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 nations. This resonates with a theme in our reading from Acts as well:
...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.
In the capital city of Philippi, they went on the Sabbath “outside the gate by the river, where we supposed there was a place of prayer.” There they met a woman named Lydia, who came to faith in Jesus through Paul’s words. She and her whole household were baptized. An unexpected blessing, strangers now become family in faith. Who knows what fruit came of that encounter – generations of Christ-followers, perhaps. The river of God, a place of prayer, a place of healing, across national borders and boundaries of difference; that’s where we are called to live the Good News of freedom in Christ. That Good News is for all nations.
Does the healing power of Christ extend to nations? There is only one way to find out. We may feel feeble in our prayers for peace and an end to terror and starvation, oppression and exploitation, economic and environmental devastation, because the needs are so vast, the pain so entrenched. It is hard to see outcomes to such prayers. The bigger the wound, the more complex the condition, the longer it can take to heal it – but our prayers are not impotent. Through our prayers we bless peace-makers. Circumstances change. We influence people in authority, or grass-roots activists. We don’t know – we know only that the healing stream that flows through and around us is meant for the whole world.
Maybe each day we 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. Maybe our churches agree to pray for one place of suffering each month, focusing our intercessions.
We don’t know where the healing stream will flow. It is up to us to be water-carriers, bearing that water of life to every place and person in need of it. It is up to us to identify and remove the obstacles in its flow. In the end, even nations will be healed, and God’s reign celebrated everywhere.
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