Let’s move now from the pool of healing in our Gospel story, to the healing river mentioned in the end of Revelation; from the healing of persons to the healing of the nations:
Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, bright as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb through the middle of the street of the city. On either side of the river is the tree of life with its twelve kinds of fruit, producing its fruit each month; and the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations.
What a beautiful picture of the new heavens and the new earth, picking up on the vision of a restoring river in Ezekiel 47, which also had fruit trees on each bank, their leaves for healing. In the new vision the healing has been broadened to the healing of the nations. This resonates with a theme in our reading from Acts as well:
During the night, Paul had a vision: there stood a man of Macedonia pleading with him and saying, “Come over to Macedonia and help us.” When he had seen the vision, we immediately tried to cross over to Macedonia, being convinced that God had called us to proclaim the good news to them.
I have refugees on the brain lately, but I immediately thought of the devastated families pouring out of an obliterated Syria, trying to save their lives and their children. Images of the unplanned, chaotic refugee camp on the Greek border, and desperate attempts to pass into Macedonia and the Balkan states come to mind. “Come over to Macedonia and help us.” If ever there were people who needed good news proclaimed, here are millions. If ever the nations needed healing, it is now.
Does the healing power of Christ extend to nations? There is only one way to find out. Perhaps we feel feeble in our prayers for peace and an end to terror and starvation, oppression and exploitation, because the needs are so vast, the pain so entrenched. It is hard to see dramatic outcomes to such prayers. The bigger the wound, the more complex the condition, the longer it can take to heal it – but our prayers do not go unheard. Maybe through our prayers we strengthen peace-makers. Maybe circumstances change. Maybe our prayers influence people in authority, or grass-roots activists. We don’t know – we only know that the healing stream that flows through and around us is intended for the whole world.
Maybe each day we should comb the news for one name in a conflict-ridden area, that leaps out at us, and make it our task to pray for that person to be fully blessed. Who knows?
When Paul and his companions acted on his vision and traveled to Macedonia, they found a river there too, by which there was a place of prayer. And there they met a woman named Lydia, who was brought to faith in Jesus Christ through Paul’s words, and she and her whole household were baptized. No one would have expected that – but strangers now became family in faith. Who knows what fruit came of that encounter – generations of Christ-followers, perhaps.
We don’t know where the healing stream is to flow, but It is up to us to be water-carriers, bearing that water of life to every place and person in need of it. In the end, all nations will be healed, and God will reign.
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