Jesus Heals

Guide: Coming to Know the Healer

As we continue to grow in our desire to know Jesus more intimately, we come to a week of reflection on Jesus the healer. This week’s prayer brings us to see several important aspects of God’s love for us in Jesus. Most of all, we enter more deeply into the heart of this man for others and come to understand a love that heals.

This is not about contemplating the divine power of Jesus or how he repaired the bodies or lives of a number of people during the three years of his public ministry on earth. This is about our coming to know more deeply this week another aspect of who Jesus is.

Jesus is able to heal because love heals. The more complete the love, the more profound is the healing. Jesus’ love is penetrating. He doesn’t hold back any of himself in loving. He is not put off by disfigurement or fear of contamination or even religious conventions that place limits to his loving. He is not afraid to touch and touch deeply. His heart is full of compassion. Jesus can so suffer with the one who suffers that he enters into the depths of — even the roots of — the pain of those he loves. Jesus loves so deeply he can understand and love the paralysis that causes the paralysis, the blindness that underlies the blindness, the leprosy that breaks out in leprosy. Jesus heals by embracing. Jesus embraces the inner illness that seems so untouchable or rigid or hidden in the darkness of denial. Jesus can love the whole person into wellness, precisely because he loves the whole person in brokenness. With such great love Jesus the lover can say, “Get up and start moving freely again,” or “Open your eyes and see again.”

This week we let ourselves become more deeply fascinated by, enthralled with, the way Jesus loves. The readings are our entry points into being present to those scenes of healing. However, the depth and power of our prayer this week, in the background moments throughout our days, will be how we become more and more aware of how Jesus loves in the real scenes of our life. We will come to see the meaning of love and the concrete ways we are being drawn to be with Jesus in his loving. Who throughout our day seems diseased or paralyzed or dysfunctional or blind or outcast by others? What external disorder or inner infection needs penetrating, embracing love? And, especially where I can’t imagine myself loving that deeply and completely — because I taste the inner resistance of it — I can imagine Jesus’ desire to love and heal.

Use the resources to begin the week and enter deeply into it. Please feel free to go to the online retreat page to offer your images and graces to others making the retreat.

Each and every day this week, we can be amazed and in awe as the Healer reveals the limitless love of his heart.

Consider sharing the graces you have received
this week with others making the retreat.

Listen to each week of the Online Retreat
on a CD or on your mp3 player.