Imagine the joy of the blind man who could see after his encounter with Christ. Consider the elation of the lame man who could leap to his feet after his dialogue with Jesus.
Listen to the delight of the deaf mute who could praise and thank God for the wonderful gifts of hearing and speech. Reflect on the bliss of the lepers cleansed by Jesus and restored by him to their place in village life. Jesus’ miracles of healing were undeniably acts of great kindness, deeds of tremendous benevolence. Yet the miracles of Jesus were not only acts of compassion; they were feats of instruction. The miracles of Jesus were acted out parables. Each miracle was a lesson about the nature of the kingdom of God.
The healing miracles of Jesus Christ brought the fortunate beneficiaries of his largesse to wholeness. The obvious deficiencies that plagued the sick and infirm perhaps since birth were banished and physical wholeness allowed them to take their rightful place in Jewish community life. Wholeness is precisely what constitutes the kingdom of God. Through Christ, those who are welcomed into the kingdom are made whole, certainly spiritually whole and sometimes even physically whole. The deficiencies that can be traced back to Eden, to that first misstep of Adam and Eve, are cast out and the believer can begin the process of growing to full stature in Jesus Christ. The wholeness of Christ, the totally obedient Son of the Father, is shared with every repentant sinner leading him to the completion of virtue, to the fullness of life, to what Pope Paul VI called “integral human development.”
Human wholeness, witnessed in the miracles of Jesus Christ, was understood by Pope Paul to be goal of the church’s social mission. Appreciating the teachings on social justice offered by his predecessors, Pope Paul went one step farther and taught that the church is interested not only in economic justice for workers but in the fullness of justice for all mankind. The church’s mission is not complete until all of mankind’s potential is realized. The fullness of the spiritual life, a sufficiency in one’s daily life, civic rights in one’s political life, opportunity in one’s community life – these goals encompass the whole of human life and cannot be neglected by the alert Christian and certainly not by the universal church. In his recent encyclical “Caritas in Veritate,” Pope Benedict XVI devotes great attention to Pope Paul’s thought that true Christian charity, the true work of Christian love, “concerns the whole of the person in every single dimension.” The pope writes of need for “completeness” in the social mission of the church which must involve, “the whole man and every man.”
Thus Jesus, in making whole the paralytic man lowered to him through the open roof, anticipates the total mission of the church, which must be concerned for the material well-being of mankind as modern popes from Leo XIII to the present have faithfully taught. The church must protect the nature of marriage and family as Pius XI taught in “Casti Conubii” and Paul VI in “Humanae Vitae.” The church must warn of political dangers as its early and sustained condemnation of Communism certainly did. And the church cannot neglect “the transcendent vision of the person” as Benedict insists.
Father Thomas D. Williams, in his recent writing “The World As It Could Be,” clearly and concisely analyzes Pope Benedict’s embrace of Pope Paul’s vision of integral human development as “the heart of the Christian social message.”
When the modern church deals with the whole man, as popes Benedict and Paul require, the church community is merely following the lead of her Master. Jesus consistently evoked supernatural faith from those who entreated him while conferring physical wholeness upon those who approached him. Jesus always dealt with the whole man, knowing that material or physical progress alone cheated humanity out of the full reward that Jesus came to share with mankind. Only integral human development, wholeness in every dimension, could do justice to the magnificent mission first entrusted by the Father to Christ and then by Christ to his church. Neither God nor Christ nor the church may leave any stone unturned until the fullness of life has been restored to all God’s ailing children.
