Justin Appel

Dear Friends,

Nearly a year ago, I walked out of the ruins of the fourth-century Capernaum Synagogue next to the Sea of Galilee, ambled over some dusty paths, and stopped before a crumbling ruin that had been dug from the ground. This excavation of a first-century house, I was told, was very likely the house in which Jesus healed Simon’s mother-in-law.

Perhaps the reality didn’t sink in right away, but since then, I have had time to absorb the remarkable truth this experienced revealed: that Jesus became a man at a specific time, that he lived in a real place in Galilee, and that he healed individual persons. Such a heady mixture of the particular and the cosmic, the physical and the spiritual, compels us to ask the question: Why? What was Jesus doing?

Something big, it turns out. He didn’t just heal diseases and cast out demons to prove a spiritual point to these Galileans. He didn’t do these miracles simply to show he was divine. In fact, he derided the Pharisees for merely looked for a sign, for miraculous proof that he was God’s Son.

These healings were a direct manifestation of Jesus ‘setting things to rights’, of his desire to restore all of creation — especially the wholeness of individual men and women — from the devastation of sin and death. These healing events were local and particular, but they signaled a larger healing that is cosmic in significance. St. Athanasius put it this way: By becoming a man, God the Son assumed a human nature so that we humans could become divine. What greater healing could be imagined?

If such a potent act of rescue and renewal was underway, no wonder the demons fled and maladies vanished at Jesus’ word!

I confess that I find this restorative narrative deeply compelling, because it means that we too are in the process of being healed as spiritual/physical beings. We are supposed to change! In this work of transformation, we can become more ‘transparent’ to the image of God in us. God does not leave us to flounder in the brokenness of the Fall — in sin and death — but rather, he takes us by the hand, and raises us up to new life, a life in which God’s love is revealed in his image.

Think of it: the reason we exist, the reason we bear God’s image, is love!

Yours in Christ,
Justin