Our broken health care system is at the forefront of a national debate on how and whether it might be reformed; in our homes, men and women struggle to figure out how to obtain health care insurance, and how to pay its ever-rising premiums and co-pays; we are in the grip of a near panic over the H1N1 flu, with our government telling us that we must get immunized or face dire consequences, and at the same time failing to make the vaccine available to us in anything approaching adequate amounts; and of course many of us struggle with health issues of our own, or in our families.

Our reading today is a healing narrative, a testimony to the power of God to heal, a power invoked by and transmitted through Jesus. As the editors tell us in their section heading, this is a story about how Jesus heals a crippled woman. But is much more than a testimony to the curing of one person, the woman crippled for over eighteen years. For if we look closely, we can see that it is not this one woman alone who is in desperate need of healing. The entire community is sick, crippled to its core.

Look at the leaders of the community, their “best and brightest”. They are appalled that this woman has been healed on the Sabbath, a day, they argue, which should be a day of rest when no work is performed. Their legalistic understanding of God’s will passed on to them as law cripples their compassion.

Look at the cultural rules of the day, which encode the belief that those who are ill are ritually “unclean”, and therefore subject to exclusion from the worshipping community and much of every day society, lest others be “contaminated.” The isolationism promoted by these restrictive rules cripples the ability of the community to care for those most in need, and promotes a false assumption that those in need of healing are “out there”, while the insiders are whole in body, mind and spirit.

This is a society and culture which, Jesus understands, is sick at heart, and symptomatic of this illness is that on the Sabbath it treats farm animals better than humans in need. By publicly healing on the Sabbath, Jesus does far more than cure one woman of a crippling condition – he sets forth a vision of ways in which the entire community might be healed as well. It is a vision, moreover, that judging by the community’s reaction, it longed for: “And the entire crowd was rejoicing at all the wonderful things that he was doing.”

Fast forward almost two thousand years. She was, everyone knew – her husband, her family, her oncologists, her chemotherapy nurses, everyone – she was the breast cancer patient in desperate need of healing. Ever since the recurrence, her life had been a series of medical interventions – surgery, radiation, chemotherapy, more surgery, more chemotherapy – medical interventions aimed at curing her of this plague, of freeing her from these rampaging cells. Ever since the recurrence, she had been the object – “the brain tumor in room 345”, “the 10:00 at the radiation clinic”, “the Tamoxifin in bed 13” in the chemotherapy unit. In this she was no different from any of the other countless patients who that winter afternoon filled the clinic, victims all of this dreaded disease. But this day, this day she is different.

In a rush she arrives in her wheelchair, pushed towards the reception desk at maniac speed by her husband. On her imperiously erect head is poised a gaudy, bejeweled tiara, a left-over from a daughter’s Halloween costume; in her hand sways back and forth a fairy wand, complete with stars and ribbons streaming in the breeze stirred up by her fast passage down the clinic corridor. Astonished, the usually dour receptionist, instantly recognizing this repeat patient, stammers out, “Good afternoon, Mrs. ….” The wheelchair occupant cuts her off in mid-sentence: “Excuse me, you must be mistaken. You, and all assembled here, shall address me today as “Your Highness”, or “Princess”.”

The receptionist does not know what to do. The entire waiting room holds its breath, nurses curiously poke their heads out of their treatment bays, all wonder how this is going to turn out. And then the receptionist, breaking into a huge smile, with a flourish of her hand and a bowing of her head replies, “As you wish, Your Highness.” And the waiting room erupts into gales of laughter, and the oncology nurses all happily play along, and for a few hours, on a single day that had started out for so many as just another in a seemingly endless parade of days in search of personal healing, there is the vision – no, more than a vision, the reality – the reality of a transformed community, where the victims are royalty, where tears become laughter, where the ministered to become those who minister to others, where in perhaps one of the most unlikely of places the kingdom of God breaks out. And as Luke reported long ago, at the scene of another healing, “And the entire crowd was rejoicing at all the wonderful things that he was doing.”

Luke’s account of the healing of the woman crippled eighteen years, an account echoed by the healing in the chemotherapy unit just narrated – a healing I was privileged to witness first hand – remind us that the healing that Jesus was about, and the healing that God wills for all of us, is far different from the individualized healing so many of us long for and expect of God.

We read the accounts of Jesus healing people and we see them as only a deliverance from personal physical suffering, as if Jesus was entrusted with some sort of medical mission to wipe out disease and distress from ancient Palestine. We do this, I think, because we so highly prize our own physical health, and we want to know, in our lives, in our bodies, the same sort of physical reversals once accomplished for a few by that super-doctor Jesus. And we forget that Jesus, instead of waging some sort of fairy wand to abolish all suffering on earth, came to earth to share in the suffering, not abstractly, and not just as an idea, but in his body, all the way to the point of suffering and dying on the cross.

Jesus was about healing, but his vision of healing was far broader than a simple, miraculous, individualized physical cure. The Rev. Dana English puts it this way: “Our faith can make us well. Jesus can restore us to health. A health which is a wholeness of being, a deeply centered devotion, not to the obsessive monitoring of our own symptoms, but to the loving presence of God in our lives. Continual prayer, intercessions, active concerns for the needs of others, embracing the blind and the lame: these are the means of our healing. God’s loving presence will never leave us, even in the midst of harsh pain.” (The Living Pulpit: Healing, Vol. 6, No. 2, April-June 1997, p. 13)

Assured of this reality, that there is a balm in Gilead, that God’s will is for us to be healed, that nothing can separate us from the love of God, we can be freed from our excessive preoccupation that Jesus will cure us, freed to embrace the great joy that we are all involved intimately, closely, permanently, in the kingdom of God freely offered to us, a kingdom where the health of all is inextricably intertwined and connected.

Again, Rev. English:

“. . . life together will always consist of pain and suffering in some measure. And as long as we expend our best energies on avoiding or curing “personal” suffering, rather than on sharing in the ministry which will always be before us, of showing forth (as Jesus did) the love and compassion of God to others, we will never be at peace, we will never be at rest. We will never be whole.” (Id.)

Look again at the scene in the chemotherapy clinic. A narrow focus on a personal cure would miss the wholeness that was bestowed on an entire community that day. One patient – no, let me not use that word, for it implies that this person was the object of care alone – this person decided that no longer would she be merely the object of the care of others, no longer would it be just all about her and “her” cancer and her health. On this day she would remember that, illness or not, she was a beloved child of God, created just a little lower that God, part of a royal priesthood, a citizen with the saints. And she would remind others that just as this was true for her, it was true for all, and so they, too, could embrace this gift in their own lives. As a result, the entire community rose to new life, and in a place which all too often is understandably somber, there was laughter and joy and new life.

Perhaps this might be an approach that would help us move forward in this national debate on health care reform, a debate that too often has become bogged down in partisan politics, scare tactics, and demagoguery. If we focus merely on the technical merits of various reform proposals, if we devote our exclusive attention to matters of how to finance this or that, or what mechanisms will be in place to coordinate payment methods, we will miss that what needs healing here is far more than our health care system.

What also needs healed is how we work together as a community, as a nation, as a people who are more together than the sum of its individual constituent parts.

What also needs healed is a fragmented national media which too often cynically functions as attack dogs for opposing political parties, not out of principle, but because that is how they can make the most profit for their bottom lines and personal fortunes.

What also needs healed is a political system which increasingly seems to reward those who seek to divide, rather than to unite, who foment bitterness, rather than engender mutual respect.

Our entire community is sick, crippled to its core.

And yet, there is a balm in Gilead, and God’s will for us is that we be made well. May that good news empower us, and embolden us, to be instruments of that healing for each other, for our ailing communities, and for all of God’s precious world. Amen.