Jesus tells us to love our neighbour as much and in the same way that we love ourselves. Well how do I love myself? Whenever I come into contact with disease my love for myself is spelt out in capital letters. I expect, and nearly always get the best treatment available. I don’t accept having to wait longer than anyone else for treatment; I want to be comfortable when I’m recuperating and I want sympathy and understanding.
I hope that I’m as zealous about my wife’s health as my own. I hope that I’m just interested my family’s well being as I am in my own, but even this is a struggle if I’m honest. Then if I extend the idea to my friends and my wider family, to my church, well it’s a pretty tall order, a pretty high ideal to love my neighbours as I love myself.
And the parable of the good Samaritan leaves us in no doubt, your neighbour, that you should be loving as you love yourself, is not limited to those around you, to your own kind, your own kin. It includes people a long way a way from you, people that you don’t approve of, and even people who seem may strange or unpleasant.
So I thank God for the Tear Fund who are walking the walk on this commandment to love your neighbour as you love yourself. We thank and praise God for them, they really do show us the way and it’s easy and a privilege for us to support them.
Clearly then as Christians we are expected to respond to disease. But as people of faith, as people with a world-view there’s something else we have to do. People expect us not only to respond to disease but somehow to account for it, to explain it. How can we be aware of the cruel realities of Cancer or HIV and Aids and still say that this universe is the creation of loving and mighty God?
If you’re an atheist or a humanist you have no such burden. In fact the presence of disease in the world may be the reason why you don’t believe that there is a God.
Disease disrupts everyone’s world-view. Some atheists suddenly find that they’re angry with God. Imagine that, feeling anger towards someone whose existence you deny. Or they transfer their feelings on to the nearest Christian. ‘How dare you say there’s a God! How dare you say that Jesus loves me, can’t you see what’s happening?’
It’s as though deep down they have a spiritual belief, or sort of belief but it’s conflicting with the situation they’re in and with what they’re rational mind is telling them. So it all comes out in an angry torrent.
And conversely many Christians when confronted with serious illness will question their faith, they suddenly get the feeling that they’ve just been mouthing the words all these years, now that they’re facing a serious diagnosis they find themselves asking ‘what do I really believe, in my heart of hearts?
So what does the Bible tell us about disease? In the book of Leviticus God lays down the laws by which the Israelites are to live, among them he gives them instruction on ritual bathing and purity, so that the spread of disease is inhibited. It’s as though He’s saying that disease is out there, it’s just a natural part of the world and you’ve got to look out for it. But in the same book he says that he will send diseases upon the Israelites as punishment for not following his commands. So which is it?
The most famous example of God sending disease is in Exodus. Perhaps this is the first recorded instance of collateral damage, the first-born of the Egyptians all die in one night because of their leader’s refusal to free the Israelites from captivity. Disease in Exodus is a sign of God taking sides on behalf of his people, and the absence of disease shows that you are one of God’s preferred people.
What a temptation this book was to Christians in the early 1980s when we first became aware of AIDS. ‘God’s plague!’ was what the cry, ‘it only kills the ungodly!’ Thankfully very few Christians still see it that way, but perhaps even those of us who were appalled by the homophobic and deeply unchristian claims that this was God’s ever so Biblical revenge upon partakers in deeply promiscous cultures and subcultures, at the time secretly wondered, ‘could it be?’ Thankfully we’ve all grown up in one way or another since those dark times.
So disease is in the world, naturally, but God also causes it from time to time – whether to punish or as a sign of his wrath or to aid his people as in when The Philistines are afflicted with tumours.
In the book of Job disease comes instead from Satan, but God allows him to do this in order to test a man’s faith to the brink of destruction.
King Hezekiah is set to die of illness but Isaiah intercedes for him and God extends his life for another fifteen years. King Asa is ‘diseased of the feet’ and inquires of physicians but not of God, so he dies.
Yet it does seem to be generally accepted that illness is part of the world and needs to be treated by doctors. After all Luke has the honour of narrating the Gospel and Acts and none of the Apostles rebuke him for his profession.
Jesus performs many miraculous healings but while he cures the leper he leaves leprosy in tact. He refers to his healing as a sign of his Messianic status, but is it just a means to an end?
The healing that takes place throughout the Gospels and which the Apostles continue in Acts never seems to happen simply for its own sake. Disease features heavily throughout the Bible, Old and New Testaments, but you never get the feeling that disease itself, the phenomenon of disease is being explained.
Buddhism on the other hand is very clear about disease. In fact you could say that the whole religion began because of this question – why is there disease in the world?
The story goes that Prince Siddhartha was born into a life of luxury, seeing as he was the King’s son, but his upbringing was very strange. His mother had died in childbirth and because his father, the King, couldn’t handle his grief he decreed that his child should never be aware of anything imperfect or decaying or diseased. So he had a very strange childhood, if every one of the servants became ill they were got rid of. If anyone who worked at the palace started to show signs of aging they were removed so that the young prince grew up with this illusion that no one gets ill, no one gets old, no one has to die.
So when, one day he escaped for the day and saw a man who was old, and a man who was diseased and dying it absolutely blew his mind to pieces. Immediately he became depressed and anxious and he resolved that he would never be content until he had satisfactorily understood why there was all this disease in the world.
So this became his quest that took him away from the palace and all his possessions until one day, while meditating under a lotus tree he found what he’d been looking for – enlightenment. And that’s what the Buddha means, it means the enlightened one.
So he became the Buddha, the enlightened one, and his followers used to ask him questions on all the mysteries of life and he’d give them answers.
When asked whether there was a God or not the Buddha said that there was no point asking the question. Since God is by definition infinite and we are finite it would be impossible for us to comprehend God, even if he existed. So Buddhists aren’t atheists, they’re non-theists.
At the heart of the Buddha’s teaching is the idea of Annica which means that everything changes. Every physical structure or organism living or not is always changing even if we can’t see it, our cells are always being replaced so we don’t stay the same nor does any one or anything else. Our thoughts and feelings, too are always changing. In fact the only thing that doesn’t change is the fact that nothing changes.
And this leads us onto another of the three universal truths, dukkha. This states that life is unsatisfactory, everything is changing and mostly decaying. The Buddha says that we are all living under an illusion, we think that things are static and they don’t change, we don’t see how everything is dying, is decaying, we want to live under an illusion.
So as far as disease is concerned the Buddha would say that it’s just the way of the world. Everything is decaying and passing out of its current existence, the only difference with disease is that we can actually see it happening.
Happiness, according to the Buddha, can only come when we take ourselves out of the illusion. Unhappiness is the result of trying to live as though everything wasn’t dying, of trying to hold on to things that are by their very nature impermanent. If we accept the ‘reality’ of impermanence then we will let go, and we will be happy.
Buddhists are good people, to the extent that they live up to the teaching of their religion.
Because of the law of karma there’s no actions without consequences so they try to be peaceful and compassionate in all situations.
There’s a great deal that’s very impressive about Buddhism and about Buddhists. If you really believe you cannot and never will be able to believe in God then Buddhism offers you a great deal.
And yet I think that the Buddhist picture of the world is wrong and I think that the Buddhist picture of disease is wrong.
I came to realise this when I was a theology student in Canterbury ten years ago. At the time I was very interested in all religions and to be honest while I was a very religious person, I wasn’t convinced that Christianity was in any way superior to other faiths. Then one day an eminent Biblical and theological scholar whom I in my ignorance had never heard of came to speak and answer questions at the university. He was called Father Raymond Brown and although I’d not heard of him you could tell that he was important because my tutor was wearing a suit and tie.
At the time I was, like many people, most concerned with the similarities between the faiths and liked to play down their differences.
I’d just been reading a book called ‘The Gospel of Buddha’ which made the curious and some would say outrageous claim that Jesus was, in fact a Buddhist. According to this book when Jesus said that to gain eternal life you had to be born again he meant it literally, you have to be born again, in another life and so on. Not born in the spirit, but really born again, suggesting that Jesus taught his followers to believe in rebirth or reincarnation (Buddhists believe in rebirth, Hindus believe in re-incarnation. The difference is interesting but not particularly relevant here)
Anyway, when Father Ray Brown asked if there were any questions I put my hand up and was surprised and a little alarmed when mine was the only hand in the air. I tried to backtrack saying it was a stupid question and perhaps not the most appropriate but he said, ‘no, I won’t laugh at you…’ So I asked him: ‘what do you think of the idea that Jesus was in fact a Buddhist’
I could see my tutor’s heart sinking. He obviously wanted someone to question the great theologian about the content of one of his books and here was this ignorant and rather odd question. But Father Brown’s answer was solid gold for me,
He answered it by telling the story of a two monks, one a Buddhist and one a Christian. The Christian monk is trying to persuade the Buddhist to become a Christian so he lends him a copy of John’s Gospel. The Buddhist monk thanks him for it and promises to read it carefully. A month later they meet again and the Christian monk asks the Buddhist monk ‘how did you get on with John’s gospel?’ and the Buddhist monk replied ‘I’m sorry, I just can’t get past the first three words’
It’s not really a laugh out loud story, more of a laugh to show that you understand it story. What was it that the Buddhist monk found so incomprehensible? The first three words: In…the…beginning
Christianity and Buddhism are fundamentally different in respect of time. For Buddhists there is an endless cycle of births and deaths. The ever-changing condition of the world is something permanent. Time has no beginning and no end. The misery and suffering of the world, the decay and the death, is the way it is and the way it will always be.
Christianity is totally different. There is a beginning and a middle and an end. The universe has a beginning, what’s more it has a good beginning. We’re living in the middle times, or should I say somewhere between the middle and the end times.
There was no disease in the garden of Eden just as there was no death. Now that we live in separation from God, in this fallen condition and this fallen world, we are indeed surrounded by death and decay and disease, it’s the consequence of being apart from God. But it won’t always be like this. Disease is a permanent feature of this world, but it will have no place in the Kingdom of God.
Imagine we are in a three part drama. Act One is Creation, Act Two is the Fall and Act Three is Redemption. Beginning, middle, end. Eden. Earth. The Kingdom of God.
So where Buddhism sees a grim reality of decay, stretching out into infinity we say ‘No! The way it is now is not the way it is meant to be and it is not the way it is going to be’
The Buddha says that everything changes. We say, ‘Jesus Christ is the same yesterday today and forever. Stop describing only the bit you can see, there’s more, there’s going to be so much more! Yes this world is transitory but it is being invaded, replaced, infiltrated by something eternal.
And this means that when we see disease we can never accept it as an inevitable part of the world. We defy disease, we even defy death.
As Paul puts it in I Corinthians 15 54-55
When the perishable has been clothed with the imperishable, and the mortal with immortality, then the saying that is written will come true: Death has been swallowed up in victory.
Where, O death, is your victory? Where, O death, is your sting?I owe Ray Brown so much because with that one silly little story, told in response to an even sillier question he taught me to look beyond the stories within stories of the Bible to see the grand narrative of the whole thing. Christianity is a story of a world gone bad that’s going to get good again. He showed me the total picture of Christianity, the grandest of grand narratives that is capable of absorbing everything that I encounter. Including disease.
It means that despair at the state of the world is not allowed. We see everything that the Buddha sees, a world of impermanence and change but we see it being taken over in the twinkling of an eye by something incorruptible and everlasting.
There is however a need for a note of caution. In the last few hundred years humans have begun to believe that they are rather clever. There have been breakthroughs in science and technology that create a certain mindset that believes we are getting cleverer and cleverer and in the process solving all our problems.
There was a time, perhaps in the nineteenth and early twentieth century when we thought that we were abolishing misery. Our advanced civilizations would make war a thing of the past, our scientists were eradicating disease from the face of the earth, and our technology was getting rid of food shortages as well.
It’s perhaps understandable that in the midst of these dizzying breakthroughs many Christians started to think that they were literally building the Kingdom of God on earth as it is in heaven. But was with the tower of Babel they were undone.
The carnage and horror of world war one destroyed the idea that we were becoming ever more civilized. And even then we managed another world war twenty years later. This surely taught us that there is something in human nature that we cannot change.
We’ve devised the means to feed the world’s population many times over, but famine isn’t going away.
And yes, we’ve made huge progress in fighting disease, in defying its very existence. But then AIDS happened. There’s outstanding progress being made in the treatment of cancer, but we’re also devising new ways to get cancer with mobile phone masts, radiation, additives, chemicals in our food and so on.
We must not think that the kingdom of God is brought into being by human achievements, by human intelligence or human actions. Karl Barth described the things of this world that delighted him, such as the music of Mozart, as parables of the kingdom.
That phrase, I think, describes perfectly our human attempts to defeat disease. When scientists achieve breakthroughs they are parables of the Kingdom. When a married couple facing cancer or alzheimers remain in love with each other that is a miraculous sign, a symbol of the kingdom to come. When a child with cistic fibrosis manages to lead an ordinary life at secondary school that is a miraculous sign to accompany the kingdom, a parable of the kingdom, but it is not the kingdom itself.
Just like Jesus. He healed as a sign of the Kingdom. Lazarus still died a natural death. But he had experienced a wonderful parable, a wonderful signpost to the resurrection body that he would one day put on for eternity.
So I finish where I began, with praise and gratitude for Tear Fund. For putting their shoulder to the wheel in the battle to defeat disease; for going where we fear to tread and defying disease. And for refusing to accept that this fallen world of decay and death is the reality that God wills. It isn’t, the Buddha was wrong. Disease
will be no more.
