Praying for Physical Healing

We've all received the call, or heard the news. A friend’s mother, perhaps, the one everyone had been praying for, has died.

You had prayed in faith. Your parish had prayed. Someone had said something foolish like, "if you have enough faith, she will be healed." You didn't know better, and they had a few verses (taken out of context) to make the claim, so you tried to work up a kind of expectation, a kind of invincible faith, then made the request.

And still, she died.

Or maybe it’s the cancer diagnosis that doesn’t go into remission. Instead, it metastasizes. Perhaps it was a prayer to relieve your chronic pain, and the pain has endured, maybe gotten worse. The tremor didn't cease. The child—the child!—who was suffering from a debilitating condition didn't get better, and died young.

If you have ever prayed for healing, you have almost certainly seen occasions when it felt like God didn't answer.

And this can lead to a kind of quiet crisis of faith: Does prayer for physical healing actually work? Or are we simply performing a spiritual ritual to cope with the unbearable randomness of illness and death?

I want to suggest something bold, something that may sound difficult at first but that I believe stands upon the deepest logic of the Gospel: when we pray in faith for healing, the answer is never “no.” It is either “yes” or “not yet, but yes.”

I know that seems to rub against the evidence. Because we have seen people died after we prayed they'd be healed. But stick with me, and I think you'll see the truth of it.

 

Why Bodies Matter to God

We should first ask a question we too rarely ask: why did Jesus spend so much of His public ministry healing bodies?

Read the Gospels straight through and you will be struck by how physical His ministry is. He touches lepers. He puts His fingers in a deaf man’s ears. He mixes saliva with dirt and smears it on a blind man's eyes. He raises a little girl from her bed and, tenderly, tells her family to give her something to eat.

Some spiritual traditions have tried to explain this away, as though the healings were mere metaphors for something “higher.” But this is not what the Gospels tell us.

The Word did not become an idea. "...the Word became flesh and lived among us” (John 1:14).

Flesh. Real flesh, with nerves, muscles, bones, and blood. The eternal Creator became flesh and had (still has!) a heartbeat.

Jesus healed bodies for at least four reasons, and each is worth pausing over.

First, He healed out of sheer compassion. "When he saw the crowds, he had compassion for them, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd” (Matthew 9:36).

The Greek word here, esplanchnisthē, is visceral. It refers to the gut, the inward parts of a person. Jesus was moved at the deepest level. Jesus felt human suffering the way a mother feels her child’s fever. Physical suffering matters to Him because we matter to Him.

Second, His healings testified that God has not abandoned the material world. Ancient philosophies often taught that matter was inferior, a prison from which the soul must escape. The Gospel makes the shocking counter-claim that God so loves matter that He became it, walked in it, ate with a mouth and digested his food, that He actually died in a material body and rose again in the very same body.

Every healing is like a protest against the lie that our bodies do not matter.

Third, His healings foreshadow the resurrection and the restoration of all of creation. They are not the resurrection itself. Lazarus, after all, eventually died again. But every healing is a preview, a signpost pointing to the day when there will be no more mourning or crying or pain, because "the first things have passed away” (Revelation 21:4).

When I write a novel, I like to seed it with little moments, little "signals" about how things are going to turn out. They aren't always obvious. But they're there so that in the end you can say, I should have seen it coming! Each healing Jesus performs is like one of those seeds, a small sign, or a whisper that speaks: This is where the story is going.

Fourth, physical healing often opens the door to a deeper healing. The body is where we live. We do not merely have bodies; we are embodied souls, or ensouled bodies. We are creatures. And so God often meets us first at the level of the flesh, because that is where we can be reached. The body, Pope St. John Paul II once said, is precisely the very gift through which we encounter God in our lives.

 

The Wholeness God Intends

We must also correct a common misunderstanding about eternity. Many Christians speak as though our destination were a disembodied heaven, a place where souls float around in ethereal bliss. But this is not the biblical hope. The biblical hope is far stranger and far more wonderful: "I saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God" (Revelation 21:2). Heaven comes down. It meets earth. And in that meeting, the dead in Christ are raised bodily.

This changes everything about how we pray for healing.

If our final destination were purely spiritual, then perhaps death would be an obstacle to healing. The body would decay, and healing would become impossible. But if our final destination is resurrection, then death itself cannot cancel the answer to our prayer.

Death is not the last word about any body united to Christ. It cannot be, because it was not the last word about His body.

So when we pray for a beloved friend to be healed, and she dies, we have not received a “no.” We have received a “not yet.” Her healing is not cancelled. It is only postponed until that day when what is sown in weakness is raised in power (see 1 Corinthians 15:43).

 

Praying Without Attachment

Here is where the Christian life becomes most demanding and most liberating all at once. When we understand that the answer to our prayer for healing is never ultimately “no,” we are freed from a kind of desperate bargaining that so often characterizes our prayers offered in moments of crisis and pain.

We do not have to twist God’s arm. We do not "work up" our faith into some kind of perfect condition, or an emotional intensity. We do not have to fear that if we don’t pray hard enough, or say the right words, or enough times, our loved one will fall through the cracks of God’s mercy.

We can pray with confidence, and we can pray with surrender. We can say, with our Lord Himself: "Father, if you are willing, remove this cup from me; yet, not my will but yours be done" (Luke 22:42).

Notice that Jesus did not pray this prayer casually. He was in agony. Sweat like drops of blood fell to the ground. And yet He entrusted His body to the Father’s will, and He was heard, though the answer looked, on Good Friday afternoon, very much like “no.”

Sunday morning revealed that it had always been “yes.”

 

Wounds That Are Not Erased

There is one more mystery to explore, and it may be the most important. When Jesus rose from the dead, His wounds did not disappear. He showed His hands and side to Thomas. "Put your finger here and see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it in my side" (John 20:27).

The glorified body of Christ still bears the marks of His passion.

This tells us a truth about our wounds, our pains, our sufferings that we need to embrace if we're going to see the truth of God's healing in our lives: God does not so much erase our wounds as glorify them.

Think of the friends or family members you know who have suffered greatly. Maybe you are suffering greatly.

Chronic illness. Disability. Terminal diagnoses. The slow erosion of the body through age.

Some of the people we know who suffered were embittered by it. But others, those we truly admire, who had a deep faith, suffered with grace.

Have you seen people like that? It's what has made innumerable saints out of those who seemed otherwise unremarkable in the sight of the world. Just a few who come to mind:

St. Thérèse of Lisieux: As tuberculosis slowly destroyed her lungs, she endured excruciating physical agony and a intense "night of faith," yet offered every suffocating breath as a gift of love, famously promising to spend her heaven doing good on earth. It was while she suffered, in fact, that she wrote her autobiography, Story of a Soul, which has been called the most impactful spiritual biography written since Augustine's Confessions. Thousands, if not millions, have been saved because of the story she told in her suffering.

In that book she wrote, "I wish to suffer out of love and to rejoice out of love; thus I shall strew flowers before your throne."

St. Carlo Acutis: Called the "first millennial saint," Carlo Acutis was diagnosed with fulminant leukemia as a teenager. He offered all his agonizing pain, which was intense, for the sake of the Church, and the salvation of souls. His nurses who attended him reported how he'd maintained a joyful smile until the end and insisting he was dying happy because he hadn't wasted a minute of his short life.

St. Bernadette Soubirous: Plagued by severe asthma, painful bone tuberculosis, and agonizing bedsores, she quietly bore years of hidden confinement in her convent, viewing her intense bodily decay as her true "job," her most important mission for God and for the sake of saving souls.

St. John Paul II: Suffering publicly from Parkinson’s disease and physical frailty in his final days (you probably remember this!), he showed the world how to carry the cross by turning his lost voice and failing body into a profound sermon on the dignity of human suffering.

But you probably don't need the lives of saints to know of examples of a few people who suffered this way. I think of my uncle, dying of bone cancer too young, who always had the biggest smile of his face. He'd lived his life as a caretaker for a Catholic cemetery, and believed he'd spent every moment of his time tending to the grounds from which the very bodies beneath him would one day rise in glory. I think of my wife's grandfather who died just last year, but refused care that would have alleviated his pain (much to the chagrin of many members of the family who did not understand it) because he wanted to offer up his suffering as a prayer for others, and he saw his pain as a way of participating in and drawing nearer to the heart of God.

These are the stories that change lives. Because the only testimony that is more impactful than one of someone who experienced healing is that of those who did not, but found a deeper love, and a deeper faith, and who drew nearer to Christ in and through their pain.

When someone suffers in grace divine light shines through their very wounds. Their weaknesses became channels through which God’s love flows to those around them. Their limitations became invitations to deeper communion with God.

Saint Paul learned this when he begged three times for his “thorn in the flesh” to be removed and received instead the answer: "My grace is sufficient for you, for power is made perfect in weakness" (2 Corinthians 12:9). Paul’s thorn was not removed. But it was transfigured. It became the site of grace.

Sometimes God heals us of our wounds. Sometimes He heals us through our wounds, drawing us into the wounds of His Son, which were fatal but which have become the very source of resurrection life for the world.

Both are healing. Both are answers to prayer.

 

Why Sometimes Yes, Why Sometimes Not Yet

If you press the mystery further, you begin to see that Jesus heals for the same reason He sometimes does not: to draw us to Himself.

The healings in the Gospels are not merely displays of divine power. They are personal encounters.

A blind man doesn’t just receive sight; he becomes a disciple. A leper doesn’t just receive clean skin; he falls at Jesus’ feet in worship. A woman doesn’t just stop hemorrhaging; she is called “daughter” for the first and only time Jesus ever called anyone such in the recorded Gospels (Mark 5:34).

Healing draws people to God. But so does the sustained companionship of God in our suffering.

When healing is delayed, and we discover that Christ is with us in our very wounds, we come to know Him in a way that healing alone might not have taught us.

This is why the answer to our prayer for healing is always “yes.”

Because God’s deepest intention is not merely to fix the body but to make us whole, to draw us into the divine life, to make us the persons He created us to be. And whether He accomplishes this by removing the illness or by transfiguring it in glory, He is always at work toward the same end.

 

Living This Truth

How, then, should we pray for healing?

Pray specifically, and pray with hope. Do not spiritualize your requests. If your knee hurts, ask Jesus to heal your knee. If your friend has cancer, ask Jesus to heal her cancer. God is not offended by the concreteness of our requests. He healed concrete bodies in the Gospels, and He heals them still.

Pray with surrender. Add, as Jesus did, “not my will but yours.” This is not a hedge or an escape clause. It is an act of trust in the goodness of the Father’s timing. You are not asking for less; you are asking for more, for whatever form of healing will most deeply draw you and the one you love into the life of God.

When the answer looks like “not yet,” do not conclude that God has said “no.” Continue to pray. Continue to hope. And begin to look for the deeper healing that God may be doing. The healing that comes through the wound rather than around it. There are those who suffer in bitterness. The bitterness is, in a way, more tragic than their pain. Because the pain, the wound, is actually an invitation to something more. When you suffer, will you take that invitation and embrace it?

Sit with those who suffer. One of the ways God answers prayers for healing is by sending His people. Your presence beside a hospital bed may be part of the answer to someone’s prayer. Do not underestimate the profound impact this can have. When we stay with those who are suffering, we participate in Christ's compassion. We also participate in the glorification of His resurrected body, by living as the body of Christ, and that very presence can testify to the truth that no wound, no pain, not even death, can separate us who are made members of His body in love.

Cultivate the resurrection in your imagination. This means that when we pray for healing, it's not just about having "faith," it's even more about having hope. Together, these lead us into His Heart, they lead us into the single virtue that will never end: love. Faith will one day give way to the beatific vision, when we see Him in glory. Hope will one day give way to the realization of hope. But love, St. Paul tells us in 1 Corinthians 13, never ends. Read the accounts of the risen Christ. Meditate on the empty tomb. Let your hope be shaped not by what you can currently see but by what you know to be coming. Let your faith and hope draw you deeper into God's love.

So pray, fervently, for healing. Pray for your own healing, and the healing of those you love. When you do, don't forget: the God who bent down to touch lepers, who wept at Lazarus’ tomb, who bore His wounds into glory, is still listening. He hears every prayer. He answers every prayer. And in Him, no prayer for healing is ever finally answered “no.”

Only “yes,” or “not yet, but yes.” And in grace, we can live into that "yes" now, even when we're in pain, even when we suffer, even when see others in pain and nearing death. Because that pain is not the end. It is an invitation to take hold of Him more deeply, more intimately, and in His wounds, to find Him who transfigures every wound that's surrendered to Him into final glory in the perfection of His love.