Healing Was a Bigger Word
Part 3 of 6 · When Healing Doesn’t Come
New to the series? Start with Part 1: When We Question If Faith Is Enough
and Part 2: Surprised by Faith.
We hear the word healing and most of us picture the same thing. Symptoms gone. Fever broken. Pain stopped. The body, back to the way it was before whatever happened happened. That’s the working definition our culture assumes. But it stops short.
The Gospel writers were after something larger and far more comprehensive.
To truly understand the role of faith in the Gospels’ healing stories, especially what it isn’t doing, we need to consider what the word meant to the original audience. The gap between their understanding and ours is greater than we realize.
The Jesus
Jesus is the Healer. Full stop. Look at the Gospels and notice how much is given to bodies being made whole. Nearly a third of Mark’s gospel is given to healing scenes. Across all four Gospels, the figure runs closer to one-fifth.1 Crowds press in. Fevers flee. Sight returns. Bodies rise up. The healings are so frequent and consequential that they shape how Jesus is recognized.
The way his name is handled in the Greek carries immense weight. Iēsous was a common name in first-century Palestine, transliterated from the Hebrew Yeshua, the same name we render as Joshua. It means “Yahweh saves.” To distinguish him from the many other Yeshuas walking around, the Gospel writers often preceded his name with the Greek definite article, ho. Not just Jesus, but the Jesus.2 The one you’ve heard about. The one with the reputation. By the time the Gospels are written, that little “the” is doing real work. Say the Jesus in a Galilean village and people know exactly which one.
When John the Baptist sits in Herod’s prison, and his own faith begins to waver, he sends his friends to ask if Jesus is really the one or if they should look for another. Jesus’s reply isn’t a sermon. It’s a list. The blind receive sight, the lame walk, those who have leprosy are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the good news is proclaimed to the poor (Matt 11:5 NIV). That’s the evidence offered. The healings are the proof.
Peter, weeks after the resurrection, opens his Pentecost sermon the same way. Jesus of Nazareth was a man accredited by God to you by miracles, wonders and signs (Acts 2:22 NIV). Not accredited by his teaching or fulfillment of prophecy, though both are true. Accredited by what he did in physical bodies and other created matter. The healings weren’t peripheral to Jesus’s mission. They were part and parcel of it.3 What he did to bodies was what he came to do to everything. Renew and restore.
Symptoms or Shalom
Modern medicine is a gift. The wisdom he gives to operate, to dose, to image, to mend what’s broken, is one of the ways God ordinarily cares for his creation. Theologians have long named this as common grace, God’s steady provision through ordinary means.4 We don’t need to pit faith healing against medical healing. All healing, however it arrives, comes from the same hand.
But the modern frame has done something the biblical writers wouldn’t recognize. It has narrowed the word. Healing in our world tends to mean: the offending symptom is gone. The lab numbers normalize. The X-ray comes back clean. That is a real and beautiful thing, and we should pray for it without apology. But it’s thinner than what the prophets and the Gospel writers understood. Our modern frame is “a science-based view that sees healing mainly as the cure of symptoms.”5
The concept that shaped how biblical writers thought about healing was shalom.
We translate it as peace, which isn’t wrong, but it leaks. Biblical shalom is not merely a state of being or the absence of conflict. Better English renderings include completeness, wholeness, harmony, and fulfillment. Across the Old Testament’s full sweep, shalom is God’s gift, a divinely ordained order in which body, relationships, community, and soul flourish under God’s care.6 I’ve seen it in people who have come through something brutal and arrived not unscathed but whole. It’s not the absence of trouble but the presence of integration.
Illness represents more than just physical suffering; it signifies a deeper rift in the order and well-being that the loving God intended for His creation. Psalm 30 is one record of shalom fractured by illness. I cried to you for help and you healed me… you turned my wailing into dancing. What gets restored is not only the body. It’s the singing. The sense of being upright again before God and neighbor. It runs the other way too. Where shalom fractures, health fractures with it, in all directions at once.7 They aren’t separate categories that occasionally overlap. They’re the same garment, torn at the seam.
So when we ask whether God heals, the question turns out to be smaller than we realize. The fuller question is whether God restores shalom. To that one, the Gospels answer yes, again and again, in shapes we don’t always know to look for.
Back Into the Room
Here’s a dimension that gets missed almost every time. About a third of Jesus’s healings restored people who were also socially outcast: Gentiles, lepers, the demonized, the ritually unclean, the woman with the issue of blood, the Syrophoenician mother.8 You weren’t only sick. You were out. Health and identity were braided together in a way they aren’t for most of us.
N.T. Wright names what we miss in the social dimension of Jesus’ healing ministry, arguing that “for a first-century Jew, most if not all of the works of healing, which form the bulk of Jesus’ mighty works, could be seen as the restoration to membership in Israel of those who, through sickness or whatever, had been excluded as ritually unclean.”9 Jesus’s healings weren’t just physical restoration. They were social reintegration.
In their world, sickness was tied to designated roles in society and at home in ways it isn’t for us. Men worked outside the home in manual labor to provide for their families. Paralysis, blindness, or deafness didn’t just limit a man’s body. They cut him out of his place. He couldn’t farm, couldn’t earn, couldn’t be what his family needed. He didn’t just lose his work. He lost his identity and status within the community.10
For women, illness cut the same way.11 The woman with the issue of blood, who we’ll meet again next week, wasn’t only sick. She was ritually unclean, cut off from corporate worship and the marketplace, unable to be a wife or bear children. In that culture, those weren’t roles she filled. They were who she was.12 Likewise, when Peter’s mother-in-law is healed, she gets up and starts serving the guests in the household (Mark 1:31). She’s not just well. She’s back.
Jesus came to heal every place the Fall has broken. His redemptive work is to recover absolutely all of it. Old Testament scholar John Goldingay puts it this way: “Jesus himself brings a ministry of healing to broken bodies, broken minds, broken spirits, and broken relationships.” Bodies, minds, spirits, relationships. Everything the curse touched, his ministry came to undo.13
What this changes for the one praying right now
Years after our own loss, we’ve sat with people carrying the quiet ache that “nothing happened.” The lab numbers didn’t move. The body didn’t mend. The pain didn’t subside.
But I can say with confidence that something was happening. In John 5:17, Jesus said it plainly: “My Father is working until now, and I too am working.” He is always working. I won’t presume to name what that work is. That is God’s, and God’s alone. What I can say, from the other side of suffocating despair and grief, is that God really is caring, loving, and faithful. He is committed to our good, even when this fallen world presses in with everything it has.
The symptom going is one kind of healing. There are others.
I’ve watched people who, in the middle of the unanswered prayer, found themselves noticing things. The person who, still sick, found the grace to encourage others while needing encouragement themselves. The friend who stopped trying to fix and just kept showing up. The spouse who stayed, and loved, in the middle of betrayal. A faith almost lost, coming back even stronger. None of it is was what they asked for. None of it explains the suffering. But those things are real, and they were happening alongside the thing that wasn’t.
None of this replaces the longing for a body to be made well. We still pray for that. We’re supposed to pray for that. The Gospels themselves invite it, especially in light of Jesus as Healer.
But naming the wider work of God can help us see that he is at work in and around us, even when we’re watching only one window. It doesn’t make the unanswered easier. It does make us less alone in it.
Next week, we’ll look at the actual words the Gospel writers used to describe all of this. Three of them, in fact. Greek verbs that our English translations tend to flatten into a single category. Don’t worry, it won’t be too technical. But it will, I think, reframe how we picture healing when we see the word in the Gospels.
See you next week.
Thomas counts the healing scenes in Mark; Kelsey averages across all four Gospels. The exact percentage matters less than the cumulative weight. Whichever number you take, the healings aren’t scattered illustrations of Jesus’s identity. They’re the bulk of how that identity is shown. (John Christopher Thomas, “The Spirit, Healing and Mission,” International Review of Mission, 2004; Morton T. Kelsey, Healing and Christianity, Fortress Press.)
The Greek definite article before Iēsous (ὁ Ἰησοῦς, ho Iēsous) is easy to miss in English translation but does real interpretive work in the Greek text. Yeshua / Joshua was a common name; the article distinguishes the Jesus as the one with the spreading reputation. On this construction, see Kenneth S. Wuest, Word Studies from the Greek New Testament, vol. 1 (Eerdmans, 1980). On the etymology, Yeshua derives from a Hebrew root meaning “Yahweh saves” or “Yahweh is salvation,” a meaning Matthew makes explicit in the birth narrative: “you shall call his name Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins” (Matt 1:21). A first-century Jew hearing the name didn’t hear it the way we do, smooth and Christmas-card familiar. They heard rescue.
Thomas, “Spirit, Healing and Mission,” 422, describing healing as “part and parcel” of Jesus’s gospel proclamation. The point isn’t that healings illustrated his message. They demonstrated it. Marcus J. Borg makes the historical version of the same observation: “during his lifetime he was known primarily as a healer and exorcist.” Marcus J. Borg, Jesus: A New Vision (HarperOne, 2009), 55.
Kuyper, Berkhof, and Keller all treat the wisdom of medicine as a gift of God’s common grace rather than a competitor to divine healing. (Abraham Kuyper, Wisdom and Wonder, Lexham Press; Louis Berkhof, Systematic Theology, Eerdmans; Timothy Keller, Hope in Times of Fear, Penguin.) Swartley adds the pastoral caution that we should not pit faith healing against medical healing. (Willard M. Swartley, Health, Healing and the Church’s Mission, IVP Academic.) The early second-century bishop Ignatius of Antioch said it more compactly: “There is only one physician.”
Beate Jakob, “We Can Expect Great Things from God: The Relation Between Faith and Healing,” International Review of Mission 93, nos. 370/371 (July 2004): 467. Jakob isn’t anti-medical. She’s naming the cost of letting symptom-cure become the entire definition of what healing means.
Alvarado names what shalom isn’t (mere absence of conflict); Carr names what it is in English (completeness, wholeness, harmony, fulfillment); Knight grounds it theologically as the gift of the God who is himself called the God of peace. (Ruben Alvarado, “Shalom on Earth as It Is in Heaven,” Cultural Encounters, 2021; G. Lloyd Carr, “shalem,” in Theological Wordbook of the Old Testament, Moody Press; George W. Knight, “Peace,” in The Wycliffe Bible Encyclopedia, Moody Press.)
Joseph M. Savage, “Shalom and Its Relationship to Health/Healing in the Hebrew Scriptures: A Contextual and Semantic Study of the Books of Psalms and Jeremiah” (PhD diss., Florida State University, 2001), 213. Savage’s working thesis is that in the Hebrew Scriptures, shalom and health are mutually inclusive categories. Tear one, you tear the other. Mend one, you’re already mending the other. This is the conceptual world the Gospel writers inherited and worked inside.
The list draws on Swartley’s catalog of socially-out healing recipients, which includes the centurion’s servant, the Syrophoenician woman’s daughter, and the royal official’s son as Gentile cases alone. (Willard M. Swartley, Health, Healing and the Church’s Mission, IVP Academic.)
N.T. Wright, Jesus and the Victory of God, eBook, vol. 2, 4 vols., Christian Origins and the Question of God (London, Great Britain: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1996), 314.
Zorodzai Dube, “Reception of Jesus as Healer in Mark’s Community,” Hervormde Teologiese Studies 74, no. 1 (January 2018): 1-2, https://doi.org/10.4102/hts.v74i1.4952.
John J Pilch, “Healing in Mark: A Social Science Analysis,” Biblical Theology Bulletin 15, no. 4 (October 1985).
Keener, New Testament, 69.
Goldingay’s frame is that Jesus’ healing ministry is as wide as the Fall’s damage: body, mind, spirit, and relationship are all in view, not as four separate ministries but as one restoration with four faces. (John Goldingay, “Theology and Healing,” Evangelical Review of Theology, 1979.)
So good!