Romans 5. 1-8; Matthew 9.35 – 10.8
I’d like to offer you a simple idea this morning, and it’s this: salvation in Jesus Christ is an act of divine healing; more specifically, it is an act of healing our harassed and helpless human nature.
But if this is true, then there seems to be a contradiction between the two readings we heard this morning.
On the one hand, in the Gospel of St Matthew, we see Jesus going about curing every disease and every sickness, and because of his compassion for the crowds he sends out the twelve disciples with authority to do the same.
But, on the other hand, in his letter to the Romans, St Paul proclaims that, having been made righteous by the gift of God’s mercy and grace, he now boasts in his sufferings. He boasts in his sufferings because they produce endurance, which produces character, which, in turn, produces hope – the hope of sharing in the glory of God.
These two readings from scripture seem to present conflicting pictures of God’s attitude towards human suffering. On the one hand, it seems fundamental to Jesus’s ministry that, when he encounters human suffering, he has compassion and heals it! But on the other hand, it seems that St Paul is saying that suffering has a positive role to play as we walk the way of salvation.
In order to make some sense of this paradox, I think we need to bear in mind two things.
First, Jesus’s ministry of healing the physically sick and diseased ultimately points to his more fundamental work of healing the spiritual disease of our human nature, namely, sin and death.
St Paul tells us that while we were sinners – that is, while we were helpless, sick, and weak – God proved his love for us in sending his Son to die for us.
As he goes on to say after the passage we heard this morning, under the old order of Adam, the whole of humanity was imprisoned under the reign of death. Through the sin of our first parent, death spread like a disease and enslaved the whole human family, so that even our wills are harassed and rendered helpless by the power of sin within us. It is the spiritual disease of sin, says St Paul, which prevents us from doing the good that we want to do, instead, inclining us to do what we hate, and imprisons us in what he calls ‘this body of death’.
However, as the great hymn puts it:
O loving wisdom of our God!
When all was sin and shame,
A second Adam to the fight
And to the rescue came.
In his compassion and great love for us, God did not abandon us, but sent his Son to take all of our sin and death into his own body, in order to destroy its power upon the tree of the cross. As St Peter puts it, ‘He himself bore our sins in his body on the cross, so that, free from sins, we might live for righteousness; by his wounds you have been healed.’ (1 Peter 2. 24.)
But if this is true, then the second thing we must bear in mind is that, what we are offered by God in Christ is the promise and hope of a new world, a new creation.
In other words, Jesus came not simply to make little adjustments to this present age – a little healing miracle here and there. Instead, by healing the spiritual disease which lies at the root of all this world’s problems, he opened up the possibility of a new world entirely free from sin and death.
And it is in connection with this hope for the new creation that St Paul speaks about boasting in his sufferings. He says that he boasts in his sufferings because they produce endurance, which produces character, which, in turn, produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us, because, like the love of God, it is a gift of the Holy Spirit.
This gift of hope within us bears witness that we are children of God, and that we will be the inheritors of the new creation. This is the promise of a new world, but not one that we presently see.
In his earthly ministry, Jesus was the presence of that new world of the age to come in the midst of this present sinful and damaged world. That is why the sick and the diseased were healed wherever he went. Because there is no suffering and no death in God’s kingdom.
But the healing that he offers is not just a plaster over the wounds of our problems and sufferings in this world. What he offers is nothing short of the crucifixion of the whole order of sin and death that hold this present age captive, and the birth of a new world, a new kingdom, through the power of his resurrection.
However, one of the problems of our sinfulness is that it makes us cling to this present world as if it were our ultimate good. It makes us forget that we are created for the infinite love of God, so that we settle for finite goods instead.
St Paul says that he rejoices in his sufferings because they wean him away from such an illusion. Instead, they produce the endurance and character that directs his desires towards a greater hope of a greater world to come in God’s kingdom.
This is absolutely not to say that God dishes out suffering, sickness, and afflictions in order to teach us a lesson. Rather, it is to recognise that this world is already broken and damaged, and that it cannot be our ultimate home. And so, it seems that St Paul is saying that he has learned to boast even in the midst of his sufferings, because they prevent him from thinking that his ultimate happiness can be found in anything other than God.
Suffering can take many forms. In the gospel this morning we see that Jesus has nothing but compassion for the tragedies that we face in this life. Sometimes the pain and trials we face seem to be too much to bear, and why God should allow horrendous evil to happen in the world that he has made is a mystery to us.
But one thing we have is hope, hope that, in Christ, God has opened up the possibility of a new world entirely free from sin and death. And the Holy Communion which we celebrate this morning is a foretaste of that age to come, and a pledge that it is God’s good pleasure to give it to us.