In November last year, the Archbishops of Canterbury and York and other senior church leaders called a month of Prayer for the Nation. A set of prayer topics for each day of the week accompanied this initiative. One prayer topic begins with the statement 'Our God is the great healer – and the agent used more than any other is the NHS.'
When I first read this statement I thought it was theologically questionable, and as I have reflected on it ever since I have become convinced that it represents a view of healing that needs to be challenged.
My problem with the statement is not its claim that God is 'the great healer.' The Bible is very clear that this is the case. In Exodus 15:26, for example God declares to Israel 'I am the Lord your healer' and the Psalmist likewise testifies in Psalm 103:3 that God 'heals all your diseases.'
In line with this, when God becomes incarnate in Jesus Christ, he spends a large amount of his ministry healing people. Thus, we read in Matthew 4:23-25: "And Jesus went about all Galilee, teaching in their synagogues and preaching the gospel of the kingdom and healing every disease and every infirmity among the people. So his fame spread throughout all Syria, and they brought him all the sick, those afflicted with various diseases and pains, demoniacs, epileptics, and paralytics, and he healed them."
Furthermore, in Acts, we find that God continues Jesus' healing ministry through the Church. Thus, we read in Acts 5:15-16: "... they even carried out the sick into the streets, and laid them on beds and pallets, that as Peter came by at least his shadow might fall on some of them. The people also gathered from the towns around Jerusalem, bringing the sick and those afflicted with unclean spirits, and they were all healed."
My problem is also not with the claim that God uses the NHS as his instrument of healing. God is in providential control of all that happens in the world, and that as the Westminster Confession puts it God does not always act directly, but uses 'second causes' to achieve his good purposes, causes which, in the case of healing, include the work of the NHS.
My problem is the claim that the NHS is the cause God uses 'more than any other.' It seems to me that this claim can only be sustained if we take an unduly limited view of healing. Healing is the making well of that which ails people, and from a biblical perspective what ails humanity is something far bigger than the afflictions of the body and the mind that are treated by the NHS.
In Psalm 103, for instance, the Psalmist takes a far more comprehensive view of God's healing activity than we normally do. He writes:
Bless the Lord, O my soul,
and forget not all his benefits,
who forgives all your iniquity,
who heals all your diseases,
who redeems your life from the Pit,
who crowns you with steadfast love and mercy.
Here God's work of healing involves not just physical healing, but the reception of God's 'steadfast love and mercy' involving the forgiveness of sins and deliverance from death, 'the Pit'.
The reason that we need this kind of comprehensive healing by God is because the afflictions tackled by the NHS are only reflections of the fundamental problem facing human beings, which is that we are alienated from God, under his judgement, and heading inexorably towards both temporal and eternal death.
This is not a situation with which the NHS can help us. Our only hope lies with God himself. The words of the funeral service in the Book of Common Prayer express this point with admirable clarity:
"Man that is born of a woman hath but a short time to live, and is full of misery. He cometh up, and is cut down, like a flower; he fleeth as it were a shadow, and never continueth in one stay.
"In the midst of life we are in death: of whom may we seek for succour, but of thee, O Lord, who for our sins art justly displeased?
"Yet, O Lord God most holy, O Lord most mighty, O holy and most merciful Saviour, deliver us not into the bitter pains of eternal death."
Martin Luther explains why we need to look to God for succour in his commentary on Galatians. He writes:
".... to overcome the sin of the world, death, the curse, and the wrath of God in himself, is not the work of any creature, but of the divine power. Therefore, he which in himself should overcome these, must needs be truly and naturally God. For against this mighty power of sin, death and the curse (which of itself reigneth throughout the world and in the whole creature), it was necessary to set a more high and mighty power. But besides the sovereign and divine power, no such power can be found. Wherefore, to abolish sin, to destroy death, to take away the curse in himself, and to give righteousness, to bring life to light, and to give the blessing (that is, to reduce these things to nothing and to create these), are the works of the divine power only and alone."
What God alone can do, God has done through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ and he makes this saving work of Christ accessible to us, and thereby provides us with the ultimate healing that we all need, through the ministry of word and sacrament in the Church. These, and not the work of the NHS are the 'secondary causes' which God uses to this end.
Therefore, while rightly celebrating the work of the NHS, what we who are Christians need to tell the world is that the key instrument that God uses to heal humanity remains the ministry of Christ through his Church.
Martin Davie is a lay Anglican theologian and Associate Tutor in Doctrine at Wycliffe Hall, Oxford.
