The Healing Activity of Jesus and The Ministry of the Church Today - Essay Example

His healing actions were central to His ministry as the Messiah who has come to preach the good news to the poor of the Yahweh. The cardinal principle of Jesus' mission is its stubborn option for the poor and the marginalized and the role of the healing action of Christ is an unequivocal proclamation that the people whom the society considers as the scum of the earth are the children of God in a special way. Since the Church is the continuation of Jesus in the world today, it is necessary for the Church to model its mission after the manner of Jesus and His disciples and missionaries, who provide us the benchmark of missionary conduct.

Jesus has a proclaimed bias for the poor, marginalized, outcasts, handicapped, helpless and sinners. Jesus' basic identity was with those who were excluded from mainstream social class, who boasted about their pedigree and righteousness. (The New Revised Standard Version of the Bible, Mat.9.11, Mk.2.16, Lk.5.13). The derogatory remark about Jesus by the Jews highlights this identity chosen consciously by Jesus: a friend of the tax collectors and sinners (Mat.11.19). In the words of Martin Percy these friends of Jesus were those, who dwelt outside the periphery of the over- righteous Jewish society, the politically, socially and religiously disadvantaged (p.28). The main focus of Jesus' ministry was directed to the poor, the oppressed, the excluded and the helpless.

The then Jewish society had a system of societal exclusions based on their self-righteous attitude as the chosen people of God. In the Jewish brag as the chosen people of God they forgot the fact that God has many chosen peoples. Social classes like the Samaritans were the outcasts, the presence of the sick like the lepers violated their ritualistic standards of cleanliness, tax collectors were branded bad because of their profession and the congenital handicaps like blindness were blindly accepted as the results of the sins of their ancestors.

Though healing actions of Jesus is traditionally considered as faith revelations, the Jesus' Messianic mission of the societal inclusion of the marginalized is also inherent in them. This healing touch is a gratuitous gesture extended to all the deprived who came to Him, irrespective of race or religion. (Percy 30).Jesus achieves the empowerment of the marginalized by his own voluntary disempowerment, the culmination of which is the helpless nailed condition on the cross. In the active ministry Jesus demonstrates it by His spontaneous association with all classes of people whom the Jews considered outcastes.

So there is dining with tax collectors, moving in the company of women of immoral history and blatant violation of Jewish rules of social segregation by asking the Samaritan woman water to drink. The choice of the ignorant fish folk as His disciples to carry on His mission, in itself is a symbol of the unique nature of Gods' work often achieved by using human beings, who in our judgment is least suited for the task. However, history has shown that the pack of ignorant fish folk under the leadership of the impetus Peter achieved what several divisions of grand armies of historical civilizations could not achieve.

According to Martin Percy:This view would not have been strange to the Early Church fathers, whose