I was recently invited to lead a healing and wholeness service and
was tempted to take the traditional line and use one of the many healing
miracles in the Bible as the primary text for the sermon. However, for reasons
which did not seem sensible at the time, I was being urged to go back down a
well-trodden path and focus on the parable of the Prodigal Son. The phrase
which kept coming to mind was in Luke 15 v17 which is translated in the King
James Version as ‘when he came to himself…’.
The story of the
Prodigal Son is well known and focuses on three main characters – the father
who despairs at the rebellious and ungrateful nature of his younger son yet
longs for his return, the elder brother who is strong on loyalty and hard work
but incapable of recognising the virtue of forgiveness. And then there’s the
younger son who does everything wrong, ends up in despair over his actions and
then, when at rock bottom, ‘comes to himself’.
Now what’s this got to
do with healing and wholeness? Well that was my question until I looked a
little more closely at it. Too often Christians have associated healing purely
with our physical selves. It’s not surprising when you read the healing
miracles of Jesus as they invariably focus on a person’s physical make up.
However a closer study shows that Jesus was not simply interested in a person’s
physical well-being but in wholeness – the well-being of the whole person.
Another understandable mistake is to think that healing is an event rather than
a process.
It soon became clear
to me that God was urging me to focus on wholeness. The notion of ‘coming to
ourselves’ is the beginning of the healing process. I detected two aspects to
this verse in Luke 15.
- False
gods – the first mistake
that the younger son made was to put his trust in false gods. Typical of
our 21st century hedonistic society, the temptation is to
assume that happiness comes through wealth and pleasure. How illusory this
notion is and we only have to look around at the faces of people in the
streets to find them riddled with tension and frustration.
- Modelling
ourselves on others – we
are all in danger of looking with envy at other people and wishing that we
could have what they have. What we don’t see is what other people face on
the inside and how they, like us, struggle with the person they are.
Verse 17 depicts a
turning point in the young man’s life. To his credit, he acknowledged his
mistakes and determined to do something about it. So often we fail to resolve our
problems by assuming that this is our lot and we should grin and bear it.
That’s not God’s view.
Words like ‘sin’ and
‘repent’ are not popular today but that’s precisely what happened here. He
recognised his mistakes (sin) and determined to turn his life around (repent).
Nothing could be more positive. Failure to respond in this way leads to so many
illnesses of the 21st century – both physical and emotional. It is
in taking responsibility for our own actions and standing up for what we truly
believe that we become the real person God created us to be. That’s wholeness!
One thing we can’t be
sure of in the parables of Jesus is to what extent they were original to Jesus
and how much was borrowed from contemporary wisdom. I suspect that the bulk of
this parable was already known to the people of his time. After all, the
parable reflects the history of the Israelite people as depicted in the Old
Testament – a people who started off in the idyllic setting of the Garden of
Eden, then became a rebellious people who spurned the grace of God and
worshipped other gods, ended up in exile (pig sty), came to their senses and
returned to the true God in repentance (and so the cycle repeated itself). This
on-going cycle is summed up in 2 Chronicles 7 v14 ‘…if my people,
who are called by my name, will humble themselves and pray and seek my face and
turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, and I will forgive
their sin and will heal their land.‘ Again
it’s interesting to note that healing is not just about our physical make-up.
If ever our land (nation) needed healing, it’s now.
What seems to be
original to Jesus is the appendix – the bit about the elder brother. It seems
to be a deliberate ‘poke in the eye’ for those among the Pharisees who, like
the elder brother, were strong on personal morality (keeping to the letter of
the law) but struggled with the notion that God is a God of ridiculously
extravagant grace. Like the labourers in the vineyard (Matthew 20:1-16) we have
to accept that God’s grace is simply not fair.
But the appendix as I
call it highlights the most important truth of all – a truth that many struggle
with. It is that we should live constantly believing in the extravagant grace
of God who, in spite of who we are, what we have done, or what we may think
about ourselves, loves us to bits and wants to transform our lives. In other
words, we should not listen to the negative impulses which so often permeate
our thinking but hold fast to the picture of the younger son’s homecoming.
After all, the
greatest healing agent the world has ever known is - LOVE!
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