Made Whole

So we're back where we started, with a seemingly-important question: will you be healed in heaven? 

Jesus says it's better for you to cut off your hand or gouge out your eye than to be thrown with your whole body into hell, and He says this while He holds out His own nail-scarred hands. 

And yet, there's something inside of us - something inside even me - that wants to believe that the burdens of this earthly life won't be forever. There's something inside me that wants to be healed. That wants to be whole. That wants to know what I'm like when I'm not held back by a body that is weaker than I want it to be. 

There's something in us that wants to see the lame man walk. That wants to see the weak child thriving. That wants to see the blind man looking around in wonder. That wants things to be very good again...because they don't feel very good right now. 

I don't have the answer. I don't know what God's really going to do with this. But I have two possibilities that roll around in my heart. 

First, maybe God just makes all things new. Maybe He just heals everything and you finally get the body you want and the freedom of movement and the strength of stature and the stamina and the wholeness that you seek. Maybe there's a distinction between the Kingdom we're living in now and the eternity that's coming and we can live in the Kingdom with one eye, but in eternity, we'll have two again. 

Maybe the promise of heaven is everything we dream it will be, everything we want it to be, everything our hearts yearn for when we think it has to be that way. 

Second, though, maybe wholeness isn't physical. Maybe the knocked-down, dragged-out, scarred-up body that we come crawling into eternity with doesn't matter as much as we think it does. Maybe we get to eternity and we don't get out hand back and we only have half our vision and we can look down and see the scars of our sojourn on earth and...we still feel whole. 

Maybe we just don't notice our limitations any more. Maybe we don't feel restricted by it. Maybe it just is what it is, but we are fully capable, fully well, fully whole anyway. Maybe we're able to do all the things we want to do through some process that we don't understand from our position on earth, but it makes perfect sense from God's perspective. 

One of the things that I've learned in a lifetime in my own broken flesh is that it doesn't always matter what the paper says; it matters how my body feels, how it moves, how it's functioning. In fact, a lot of the time, you'd look at the documentation and wonder how, exactly, I live the way that I do. I've met many other patients over the course of my life who can say the same. 

So maybe eternity is like that a little bit. Maybe it doesn't matter what the body looks like...maybe it just works. 

And maybe you look down and see the scars of a life as well-lived as you could have, knowing what you saved yourself from when you cut off that hand, making it all out through the one good eye you have left, and you're just filled with thankfulness for the goodness of God...for the grace that brought you this far. 

For the love that brought you home.  

Marred By Sin

If it's possible that Jesus was talking just about the way that we live in the Kingdom on this side of eternity when He told us to cut off our sinful hand and gouge out our sinful eye, then we have to understand something very important about this:

We will be judged for it. 

It's actually quite interesting if you pay attention to it. Follow me here. 

In the culture in which Jesus was talking, indeed all the way back through the old covenant, a deformed offering was no offering at all. You couldn't bring an animal with a blemish to God. 

That's how so many folks who were labeled "unclean" ended up being cast out of the Temple...and of the community in general. If you were deformed in any way, you were unacceptable to God.

It's also, somewhat, related to how we got the idea that a deformation or disability or illness was a mark of personal sin. Remember the man born blind? Everyone wanted to know: who sinned? Every time Jesus meets someone who is imperfect in their body, His first words are, your sins are forgiven. Why? Because it was believed that sin was the great deformer. 

Now, here He is saying that if you're sinful, might as well deform yourself. It is better to be deformed if it helps you to overcome your sin than to be whole and living a lie to yourself. 

But...if you cut off your hand, other folks are going to know. If you gouge out your eye, everyone else is bound to see it. 

Take care of your sin, and you'll be walking around as a marked man. In attempting to rid yourself of the offense, you'll actually make yourself untouchable. You'll put a mark on you. The world is going to look at you and tell you that you're not acceptable to God. 

Even if, in cutting off your hand, you have made yourself more acceptable to Him. 

This is important because Jesus is doing a couple of things here. 

First, Jesus is giving you permission to ruin your own life for the sake of it. He's giving you permission to step into something that looks unclean for the sake of being cleaner. He's telling you how extreme an action it is to address your sin, to take it seriously, and to do something about it. He's telling you that you're going to be marked...and then telling you you're going to be better of for it. 

Second, Jesus is saying something about everyone who was thought to be unclean. He's speaking to the ones who were ready to judge them for it. He was saying, in essence, "Maybe you see a man with one hand and you think less of him. But maybe he's doing the greater thing. So mind your business." Because you never know if the crippled man might actually be more holy than you think you are. 

Third, Jesus is saying something about the sacrifice in general. He's saying, now, it doesn't have to be perfect. It just has to come from the right heart. Which, honestly, was the point all along. God never said that He wouldn't accept a deformed sacrifice because He doesn't like deformed things; God didn't want a deformed sacrifice because He didn't want the people offering only their rejects - their unprofitable, unfit, weak animals to Him. He didn't want them to think that sacrificing to Him was as easy as getting rid of the things they wanted to get rid of anyway, the things that weren't going to pay off for them. But now, what Jesus is saying is that if your sacrifice is made in the right heart, in an effort to get closer to God and to do the right thing with your life, then it's okay to be a little deformed. 

I love all of this. 

And it still leaves us some room to talk about what we started with, which is this: what happens to your hand when you come into eternity? 

The Kingdom

Of course, it's not that simple. Will God heal us in heaven? 

We can't really know. 

We know Jesus is in the business of healing. We know He defeats death. We know He forgives sin. So if your hand causes you to sin and you cut it off to keep from condemning your whole body to Hell, can't God restore that sinful part of you through forgiveness and redeem it? 

Nothing will be broken in heaven...or will it?

One of the things we have to answer first before we can even really look at this question is...what, exactly, is the Kingdom?

For most of us, we have been taught that the Kingdom is the coming eternity with God. It's the after-life. It's what we do when we are beyond this curse-bound place and redeemed. 

But ah, there it is - redeemed. If you are waiting for heaven to be redeemed, then, my friend, I have to ask you what you believe God is doing in your life now. Are you not already being redeemed? 

Are you not already different in your heart than you were before you followed Jesus? Are you not already different in your approach to life than you were before you knew you were created in His image? Are you not already better, across so many facets of your life, than you were when you first met Him? 

Friend, are you not already being redeemed? 

And if you are being redeemed, then what exactly are you waiting on eternity for? The fullness of your redemption, yes, but only maybe? 

In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. And He declared they were good. And the more He filled the earth, the more He declared that it was good. Until He got all the way down to human beings, to you and to me, and He declared it was "very good." There's no account in Genesis of the development of the heavens; only of the earth. And it was "very good." 

And the New Testament is full of "one another"s. Of the way that we are supposed to live here, side by side and hand in hand and heart in heart. The grand vision that God has for us is the life we live together in His name. 

And even Jesus Himself says the Kingdom has come. Indeed, it is already here. 

So if it's better for you to be Kingdom-ward with one hand than to have two and miss it all entirely, be thrown into Hell in a separation of yourself from God....that doesn't necessarily mean we're talking about eternity. We could just as well be talking about the here and now - about a life separated from God versus one that is lived in the Kingdom...in loving and honoring and one anothering the way that God designed us to do so. If your hand is keeping you from living the life God has for you right now, cut it off. It's better to be without it. 

But then... 

Bad News about Heaven

If you're just wanting Jesus to heal you, then I have some bad news about heaven.... 

See, we say it all the time, especially when we are watching someone we love struggling in their human flesh. We look forward to the day when Jesus just takes them home because they will finally be healed of all of this. Because they will finally get their body back. 

We look at our loved ones in wheelchairs, and we imagine them running. We look at the amputee who lost their legs in battle, and we see them, like the man in the Temple, stretching out their limbs again. We look at the blind and know that they will see us. We are confident that when we all get to heaven (what a day of rejoicing that will be), we will all be full and whole and well and the things that ravaged our bodies down here will be no more. 

But...maybe not? 

Jesus Himself said that if your hand causes you to sin, you should cut it off because it's better to have only one hand than to be thrown whole into hell. And if your eye causes you to sin, gouge it out. Because it's better to only have one eye than to have both and be bound to hell by the one. 

And it was Jesus who was crucified, with nails piercing His hands and His feet, who came back from the grave and showed those physical scars to Thomas. Did not just show them to the disciple, but let the unsure young man put his fingers through the holes. 

So tell me again how we believe that God is going to restore our bodies to perfectly and beautifully functional and whole when Jesus Himself says the hand that would throw us into hell is better off amputated and He showed His own physical, earthly scars to a disciple after His own resurrection? 

Yesterday, we asked what it is that we're believing God for and saw that from very early on when Jesus was walking this earth, it seems like a lot of folk were believing Him for their healing. 

What if...Jesus doesn't heal you? 

Not because He can't. We know that He can. Not because He doesn't want to. We know that He wants to. But what if...that's just not the way? 

What if all the things that you've lost in this body are not coming back to you in the next life? 

On the surface, this seems like a damning question. It's too hard. It's...unfathomable. God won't heal me? God won't make me whole? My child who has been bound in a wheelchair, my husband who lost his legs in combat, my wife who suffered a traumatic brain injury, my friend who went blind...they're going to be crippled...for eternity? 

What kind of God is that? 

But that's exactly the point. That's exactly the question. If you aren't believing God for your healing, is there something worth believing Him for? 

I think it's good to engage our sanctified imagination this way. I think it's good to think about the things we might be missing because the answers we've already settled on are too comfortable for us, too close. One of the best ways we fall more in love with God is by thinking about the things we don't normally think about, by thinking about more than we've settled for in our too-familiar faith. 

What other things can you dream of with your eyes wide open? 

Healing and the Kingdom

Let me ask you a question: what are you believing God for? 

Not why do you believe in God, but what are you believing He will do for you? If God in the flesh showed up this afternoon, what is the thing you would expect most from Him? 

This is an important question because God in the flesh actually did show up once, and if you pay attention to the way that the Gospels develop, it reveals something interesting about the human condition. 

I've been reading through the book of Matthew lately...again. And one of the things that jumps out to me as I read this year is the number of folks who brought their loved ones, their friends, their kids, whoever to Jesus for healing. The number of blind men who stand on the sides of the road. The number of crippled and diseased and outcasted men who come to the Temple and the synagogue to seek Him. 

I know what you're thinking: so what? Jesus's healings in the Gospels are very well known. 

But...they weren't. 

When Matthew first tells us that the crowds were bringing the sick and the lame and the blind and the diseased and the afflicted and the outcast to Jesus...he also gave us no record at all of any previous healings Jesus had done. The people were just...bringing the broken. 

Because they heard that God was among them. 

Maybe God. Maybe a prophet. Maybe a crazy man. Whoever They had heard stories about the kind of authority with which this Man spoke, about maybe how a dove descended from the heavens, maybe about a voice booming with love for Him. We're not really sure what kinds of rumors were circulating about Jesus in the very early days of His ministry, but somehow, everyone was getting the idea to bring their sick to Him. 

Is this what we most expect from God? 

Do we believe that the first thing that God would do if we were ever to encounter Him is to heal us? 

Is that what we want Him to do?

It's interesting that yes, Jesus healed the sick. He gave sight to the blind. He made the lame walk. He stretched out deformed hands. He stopped chronic bleeding. He cast out demons. He called the dead out of the grave. But He didn't actually teach all that much about healing. 

No. Jesus taught about the Kingdom of God. 

About the first being last and the last being first. About the reward being great for anyone who has made sacrifice. About loving God and loving others. About being honest and upright and righteous and forgiving and gracious and merciful. Not about being healed. Not even about healing. But about the Kingdom. 

And yet...they kept bringing their sick to Him. And He healed every one of them. 

But...what are we believing Him for? Just for this? 

It's a good question to be asking ourselves.