Presently, it bears the name CURE. I can imagine The Healer being fully professional, but without a white coat and stethoscope. As he interviews the sick person, he asks (as he does in the canonical gospels, “Do you want to be healed?” (John 5.2-9) The Jesus we see in what Christians call authentic Scriptures had great insight into the wants and needs of people. There are, of course, people who seem to enjoy ill health. Having experienced some ill health, been in hospitals a few times. I know that I don’t enjoy ill health, or the loss of a sense, or the prospect of an “end of life scenario” which includes months of living in a hospital bed, or sitting in a rolling chair, wrapped in a blanket. Drooling.
The person Jesus speaks with wants to be healed but complains that he is in a bad situation.
Now, let us return to our apocryphal Gospel of CURE, The next thing the Healer does is to ask the sick person to fill out six forms, to sign several others, and to relieve the Healer from all possibility of suit. The needy person would then know for sure that she might die getting well.
CURE 6:15 “There are, yea formes and more formes. In the book of the Law it is written. Let none be informal, or uninformed, but rather may formes multiply as did the loaves and fishes. Truly, the LORD sayeth: It is in formes that our salvation rests.”
The next issue addressed by the Healer is that of payment. In the Official Gospels, Jesus never asks to be paid, nor does he proclaim that health is a privilege for those who can pay.
CURE 9:35: “Sayeth the LORD, the fee is part of the treatment. Charge!”
“What kind of insurance do you have?” “If you have none, we have the Disciples’ Pay Plan, where you can pay six denarii a month for five years. Check with Judas over there. If you cannot pay this, then I know a nice clinic down the wadi where the care is not so good, but they do try to accommodate those in need.”
Of course, this is fiction. There is no new Gospel of CURE to join the list of new Gospels out there that would present Jesus as a physician for hire. However we understand the healing acts of Jesus, they were offered without any hope of compensation, unlike the healing evangelists who suggest that we send a gift for his or her reassuring account of perfect health and abounding prosperity. “Just send a check for 40 dollars a month, and we will get to you an anointed prayer towel.”
Departing from all this approach, in the modern era, healing is costly, and continues to grow ever more so. Since I entered the Presbyterian ministry in 1960 the diagnostic tools have gotten ever better, and very expensive. Speaking on a personal level, I have just undergone a very specialized operation that may restore some of my lost hearing. It will cost upwards of 40,000 bucks. Think of that! I don’t worry so much about the cost, because I have the wonder of all wonders, and that is a government sponsored health plan called Medicare. In addition, I have personal insurance, which takes care of some charges unpaid by Medicare. With very complex rules, both plans are set up in such a way that some charges are “written off” and others modified. I do not expect to go broke on all of this wonderful work. I quickly sign on a dotted line, with no more qualms that I used to have when I would buy a car and tie myself up for five years of monthly payments.
Being old in America has its advantages. We can expect the government plan to allow us to receive both necessary and unnecessary medical attention in the last years of life. But not all of us can claim this benefit. People who have worked at certain below minimum age jobs, who have tended to children for payment “under the table,” and cared for relatives in declining health, may receive little or no benefits. And, if they do receive benefits for, say, home care, the rules and regulations may be so many and so hard to understand as to confound anyone who has not got a business degree from Harvard. Even those august people may not understand how to manage these health care programs. Recently a high executive of one of the political parties did not even know what his insurance company was!
One day, I was talking with an elder in my first congregation. He was just the finest sort of fellow, and drove a plain brown, depressing, Ford car. My wife had just entered public health nursing, which offered some free health support to many very needy people in our rural area. Many had severe illnesses, and tuberculosis was a major threat to life in those days. The elder addressed me directly: “I hear that your wife is going into public health work. I do not approve of public health work. Healthcare is not a right, but rather a privilege.”
I disagreed with him, and in my young preacher voice, I told him so. It did not affect our respect for one another, but that event has stayed with me.
In this essay I would like to lead you, the reader, to consider the current situation for the more than forty million uninsured folks in our country. Many of them are children and youth. For those who feel that America is a “Christian Nation,” and some who avow their secular understandings of society, there is still that question. “Do you want to be healed?” And following that inquiry, consider well how that shall be done.
Lawton W. Posey is a retired Presbyterian minister living in Charleston, W.Va.
