Author: Rev. Prof. Sorin Cosma (Caransebeș Faculty of Orthodox Theology)
Keywords: healing, illness, body, soul, love, faith, prayer
Abstract:
The healings carried out by our Savior are part of His messianic activity, as a fulfillment of the prophecies, in the context of preaching and establishing the Kingdom of God in the world. Healings are acts of God’s love, intended to restore His image and likeness to human nature that bears the wounds of sin. Although they represent supernatural realities, the healings performed by Jesus Christ are full of naturalness, discretion and compassion, and have nothing provocative, spectacular, advertising or interested in them. Being acts of sincere and disinterested love, they aim only at the salvation of the person in physical or spiritual difficulty. As a result, the wonders carried out by the Lord target the entire human being: both the body, as liberation from suffering, infirmity and powerlessness, as well as the soul, as liberation from the burden of sin. Between these two forms there can be a mutual interaction in the sense that the healing of the body can also be achieved through liberation from sin. In general, the healings performed by Jesus claim the involvement of the one healed through confession of faith. But faith intertwines organically, reciprocally and functionally with prayer in order to be to be saving, so that the power of faith is dependent on the power of prayer, and at the same time, the power of prayer is determined by the power of faith. If our Savior performed healings mainly by the power of word, the Holy Apostles sent by the Lord on a mission performed healings by using God’s creation, towards the constancy of its grace in the liturgical treasury of the Church as Holy Mysteries and divine services.
Pages: 45-52