Topic: Healing

Christ is sacramentally present to heal and forgive when his people are open, honest and vulnerable with one another in seeking healing for their sickness and suffering.

As the victim of the ultimate in human evil, the risen Christ is the One who can offer the complete forgiveness, to us, and through us to the rest of the world.

Lent can be a dark night filled with tears and mourning and loss, but it is worth it, for God’s joy comes in the morning.

God in Jesus Christ touches our grubby humanity to make it clean, so that human beings and human community might regain their colour, shape and original purpose.

The demonic forces of our culture and time colonise our lives but if we turn to Christ, he will drive away the demons and fill us with his Spirit. His truth will set us free.

The wound of abandonment which haunts every human being will find its healing in Christ who is everywhere present as the authority and power of God.

The gospel calls us on a road to healing and wholeness, but its steps are so deceptively simple (which doesn’t mean easy) that we often don’t take them seriously and so don’t do them.

Summing up the previous section of the gospel, Bartimaeus is a model disciple – one who sees who Jesus is, has no pretensions to power, leaves everything, and follows Jesus on the way.

When we encounter the reality of God we are overcome with our own unworthiness, and we are confronted with a choice – to push God away and hide from our self-realization, or to accept God’s gracious invitation to mercy, transformation and mission.

Christ’s wish is that all people will respond with thankful joy to his offer of holistic healing and growth – physical, emotional, social.

God’s church is to be a place of cleansing and healing and preparation for mission.