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Center for Action and Contemplation
Jesus’ Healing Ministry
Jesus’ Healing Ministry

The Significance of Healing

Sunday, January 26, 2025

Father Richard Rohr focuses on the Gospel of Mark to explore the significance of Jesus’ healing ministry:  

The Gospel of Mark is primarily a gospel of action. Jesus is constantly on the move from place to place, preaching and healing, preaching and healing. Jesus is conveying the good news of God’s big picture into people’s small worlds, and he does this much more than he talks about it. Jesus’ actions and physical healings consistently rearrange faulty relationships—with people’s own self-image, with others, with society, and with God who is henceforth seen as on their side. The same is true for us today.  

There’s not much profit in just thinking, “Wow, Jesus worked another miracle!” But there is much profit in noting the changed status, self-image, courage, and relationship to family or community that the cure invariably entails. This is the real transformative message. I am not denying that Jesus could and undoubtedly did perform physical healings. It still happens, and over the years I have seen it many times. At the same time, the healings and exorcisms in Mark’s Gospel are primarily to make statements about power, abuse, relationships, class, addiction, money, exclusion, the state of women and the poor, and the connections between soul and body—the same issues we face today.  

Jesus also doesn’t heal as a reward for good behavior. Usually there is no mention whatsoever of any prerequisites, and sometimes it’s not even the one cured, but those around them, who have faith. Neither in Mark’s Gospel is there any primary concern about life after death or heaven. We projected that onto the text. All of the healing stories are present-tense concerns for human suffering in this world. They tell us that God cares deeply about the tragic human condition now. How could we miss this? In general, rewards and punishments are inherent and current. Sin is its own punishment, and virtue is its own reward now.   

Jesus’ healing ministry reveals God’s solidarity with suffering. 

We are all initially created in the image of God, and Jesus’ public ministry is always recreating and restoring that image. We could say that is all he is doing! Christians believe that we cannot know the mind of God until we see what God was doing in, through, and with Jesus. Transformed people, like Jesus, naturally transform others. In Jesus’ ministry of healing and exorcism, the transformations were immediately verifiable and visible. The real message here is not a medical cure or whether Jesus could do such a thing, but that (1) God cares about human pain, (2) God cares about it in this world now, (3) God’s action actually changes people, and (4) the people who have experienced God’s grace are equipped to pass on the real message.   

Reference:  
Adapted from Richard Rohr, Yes, And…: Daily Meditations (Franciscan Media, 2013, 2019), 80, 401. 

Gabriel Jimenez, Untitled (detail), 2017, photo, Unsplash. Click here to enlarge image. Humble soil and saliva are base elements and essential to one of Jesus’ healings. The capacity for healing need not be elaborate or ostentatious. 

Story from Our Community:  

I am 33 years old and trying to heal the grief, anxiety and pain caused by being raised by an alcoholic father. Over the past few years, the Daily Meditations have helped me to find meaning in my process of healing from trauma, making me feel that I’m not alone on my journey. I never understood God until I started reading Father Richard’s books. He simplified it and helped me to embrace Jesus as a human and brother, a child of God like all of us. Jesus has become someone I can relate to in my quest for peace, within myself and the world. “Forgive them, for they do not know what they do” is perhaps my greatest lesson in life.  
—Nienke J.

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