Wisdom of Solomon 1:13-15; 2:23-24 Lamentations 3:21-33
2 Corinthians 8:7-15 Mark 5:21-43
It would seem to me that from extended reading of the Bible, we can conclude that it is a collection of writing containing the insights of people who are struggling to live with the great mixture of life, with the many seeming inconsistencies that cannot be avoided in this great mixture. In terms that we can understand, the mixture of a most powerful loving being whose love would not want innocent suffering to happen seems to be contradicted when that powerful loving being exercises restraint from intervening in the free conditions of the world when innocent suffering happens all the time, sometimes as the deliberate inhumanity of people toward others, and sometimes in the seeming mistimings in the events of nature, particularly like when an earthquake happens under the place inhabited by many people.
Much of the writing of the Bible is generated under the conditions of the seeming conditions of what is evil, bad, suffering, and loss being the dominant experience for those who were writing their insights for living for their communities.
When in the probability mixtures of good things happening and bad things happening, and the bad seem to be the dominant experience, the hopeful thinking arises as a coping mechanism but also as an art of living, namely, the art of having faith or being persuaded about love, goodness, health, and justice.
When so many people seem to be just ordinarily selfish or extremely bad, humanity needs exemplars of something different. Humanity needs utopian people, people who seem so extraordinary that they provide an example for the direction of how we can live best, given the vulnerabilities of life.
If we can be amazed at how Mozart had a way with music from very early age which blossomed into sheer musical genius; Jesus was the person who had a way with living itself to such a superlative degree that people could only use divine to speak about how this other-worldly person lived a "this-worldly" life.
"This-worldly" life includes sin, loss, sickness, and many other negative probabilities in the field of freedom which is our actual experience. Freedom in time means that in faith we look for good outcomes in the face of actual bad circumstances.
In the event of disease and sickness, we seek the good outcome of health. The Gospel writers who wrote decades after Jesus lived, were writing from their belief of the return of the Risen Christ within their lives through the baptism of the Holy Spirit. So they promoted the presence of an eternal life within themselves even as their outward lives showed all of the wear and tear of times, including the events of sickness.
The spiritual message of the healing stories of the Gospel is that we can know the healthfulness of the Risen Christ within us even while we are sick. Something has come out of Jesus of Nazareth which is continuously healthful for us.
Are selective uncanny healing stories meant to indicate that Jesus and God selectively choose to heal or cure some people and not others? What is the divine criteria for why some people get uncanny cures and not others? It is a fact that not everyone who has been or who is sick gets cured or healed by Jesus, so what is message of the healing stories of the Gospels? Were they meant to indicate that Jesus had gotten rid of all sickness for everyone all the time, if only people had the right kind of faith to activate such healing?
I think that the spiritual meaning of the healing stories is that the higher health of eternal spiritual life co-exists with sickness in time not to unrealistically think that sickness will no longer happen, but to know a greater embracing and integrating experience of all that is happening to us.
The healing of the young girl bespeaks the healing of the "child aspect" of our personalities which is often dead-like because it is buried by our experiences of adult loss and grief. We have the power of Christ to resurrect our "inner child," the one who is hopeful, joyful, and happy for no reason at all, like a smiling baby in treatment for terminable cancer, or like kids, laughing and smiling in a refugee camp playing soccer with a make shift ball.
Reality would often mock us to believe that we have no reason for hope, joy, kindness, and goodness, because things are just too bad, and too sick.
The health offered to us by the Risen Christ is an integrating everlastingness which we can experience within us and be persuaded about how worthwhile life is, in itself.
Let us accept the rebirth of our inner child who has the wisdom, the naïveté, the innocence, the hope, and the joy, to smile for no seeming reason at all except for being made in the image of the Hope that is God. Amen.
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