Let’s test the claims of faith-healers

By FR OSKAR WERMTER SJ

The junior doctors working in Zimbabwe’s major referral hospitals recently went on strike for better pay and improved working conditions.

An evangelical pastor named M Cedric, who is active in a faith ministry, made the claim that God heals all sickness and diseases if we only pray for it which would make doctors superfluous.Praying for and with the sick is something all Christians do. Even traditional religion is largely about driving out evil spirits to restore peoples health, and indigenous religious movements like the white-gowned, bearded Apostles, with a shepherds crook in hand, are attracting the sick to pray over them.

Nurses in a Harare hospital recently put up posters saying, We treat our patients, God heals. Christians have always believed that they must take care of the sick and show their love to them just as Jesus did.

God uses the hands of doctors and nurses to heal the sick, and Christian doctors know they are doing Gods work and nurses pray for their patients while they look after them. They welcome priests whose pastoral care goes together with their nursing care.

The intelligence, ingenuity and skills of medical professionals are divine gifts for which we must be immensely grateful. Leaders of government and civil adminstration are morally obliged to provide health care facilities, and by that they are indirectly doing healing work.

Are medical workers trying to rival God? Are they showing lack of trust in the Divine Healer? Is scientific medicine human hubris and arrogance? Not necessarily. Many physicians and surgeons know full well the limits of their craft. There are surgeons who say a silent prayer when the theatre sister puts the surgical knife into their hands.

God enables and empowers. We honour him by using and developing the abilities he gives us. It is just bad theology to say God is working miracles for us so we can sit and do nothing. We dont believe in a god of free lunches.

A reader wrote to a Zimbabwean Sunday newspaper recently, complaining bitterly about a prophetic healer who had persuaded his HIV-positive mother to stop taking her ARV medication: God will heal her through his prayer, if only she has faith. If she falls gravely ill again, will she think God has abandoned her?

Just visiting the sick and comforting them is not enough, we are told. We must pray to God, so he will remove all sickness. Really all?

The Church acknowledges rare divine intervention and healing. But we cannot force God to do our bidding. If there is a claim that a sick person was healed by divine intervention, the Church asks medical doctors, including agnostics, to investigate. If they find there is no scientific reason for the spontaneous and inexplicable recovery of a patient, the Church, normally inclined to be sceptical, accepts the claim.

Would it not be fair for the faith-healing prophets to subject their claims to a similar test? That, of course, would be the end of all propagandistic claims of sudden mass healings.

Some of our evangelical partners in dialogue state there is no heaven (Rev 6:14). They are concerned only about this our present existence.

But Christians must accompany their brothers and sisters also in their final hours. Death must not be a taboo. It is the door we all must go through. Medical science has developed palliative care for the terminally ill.

Not even prophets can claim that they and their clients are going to live forever.

Fr Oskar Wermter SJ works for the Pastoral Department of IMBISA, based in Harare.