Several of Jesus’ healing miracles in the gospel stories involve maladies that to us sound a lot like mental illness or epilepsy. You don’t read stories about Jesus healing a broken leg or closing a wound. The blind and the lame are healed, but those were persistent ailments. Maybe Jesus didn’t do triage?

The gospels also tell us that Jesus did many other miracles that were not recorded. You couldn’t write every story, list every event. The included stories usually surround an illness that was beyond understanding. A broken leg from falling down a hill, or a gash from a knife blade, was easily understood. Primitive doctoring could tackle those. But what causes someone to fall to the ground in seizures? What causes someone to seemingly lose their mind? Demons? Forces of evil? This is where Jesus showed he had power from God by handling things people couldn’t understand.

Today, we know so much more about mental illness, its causes, and treatments. And yet, though the medical profession handles these conditions as well as any other human ailment, we are more like our ancient ancestors than we’d care to admit.

Mental illness confounds us. We sympathize with folks in recovery from heart attacks and back surgery. We take meals to people recovering from hip replacement or the first rounds of chemo. But we’re not always sure what to say or do with folks battling mental illness or chemical addiction, or dementia.

Our grasp at understanding the soul, the “me” that is me, is so closely tied to our mind that when the mind doesn’t seem to be working right, we wonder what has happened to the person. She may wonder that too.  

Maybe the most meaningful part of Jesus’ miracle stories isn’t that he healed folks who were thought to be “demon-possessed,” but that before the miracle, he claimed them and treated them with dignity. Except for those of us in the medical profession, we are not given the task of healing, but we can still claim those who struggle with mental illness as one of our own and treat them with dignity. Just doing the latter will chase many “demons” away.

Beginning next Wednesday, Ben Flannery will start a 3-week series on mental health. Do yourself and your family, and our ministry at FAB a favor and join us.

~ Dr. Tim Moore