The Charisms: 4 - The Gift of Healing

Jesus ministry involved preaching, teaching and healing. Jesus healed the sick, cured lepers and gave sight to the blind. He passed on this same authority to his disciples. "Cure the sick," he told them. "Raise the dead, cleanse the lepers, cast out demons. You received without payment; give without payment" (Matthew 10:8).

The purpose of this gift is manifold. It shows God’s mercy and compassion on the sick and the suffering (Acts 10:38, Luke 13:16), demonstrates that Christ is the Son of God (John 10:36-38), confirms the Word (Mark 16:15-18, Acts 4:29-30), helps attract people to the Gospel (Luke 4:40-43), and brings glory to God (Mark 2:12, Luke 13:13, Luke 18:42-43, John 9:2-3).

The gift of healing is a special gift granted to someone whereby when they pray over someone, the process of healing takes place quickly, sometimes instantly. This gift operates on three levels: mental, physical and spiritual. Catholics accept this gift in the lives of the saints, but find it difficult to accept in the lives of ordinary Christians, especially themselves.

The person with the gift, however, cannot heal everybody. Who is healed and who isn’t is, of course, decided by God, who sometimes decide to withhold healing. As the Catechism states: "The Holy Spirit gives to some a special charism of healing so as to make manifest the power of the grace of the risen Lord. But even the most intense prayers do not always obtain the healing of all illnesses. Thus St. Paul must learn from the Lord that "my grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness," and that the sufferings to be endured can mean that "in my flesh I complete what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions for the sake of his Body, that is, the Church" (CCC 1508).

Here are some examples of Christians healing the sick.

Peter healed Aneneas, who had been bedridden for eight years with paralysis (cf. Acts 9:33-34).

Peter heals a crippled beggar by the gates of the temple (cf. Acts 3:1-8).

Peter’s shadow was sufficient to heal many. "Yet more than ever believers were added to the Lord, great numbers of both men and women, so that they even carried out the sick into the streets, and laid them on cots and mats, in order that Peter’s shadow might fall on some of them as he came by. A great number of people would also gather from the towns around Jerusalem, bringing the sick and those tormented by unclean spirits, and they were all cured" (Acts 5:14-16)

Paul healed a crippled man in Lystra who was lame from birth (cf. Acts 14:8-10).