Fairhaven Shorts 4-28-2024

Healing: A Threat to Power

And Peter and John, unsurprisingly, have landed in the spotlight for this healing. And the spotlight's a pretty dangerous place to be, always, but especially then in Jerusalem. Because healing, like resurrection, is a crisis. It's a challenge.

And it is profoundly setting to people. Now, that doesn't seem right, does it? When you think about that at first, it doesn't seem right. It seems backwards. Who could possibly be mad about something so wonderful happening? The lame are walking, the blind are seeing, decades of bleeding stopped in an instant.

Jesus did that kind of stuff all the time. What's not to like about that? Well, here's the issue, is power. Healing broken bodies and spirits is something that you or I certainly cannot do by ourselves. No human being can do those things.

And so when it does happen, it's extremely threatening because it's a move of power. It's a threat, especially to the scribes, the priests, the rulers in the time of the early church.

Healing Challenges Stability

The potential for any lowly peasant to start healing the sick and the injured is almost as disorienting as Jesus refusing to stay dead. Raising a man from the dead, healing somebody who's been crippled for untold decades, just screams to the world, Everything has changed. Nothing will ever be the same again. And that is really terrifying and unsettling because things aren't staying the way they're supposed to be.

And so you might be thinking in this story, Oh no, not for me though. I would love to see miracles like those. Why would somebody be mad about something like that? Would you? Are you sure? All of this kind of stuff still happens, you know. So what would happen if people started being miraculously healed?.