Sickness and Death: An Orthodox Perspective.
Fr. John Anthony McGuckin.
(Cuvantul – The Word. Summer 2023)
Each one of the four Gospels shows a very lively interest in the healing ministry of Jesus 1. It is clear enough to any reader that the evangelists saw Jesus’ healing power as a major sign of the message of ‘Good News’ (for that is what the old word ‘Gospel’ means) which Jesus wanted to bring to the men and women of his day. The ancient Greek pagans regarded sickness as a ‘curse sent from the gods’ and experienced healing so rarely that it was seen as an almost divine phenomenon. The services of a doctor, however, were so restricted in ancient days that maintaining good health was really the preserve of the very rich. Jesus’ ministry set the term for the church to widen out the scope of healing care to embrace even the poor: for it was, generally speaking, the poorest who suffered from the worst diseases, and throughout the course of the early church those doctors who, when alive, gave free healthcare to the poor were regarded as especially important saints after their deaths: known to us now as the ‘Unmercenary Healers.’
Many of Jesus’ miracles of healings, however, are also presented by the evangelists as exorcisms from evil forces. The two things (exorcisms and healings of physical sickness) are presented as very closely associated in the Gospels and this is why the Orthodox Church has ever afterwards associated sickness with some kind of evil oppression over a believer. Not a curse; and certainly not from God; but an ‘unnatural’ oppression nonetheless. In the special healing services, such as the sacramental anointing, the connection is still spelled out very clearly there. The sick person is invited to repent before the healing anointing, and the absolution of sins is offered by the priest through this sacrament of oil. I have had several non-Orthodox friends react to this in a negative way: as if the church is suggesting here that a person only gets sick because they have sinned, and the illness is some kind of punishment sent by God to cause a person to repent and change their ways. This was a view that was sometimes raised up in the Old Testament, but the greatest Fathers of our church took pains to say that it was not a correct view for an illuminated Christian: because the glorious redemption spread over the world by the resurrectional power of Jesus has brought that old conception to an end (a teleiosis as the Fathers put it: ‘an end through a fulfilment’) because the love of God has more clearly manifested itself in the life and teachings Jesus brought us.
St. Basil teaches this in his homily That God is not the Cause of Evil.2 Many others of the great Fathers have insisted on this too 3. So, it is from the Lord and his saints that we have learned that God is not some fearsome heavenly being punishing mortal sinners by disease and death, but a loving Father who is grieved when his children suffer, and ever ready to help when asked. And yet there are still some Christian preachers who continue to argue the Old Testament view of illness as a punishment as if it were part of the Gospel message to those who are ill. They cause immense damage by doing so: for it takes only a second or two of thought to realize that illnesses strike down the good and the kind as much as they ever do the malevolent.
A more correct way is to understand the matter in the way Jesus approached it: that illness is a disorder that is contrary to God’s desire for the new human condition he has granted to us in the Resurrection: a state of anticipated glory. Since we, his baptized faithful, are part of the Lord’s resurrectional community, and stand in anticipation of this holy glory, it follows that debilitating illness is a corruption (Ptharsia) and cannot be part of that holy expectation. This is shown to us very clearly in those memorial prayers for the dead that we repeat so often; when we describe the state after our death as: ‘A place of brightness, a place of refreshment, a place of repose, where all sickness, sighing, and sorrow have fled away.’ This of course means that it is not God who wishes illness upon anyone, and on the contrary is always ready to hear our prayers for help when we are in distress: always ready to lift away the oppressive veil of sickness.
And yet, as a priest talking with sick people, I have found very few actually feel or believe this in their hearts when they are sick. An illness, of course, often casts down our spirits anyway, and it is hard to keep up hope and joy when one is feeling sick and weary, especially if this lasts for a long time. People often tend to think, in times of illness, that God really has punished them in some way: is angry with them and has sent this sickness upon them. But that attitude, I think, is itself a depressing ‘illness of the spirit’ affecting us just as the sickness of the body does, to bring down our physical strength and often our mental cheerfulness along with it. If we really did learn to believe that sickness is not directly from the hand of God, how much it would change our attitude and help us to realize that Our holy Father, the Lord and the Spirit, the Blessed Virgin and the saints, all have deep compassion for us and wish us to rise up again in health, and are always willing to give us their blessing to this end.
So why do we have sickness at all if this is the case? The answer is banal and obvious really: we have sickness because we are only temporary beings on this earth. St. Athanasius says that we were made out of the ‘stuff of nothingness’. He is one of the first ever to say this. The pagan Greeks had argued that the gods made humans out of a kind of pre-existent formless ‘stuff’ which they then shaped into order. Athanasius says that this is not the case: and that God made us out of the reality of “nothingness”, such that nothingness is the core of our being. He argued further that, left to our natural state, one can see this falling back into nothingness at every single stage of a human life: childhood to adolescence, youth to old age: ever the process of change, and a change that is always a life-cycle declining towards death. Athanasius’ sermons must have been rather; like punches on the chin in his cathedral in Alexandria because he was perhaps more like a philosopher than a cuddly pastor. But his point is consistent: we humans are dying from the moment we are born, and our body-vehicles are merely temporary. We tend and turn to nothingness until the Risen Christ breathes into our void the life-force of his resurrection. Why do we get sick then? For the same reason that we are destined to die: because our bodies are fragile and temporary. As the Starets Serafim (Man) of Rohia monastery put it to me one day, when I told him I was leaving the monastery to renew my passport visa: ‘Never forget, dear Father, that we only have a temporary Visitor’s Visa to this planet.’
Now some might think this is very depressing news, but St. Paul told us not to lose hope over the matter (1Thessalonians 4.13). Certainly many people one meets, like to forget this state of affairs, and perhaps, even more, to pretend that it does not exist at all. I have even been at deathbeds when the last breaths are barely being expressed and yet family members are still shaking the dying person’s hands and saying: ‘Never mind we’ll soon have you up and about again!’ I have seen that this is no consolation whatsoever to the person who is preparing to die, who has entered a state of peacefulness that it is difficult, for those they love, to comprehend: where Christ and his angels are far better than us at performing the offices of the transition of the soul to another state. So, if we are sick for the same reason that we die, namely that we are transient beings on this earth: how can we cope with this?
We start with the act of faith that sickness and death are not punishments of an angry God but things that God will enter into at the very core, so as to give us a new energy of life. When the Lord Jesus encountered sickness in his earthly ministry in Galilee he instinctively touched it, flesh to flesh, and passed over his own energy of life-giving light to banish illness as if it were an evil force. When he found the dead son of the widow of Nain, with his mother following the bier in tears, he reached out to the dead man and raised him back to life. But this was not what he did with every corpse he came across. He raised the son because the widow was bereft of all support, and he pitied her, not so much the dead man. He raised Lazarus to be a continuing sign of his own victory over death, which would come in only a week afterwards. In short he was teaching us that his grace and energy will flow into sickness and even into death, if only we call out to him. The fact that he only raised very few people from the dead in his earthly ministry tells us one remarkable thing: that Christ himself will give us death as a beautiful gift one day (not a punishment or a fearful casting away) and in that gift will also transfigure us away from all sickness and death and corruption, into life and light in his presence (‘where the light of his face gives gladness to all his saints’). Neither sickness nor death itself will be allowed to stand in the way of that resurrectional glory of His which he will gift to each one of us who believe in him.
Our church has associated the healing sacraments with the call to repentance from sin precisely because it is telling us that the first step towards health is to put the soul right before God; to live with his praise constantly in our hearts (‘You shall love the Lord God with all your heart and soul’) and to have compassion on people around us (‘And love your neighbour as yourself’). The second step is also to follow Jesus’ example, for he walked everywhere and ate the Mediterranean diet, so was as strong and healthy as he could be. We modern folk seem to live out lives that are in a state of being ‘carried’ all the time: carried in cars or buses, carried in armchairs, carried on conveyor belts, escalators or elevators. Even half an hour mild exercise a day, such as a walk to the shops, has an immense impact in strengthening our bodily health. It is thus a most blessed thing.
But if severe illness does strike us in the course of our life, as it does for some chosen souls beyond their ability to avoid it, then the message this should give us is not one of despair: that God is somehow angry with us and has deliberately ‘cast us down.’ Rather believe always in the Lord’s enduring mercy and kindness 4. Remember that the Apostles themselves demanded that the church should always contain within it those who have the gifts of Christ’s own healing. The Apostle Paul listed healing as one of those basic charisms expected in the Church as the community of the New Age, and possessed of the power, the energeia, of the Lord's Resurrection 5. But, more and more, as generations passed, the healing ministry seemed to be restricted to the presbyters of the community, something we can see already in the Epistle of James 5. 14-16. A clear reference to the charism of healing is found in the Church's most ancient ordination prayers 6.
The later Fathers of the church argued that the presence of the healing charism had to remain forever in the church, whether among lay or ordained, because it was the deep sign that believers were already some part of the community of the ‘New Age’, the age of Resurrection glory, when all sorrow and sickness would be eradicated from the race of the redeemed. Already the Old Testament prophets sensed this dawning hope 7. The church’s prayer books are now full of references to healing and consolation of the sick: especially in the sacrament of anointing, but above all, perhaps, in the most wondrous sacrament of the Eucharist. Even if we are in full vigour of health, taking the Eucharist regularly makes our life energy shine with radiant brightness. Many of the saints have actually glowed with light after receiving the Eucharist, so great is its healing power.
St. Gregory the Theologian in his Oration 14 On the Poor, and St. Basil in his Homily on Justice and Mercy are two of the Fathers who have especially insisted on this theology of how God loves the poor and afflicted above all in his church. St. Gregory of Nyssa said that being a doctor was ‘the most noble profession imaginable’ (Oration on the Poor) and his brother St. Basil reminded his hearers that healing miracles were wonderful things, but so too the daily ministrations of the doctors (and he himself practised as such) were equally part of God’s gift of grace to the sick. 8
If we are sick we should, therefore, immediately turn to the Lord in hope and never cease to ask his graceful intercession. He wants his grace of healing to overflow upon us always. We should never tire of asking. If we come to death, however, we should (and by then we will) come to the understanding that this too is His gift of healing: as it delivers us from this world of pain and failure, into the world He wishes us to enter along with Him: that age of life and peace and unending joy, where the light of His own blessed face is the ineffable joy of all his saints. To that extent, the gift of death is one of the Lord’s great mercies, and is nothing at all that we should fear, as long as we place our hand in His. And if, by God’s kind grace, we ourselves are presently in good health and still full of vigour, then we should not only give thanks for it, but should reflect the Lord’s own outreaching kindness, and never let our night prayers pass without asking Our Saviour to shower down his mercy and consolation on all the sick and sorrowing across the face of this world. By such an attitude we can render the oppressions of sorrow, sickness, pain and even death, into a hymn to the glory of the God who is already in the process of transfiguring us to life.
1Mark alone demonstrates how much the healing stories provide the core of his Gospel narrative. See: Mk. 1.29-34; 1.40- 2.12; 3. 1-6; 5.21-43; 6.30-44; 6. 53-56; 7. 24-37; 8.22-26; 10. 46-52.
2 ’God is not the cause of suffering. It is madness to believe that God is the cause of our sufferings. Such a blasphemy…. destroys the concept of God's goodness.' St. Basil. Homily: That God is not the Cause of Evil. 2. Migne. Patrologia Graeca. (henceforth PG). 31.332.
3. St. Maximus Confessor. 'When God created human nature He did not introduce…. suffering into it.' To Thalassios. 61. P.G. 90. 628A; Ibid. To Thalassios. 41. PG. 90 408C; St. Gregory Palamas. Homily 31. PG 151. 396: 'God did not create either the death of the soul or the death of the body.' Idem. Theological & Ethical Chapters. 51; St. Athanasius, Against the Pagans 2-3; St. Basil. Homily, That God is not the Cause of Evil. 7. P.G. 31. 344C; Gregory Nyssa. Catechetical Oration. 5.6; ibid. 5.8; St. John Damascene. On the Orthodox Faith.2.12.
4.Philippians 3. 10-11.
5. 1 Cor. 12.9; see also Justin. 2nd Apology. 13; Idem. Dialogue With Trypho. 17; Ibid. 30; Irenaeus. Adv. Haereses. 3.18.4; 4. 20.2; 5.3.1f; Origen. Against Celsus. 7.32; Cyprian. Epistle. 74.2; 76.2.
6. Apostolic Constitutions 8. 16, 26.
7. Wisdom. 1. 13-14: 'God did not make death, nor does he delight in the death of the living. For he created all things that they might exist.'
8. St. Basil. Regulae fusius tractatae interrogation. 55. PG. 31.1048