Offering care and solace for those who are sick are essential ministries of every Christian pastor and of the whole Christian community. The sick need the healing news of Christ and the power of the Spirit to both fight against disease and to find comfort and hope. The Christian community, likewise, needs the sick to teach what is most important in life and to witness to the power of the gospel.

Human life is permeated with paradox. The joy and pleasure of the act of conception result in the risk and pain of childbirth. The rich process of physical, mental, and spiritual development is pervaded by the anxiety that accompanies all human growth. And the grand promise of youth and health must eventually come to terms with the experience of limitation, illness, debilitation, and ultimately death. Promise and pain bracket human life at every turn.

The Creation story of Genesis reveals that God did not intend the great gift of human life to be experienced in this way. In Genesis, suffering and death are shown to be intruders in the Creator’s original design. They reveal humanity’s separation from God, the result of our fallen state. By human choice, sin entered the created order, and with it, death.

Jesus Christ, the Word incarnate, was sent by God into this ruptured creation to reclaim it and humanity for God. Jesus suffered. Jesus entered into the very heart of the paradox of human life by willingly embracing death on the cross. By raising him to life, God overcame death and restored humanity within the original, creative design revealed in Genesis. This does not mean that suffering and death have been removed from human experience, but that they have been conquered and made salvific, the very means of eternal life.

It is within the context of the mystery of Christ’s dying and rising that Christians who are sick are seen to have a ministry to the community of faith and to the world as a whole. With Christ, they stand in the center of the paradox of life, the grandeur of its promise and the inclination to hopelessness with which it is rife because of suffering and the certainty of death. On the one hand, by their active struggle against illness, the sick members of the community of faith witness to the fact that sickness and suffering are evil and alien to God’s plan for creation. In this, they proclaim the goodness, the gift of life, and the greatness of humanity’s place within the created order.

On the other hand, by their willing acceptance of the suffering that they cannot avoid, Christians who are sick experience and witness to the reality and mystery of suffering. In the heart of this mystery, they discover that the experience of suffering need not be one of futility and despair. In union with Christ’s own suffering and death, these old enemies of the human race, these strangers to God’s creative intent have been transformed into the means of grace and salvation.

Christians, who are sick, minister to the well first and foremost by being witnesses to and embodiments of these fundamental truths of Christian revelation. By facing the reality of sickness, the weakness, dependency, and fear that it entails, the sick Christian can help the Christian community and society as a whole acknowledge and accept the fundamental frailty of human nature that all people experience, whether or not they are sick. The denial of this reality can succeed only temporarily and is not without cost both for the individual and for society. In the individual who attempts it, this denial can result in an incapacity to deal with the changes and chances of life and one’s own weaknesses. 

It can also mean an unwillingness to see change in others and can result in anger at the sight of one’s own unacknowledged weaknesses reflected in others. These characteristics can also be evident on a larger stage in societies, where frailty and the nonproductivity associated with it are viewed as having no value. In such a society, the infirm and aged are relegated to the margins of the normal life of the group and even may be viewed with disdain. They are potentially painful reminders of a fundamental frailty that no one wants to admit within a social structure where measurable productivity is the gauge of personal worth.

The tendency in each of us and in the society we inhabit to deny human weakness and dependency is the outcome of fear, a fear which has its roots in an abiding sense of our mortality. Sickness puts us in touch with mortality, our own and others’, in a direct and inescapable way. And those who are sick can minister to the well by showing them first of all that this fear is not to be denied, that it has positive value and rests on a true intuition that things were not meant to be like this. Second, the sick can help the rest learn that this fear can be faced and thereby become the way to hope and healing, the occasion for coming to an acceptance of our full humanity.

The sick are not then, in a marginal relationship with the rest of human society. Even less so are they on the periphery of the Christian community. They have an essential role at the very heart of the mystery of Jesus, dead and risen. The Gospels portray Jesus as having a constant concern for the sick and the infirm, whom he sought out, consoled, and healed. Jesus recognized that in their weakened or impaired condition the sick were allowed only a marginal existence in society. Some were considered outcasts Jesus’ ministry to them was at one and the same time an affirmation that such suffering was the result of an evil completely opposed to his Father’s design and a proclamation of the kingdom that he came to inaugurate, a kingdom heralded by Jesus’ own divine compassion and healing. And in his utter self-giving on the cross, Jesus suffered fully the effects of the evil loose in the world. In Jesus, we see the face of a God who is forever at one with the abandoned, the destitute, the victim, and all who experience hopelessness. The whole of Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection show us a God passionately attached to us, to the restoration of all creation.

The community of faith needs those who are sick to teach it about the vulnerability of God in Christ, who “is still pained and tormented in his members, made like him” (Pastoral Care, 2). The sick teach the community about Christian hope found paradoxically in human vulnerability when united to Christ, the suffering servant. In the face of a society, which can view the sick only as those who are in need and for whom so much must be done, the Christian community proclaims the place and dignity of the sick by the very way in which it loves, cares for, and depends upon them. And even as the community encourages them to offer their sufferings in union with Christ, it relies upon them to pray, in the privileged way that is theirs by virtue of this union, for the whole church and for the entire world, for peace in the world, for the many needs of the church, for individuals and families in crisis, and for all those caught up in the mystery of human sufferings, whether in body, mind, or spirit.