Lifted Up for Healing
Sunday before the Cross
Oops
There’s something unsettling about walking into a doctor’s office when you know something’s wrong but you’re not sure what. The waiting room anxiety. The forms asking about symptoms you’d rather not acknowledge. The moment when the doctor looks at the test results with that expression that says, “We need to talk.”
But what if the diagnosis isn’t just about your body? What if it’s about something deeper—something that touches every relationship, every choice, every moment of your life?
In John’s Gospel, Jesus speaks to Nicodemus about a kind of sickness that runs deeper than any medical condition. It’s not a sickness of the body, but a sickness of existence itself. And unlike Nicodemus, who came seeking answers in the darkness, we often don’t even realize we need healing.
One of my professors, Fr. John Behr, writes about this profound human condition—not as guilt or shame, but as a fundamental displacement from what we were created to be. We exist, he suggests, but we haven’t yet learned how to truly live. We have bios—biological life, animated life—but we lack zoe, the divine life that can only come through Christ.
Think about it: we come into existence without our choice, “thrown,” as one philosopher put it, into a world where the only guarantee is that we will die. And so we spend our lives trying to secure what we have, protect what we’ve built, hold onto what feels like ours. We live in what Hebrews calls “lifelong bondage” to the fear of death—not just physical death, but the death of our plans, our security, our sense of control.
Ugh
But here’s what makes this condition so insidious: we can’t heal ourselves.
But, we try! Oh boy, do we try!
We build better institutions, craft better policies, develop better technologies. We work harder on our relationships, read more self-help books, attempt more spiritual disciplines. We might even try to reform the church—better programs, better outreach, better stewardship campaigns.
All of these things might be good, but they can’t address the fundamental problem: we’re trying to fix from the inside a condition that affects our very capacity to fix things. It’s like trying to perform surgery on yourself while under anesthesia.
Nicodemus represents our best human efforts. He’s a teacher of Israel, a leader, someone who takes spiritual matters seriously. He recognizes that Jesus is “from God.” But when Jesus tells him he must be “born again,” Nicodemus can only think in terms of human possibility: “How can a man be born when he is old? Can he enter his mother’s womb a second time?”
We do the same thing. We hear about transformation and immediately start planning: What spiritual discipline should I adopt? How can I be a better Christian? What does our parish need to do differently?
But Jesus points to something that must come from above, from outside our human capacity. “No one can see the kingdom of God unless they are born again”—literally, “born from above.” This isn’t self-improvement; this is resurrection.
Aha
And then Jesus says something that must have been shocking to Nicodemus: “Just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life.”
What a strange image for healing! Moses lifting up a bronze serpent—the very thing that was killing the Israelites—so that those who looked upon it would live.
The cross looks like the ultimate symbol of death, defeat, failure. From every human perspective, crucifixion represents the complete collapse of Jesus’ mission. His disciples abandon him. The crowds turn against him. Even God seems absent.
But this is precisely where healing comes from—not in spite of the cross, but through it.
True healing cannot come from avoiding our mortal condition, but only by going through it. Christ doesn’t heal us by circumventing death, but by transforming it. He shows us what it looks like to embrace our mortality not as victims, but as an act of love.
“For this is the way God loved the world: He gave his one and only Son, so that everyone who believes in him will not perish but have eternal life.”
The healing comes precisely through the lifting up. The cross becomes the source of life because it reveals what love looks like when it meets the worst that death and sin can offer. Christ doesn’t just endure crucifixion; he transforms it into the very means by which divine life enters human existence.
This is why Jesus says he came not to condemn the world, but to save it. The lifting up of the Son of Man is not punishment, but medicine. Not vengeance, but healing.
Whee
Now imagine what this means for us as a parish. We exist to lift up Christ—not our programs, not our building, but Christ himself as the source of healing.
Every Divine Liturgy is an act of lifting up. Every time we approach the Eucharist, every time we venerate the cross, we participate in this healing movement.
But what if our entire parish life became a way of lifting up Christ for the Northland? Instead of being known as “the Greek church” or “the festival church,” we could be known as the place where people encounter God’s healing love. Where broken relationships find restoration. Where those trapped in addiction, despair, isolation discover love stronger than death.
Think about our festival: What if it became not just cultural celebration, but witness to the joy that comes from the cross? What if our proceeds went not to “keep the lights on,” but to ministries that lift up Christ for healing?
Think about our stewardship: What if we gave not from obligation, but from gratitude for healing received, eager to share that healing?
Yeah
So here’s the transforming question: How will we be known as a place of Christ’s healing?
Not generic healing, but the specific healing that comes through the cross—healing that embraces mortality and transforms it into eternal life, that takes our deepest brokenness and makes it the place where divine love enters.
This isn’t about adding another program. This is about recognizing what we already are: a community gathered around the cross, sustained by the Eucharist, called to lift up Christ as healing for a broken world. That sounds a bit like our mission statement: Healing in Christ, together as one Body.
Maybe we need to look at who God has placed around us—in our neighborhoods, workplaces, families—who are waiting to encounter Christ’s healing love. Maybe we need to tell our own healing stories more boldly, not as triumphant successes, but as testimonies to the cross that gives life.
As we prepare for the Elevation of the Cross next Sunday, let’s ask: What would it look like for our parish to be known first as a place where Christ is lifted up for healing?
The world around us doesn’t need another organization or social service, but a community that knows the secret of the cross: that life comes through death, that healing comes through what seems to destroy, that love is stronger than anything.
Christ has been lifted up. The healing is available. Will we be known as the place where people can find it? Will you be known as a person who has found life through death?
Amen.