Abstract
The diagnosis of a life-changing illness tests the faith of even the most committed Christian. In this paper two Anglican clergy who have both received life-changing diagnoses reflect theologically upon their experience and draw conclusions about the relationship between sickness, sin, evil and the goodness of God.
Christians can struggle when receiving bad news. The temptation is to jump to one or other extreme theological conclusion: either evil has visited this bad thing upon me, or God has done so for some reason. We are prompted to write this short paper following a year of theological reflection together having both received life-changing bad news. On Christmas Eve 2013 Simon was diagnosed with terminal cancer. On 29 June 2014 Tom received both the news of the death of a friend in a car crash and a diagnosis of Multiple Sclerosis, a degenerative disease. We have been motivated to try to frame these unwelcome and unsought circumstances with theological conversation which doesn’t default to either of the extremes outlined above, as a pair of clergy one of whom faces death in the near future and one of whom faces an unpredictable deterioration into disability, and we offer these reflections to the wider church.
It first must be stated that we reject any assertion that these circumstances are evidence of the triumph of evil. It cannot be the case that God is too weak or disinterested in us to intervene. It is too easy, as tempting as it may be, to collapse the reception of bad news such as this into a statement of the absentness of God, or the victory of the devil. Neither do we want to actively affirm the theology of the Visitation of the Sick service of the Book of Common Prayer which suggests that ‘whatsoever your sickness is, know you certainly, that it is God’s visitation’. 1 There must be room for a more generous theology of suffering which acknowledges the grief, anger and disappointment, the recognition of hopes and expectations frustrated, a future cut short or radically reframed, which comes with both a terminal and a degenerative diagnosis, but which at the same time does not resort to a simple attribution of blame on either God or the powers which work against him.
Scripture provides for us both challenge and sustenance. Passages such as Mark 16.18, as dubious as its authorship might be, provide real challenge, asserting with confidence that the disciples, in a post-Ascension world, filled with the Holy Spirit, ‘will lay their hands on the sick, and they will recover’. Texts such as James 5.15, ‘the prayer of faith will save the sick and the Lord will raise them up’, provide a similar challenge, as do the healing miracles of the Gospel. Both of us pray that God will heal us, and we live and minister in a tradition that allows for and even expects that possibility, but to be honest neither of us live our days confidently hoping for physical healing of that sort. What is interesting is the way in which other portions of Scripture rise to meet us. Psalm 49, sung in Salisbury Cathedral every ninth evening, with its stark reminder that death comes to all people, and that the achievements and victories of this life can never be the defining features of a soul, has become a monthly milestone in Tom’s prayer life: There be some that put their trust in their goods: and boast themselves in the multitude of their riches. But no man may deliver his brother: nor make agreement unto God for him … For he shall carry nothing away with him when he dieth: neither shall his pomp follow him. For while he lived he counted himself an happy man: and as long as thou doest well unto thyself men will speak good of thee.
2
What is sown is perishable, what is raised is imperishable. It is sown in dishonour, it is raised in glory. It is sown in weakness, it is raised in power. It is sown a physical body, it is raised a spiritual body.
3
We would both want to say that having lost something is different from never having had it. Both of us enjoyed good health, freedom of movement, and the expectation of a long life. Those blessings are no longer ours, and we need to be able therefore to say something about whether or not this is a diminishment. Doubtless physical abilities which we once had are now gone, so there has been a reduction in capacity. Some of this disability, in the proper sense of the word, is humiliating, and all of it brings a sense of loss. Loss, however, is not the same as diminishment. We are created in the image of God, but with what the Apostle calls a perishable, dishonourable and weak body which is destined to be imperishable, glorious and powerful. What we seem to be experiencing is a stripping away, effectively a being laid bare before the eyes of him to whom we must give account, 4 which brings with it, alongside the recognition of loss, a complex mix of blessings. We want to be clear that in this sense the disease itself is not the blessing, it is an evil, and we would not have wished for it or sought it, but in the midst of the disease extraordinary blessings are found. Indeed Simon is able to articulate that he has found a deeper and more profound faith through his experience of having cancer, and so even the cancer itself appears to him to bless him. The goodness of God is evident in what this experience reveals to us about the nature of our status before him, as loved children who stand complete before him in our profound brokenness – bearing loss but not diminished, changed, but with the nature of God’s image undepleted, and ‘all our riches to sufficiency’ of St Francis’s ‘Praises of God’ just as rich and present as before.
A Time to Heal, the Church of England’s most recent attempt to say something systematic about the ministry of healing, referred to the fact that the pattern of our discipleship is a crucified God, a man who went knowingly to his death, and thus ‘the death of Jesus is the key to life’. 5 It has been pointed out also that the risen Christ’s body is a disabled one, bearing the marks of the nails into eternity and suggesting thereby that, whatever resurrection is, it is not a return to a biological perfection but rather a glorification of all that makes us who we are, which must include our experiences, injuries, disabilities, and indeed our mortality and death, for ‘in these events the fingerprints of a dying/rising God at work may be recognised’, and that those who feel their mortality most keenly ‘may also see in the face of their biological death a familiar pattern’. 6
What, then, do we want to say about receiving bad news of this nature as Christians, and as priests? We want to say that these things are neither God’s visitation upon us nor indicative of the victory of the devil. We want to say that these diseases are a type of evil; we do not welcome their intervention in our lives; and we grieve for what we have lost and what will never be. None the less we also want to affirm the goodness of God in revealing to us through these experiences more of his abundant goodness, as the Scriptures come to meet us, as prayer deepens and broadens, and as we are able to see more clearly than before that the pattern of our living and our discipleship is the dying Christ of the crucifix, and the disabled Christ of the Christus Rex. We want to draw the distinction between loss and diminishment. The former is real and painful and needs to be faced. The news we have both received is ‘bad’ indeed, but it is not a story of diminishment. Rather it is part of the story of Jesus Christ, the man whose power, imperishability and glory are most properly seen in weakness, perishability, dishonour, and to whom therefore we are able to pray all the more simply and profoundly for ‘strength for today and bright hope for tomorrow’. 7