Every other January, I take a group of university students to the Eternal City of Rome where I teach a course on early Christianity. Since we are surrounded by the art and architecture of the early Christians, we spend our time visiting house churches and catacombs, martyr halls and basilicas, chapels, museums and early monastic centers. A central task of the course is to discover how our ancestors worshipped, understood, and imitated Jesus of Nazareth, the central figure in the Christian story. As they study the artistic images of Jesus from the first three hundred year of Christian life in the city, my students are surprised – quite surprised – when they discover that it is very difficult to find an image of Mary, the birth of Jesus, the cross, the risen Christ, the second coming, or the last judgment.

What we do find in abundance are images of meal scenes and healing scenes. We find paintings, mosaics, and carvings of Christians sharing large round loaves of bread and big cups of wine. We discover Jesus bringing sight to a man born blind, healing a paralytic, releasing a woman from the misery of a hemorrhage, restoring a young girl to life. Wherever we go in early Christian Rome, we encounter these images of healing over and over again, as if our ancient sisters and brothers could not create enough of them, as if they wanted their children – and perhaps us – to know that they experienced and understood Jesus as the embodiment of God’s desire for healing in this world, that they recognized in him a powerful energy which brings health and wholeness to the creation – wholeness being the root meaning of the word “salvation.” While our ancestors could say many things about Jesus, they would not hesitate to tell us that he was born of Mary and baptized by John to heal: that is, to promote health and life rather than diminishment and death; to free people from grief, troubles, and anxiety; to reconcile what is separated; to cleanse and to close a wound of the body, the mind, or the spirit.

As a child, I received these healing stories of Jesus as miracles, as supernatural events, which somehow “proved” that he was divine since, in the thinking of my childhood, only the divine – only God – could heal with a glance, a word, or a touch. In other words, the many healing stories narrated in the gospels were more about him than the people who experienced healing, more about God than about us. But then I went to college and then to seminary and learned that there were numerous healers in Palestine at the time of Jesus. There was nothing unusual about being a healer but there was this: it seems that Jesus the healer was different than others of his time and region.

While other healers charged people for their services, Jesus offers free healing; he charges not a penny since, in the reign of God, health is a free gift from God. Rather than being left to their own devices, superstitions, or misery because they could not pay the fee, healing flows through Jesus to the many poor who had no access to healing. While other healers were associated with a healing center – a healing shrine – to which those in need would have to travel, Jesus is on the move; he is mobile, always going toward those who, because they were lame, paralyzed, blind, bed-ridden, or without friends or family, would find it almost impossible to travel to a healing center. He goes to them. He does not simply observe human suffering as a predictable fact of life, but engages and alleviates such suffering. And this as well: we know that in the ancient world – a pre-scientific world – people sincerely believed that chronic illness, mental illness, any physical deformity, and death made one “unclean” and “unholy” in the sight of God and the community. Simply touching a leper, a menstruating woman, a dead girl, a demented man, someone who practiced a seemingly “unholy” religion, or was of a different race rendered one socially untouchable. In that world, so different from and yet in some ways so similar to our own (for we, too, have our cultural and personal lists of “untouchable” persons), Jesus ignores the invisible yet very real boundaries that separate people into “clean” and “unclean,” “insiders” and “outsiders,” ”healthy” and “unhealthy,” “worthy of touch” and “untouchable.” He crosses these boundaries and in healing those perceived as outsiders, he makes himself “unclean” and “unholy.” In his commitment to the reign of God, he reveals that God is with those who society declares “untouchable” for it would seem that in the reign of God, there is only mercy for those in need: for the poorest of the poor, the uncontrollably demented, the emotionally scared, the intellectually arrogant, those who worship other gods. It would seem that in the merciful reign of God, in that ancient world and in our own, there is to be free healing, mobile healing, and universal healing.

And yet, in today’s gospel, we hear one more thing: Jesus holds no monopoly on healing. It is not his private possession or a personal demonstration of his divine origin; it is not something to be earned or demanded from him, the calculation of cost and benefit so lively in his time and in our own. It is not hoarded or guarded. Rather, the capacity to heal is given away, flows through him and from him to the many, not the few: Mark writes that “he called [them] and began to send them out … and they anointed the many who were sick and cured them” (6:7, 13). You see, here is the astonishing discovery: the capacity to heal is freely given away to his companions, that is, to you and to me.

It has been many years since my baptism and only a few weeks since the baptisms of Alexis, Christopher, and David. I mention these baptisms because each one prompts me, and can prompt us, to ask the simple yet troubling question: What is flowing into each of us because of our baptism when each of us, as a wee infant or an adult, was consecrated a priest with Jesus the healer? And so I wonder and I ask you to wonder with me: if we have been made one with Christ as his sisters and brothers, if we have received his vibrant and life-giving Spirit, if we have been drawn into this community which communes in his Body and his Blood, have not you and I also been drawn into a body of persons committed to healing? Does not each one of us share, in our own distinctive manner – let me say that again, in our own distinctive manner – the capacity to promote health and life rather than diminishment and death; to free others from grief, troubles, and anxiety; to reconcile what is sadly separated; to cleanse and to close a wound of the mind, spirit, or body? Or, and you might readily agree with me, is that asking too much of us? Wouldn’t it be better to leave the promise of healing to the professionals: to the physicians, therapists, surgeons, nurses, deacons, social workers, psychiatrists, and priests?

Indeed, if I told my 83 year old mother, a homemaker for most of her life, that she is an embodiment of Jesus’ healing power in the world today, she would probably roll her eyes, laugh out loud, and say, “Sam, calm down! I just listen to friends tell me their troubles on the telephone and try to give some small word of encouragement.” So, a retired woman listens to people on the telephone. Is that something so insignificant that we can easily ignore it or chuckle about it? I think not. It doesn’t seem insignificant at all to the person speaking on the telephone who has just been told by her physician that her baby is autistic, or the person who has just found out that his wife has been diagnosed with cancer, or the person who finds if difficult to reconcile a good God with senseless suffering in the world, or the person who, as an adult, is still rehearsing the memory of a troubled and diminished childhood. Hardly “insignificant.”

You see, there is no monopoly on healing in the reign of God and in the presence of Jesus. We are simply acting according to our nature as Christians when we allow this healing energy to flow through us to each other, when we allow this healing energy to flow through us to those who care not one wit for Jesus or his church.

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