefore, we could even say that when Jesus expels an unclean spirit it could be that the person suffered from "meanness" that was so deep that no one was able to come near the person. Could it be that that someone was so "full of themselves" so self-absorbed that no one else in their life really mattered much at all, that they lacked the wonderful gift of the living presence of God's love and were therefore possessed by an unclean spirit? When Jesus comes into their life and heal them, they begin to live a life filled with love and with life actions reflective of such love. That's a real healing event.



Connection: Old biblical words can really seem foreign. Then again, if we look around as the absence of the love of God as put to life in Jesus, some of them are not odd at all. Look around. There are many ways the healing love of our God is needed all around us.



Bless us with your power to heal, O God, so that our ways may give way to the life-giving will that brings healing into our broken world. Amen.

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