THE HOLY SPIRIT
IN

Today as Christians we live in the Age of the Holy Spirit in which we are called to reap the enormous spiritual harvest of healing and reconciliation won for us by the life, death and resurrection of Jesus.

Christ. In our Christian mission of healing and reconciliation, which we pray is inspired by the Holy Spirit, the Lord Jesus is fulfilling in us the promise he made to his Apostles at the Last Supper. "1 tell you most solemnly that whoever believes in me will perform the same works as I do myself, he will perform even greater works" (John 14:12) As long as we remain completely open to the guidance of the Holy Spirit, then in the Christian ministry of healing and reconciliation we will continue the healing work which Jesus did during his life on earth by relating it to his resurrection.

Because the word 'healing' is so much misunderstood even by Catholics it is better to use the word 'reconciliation.'Reconciliation or healing is the new life of the Spirit by which we are introduced into a new loving relationship with God our Father from which flow true loving relationships with our neigbhour and a true love of ourselves. It is the fulfillment of the Mosaic Law. Jesus said he came not to abolish the Law or the Prophets but to complete them. The key note of the Mosaic Law was that we were to love.

God, our neighbor and ourselves. We were created originally in God's image but sin entered our human condition and now in the Holy Spirit we are re-created in the image of Christ "because God the Father wanted all perfection to be found in him and all things to be reconciled through him and for him."
(Colossians 1 : 18, 19)

When we acknowledge Jesus as the Christ and the Lord of our lives then we are healed and reconciled with God our neighbour and ourselves. It is sad, but often when the word healing is used on it own without an explanation it is open to different interpretations, many of which are false and misleading. When the two words healing and reconciliation are used together it is obvious that every Christian church accepts them and so they will become a source of unity instead of division.

Jesus was perse a healer/reconciler and the people knew it. They sought his presence and his mission everywhere. "The people gathered in their thousands so that they were treading on one another, that evening they brought to him all who were sick and those possessed by devils. The whole town came crowding round the door, and he cured many who were suffering from diseases of one kind or another.

In the morning long before dawn, he got up and left the house and went off to a lonely place and prayed there. Simon and his companions set out in search of him, and when they found him, they said 'Everybody is looking for you.' He answered 'Let us go elsewhere to the neighbouring country towns so that I may preach there too because that is why I came.' And he went all through Galilee preaching in their synagogues and casting out devils." (Mark 1 : 32-34)

Through the gifts of the Holy Spirit, this is how Jesus lived and in the same Spirit this is how we should live. If we take healing out of our mission as Christians then we have no gospel to preach and the Holy Spirit will not be used to spread the message of Christ's resurrection and healing.

How can we relate to what Christ did if we ignore his healing and reconciliation and claim that they ended with the Early Church? St Paul states clearly that the ministry of healing and reconciliation by Christ has been handed on to us to continue his work, and he calls us Christ's 'Ambassadors because of our ministry in his name'. "God in Christ was reconciling the world to himself, not holding men's faults against them, and he has entrusted to us the
news that they are reconciled. So we are Ambassadors for Christ. "It is as though God the Father was appealing through us and the appeal we make in Christ's name is be reconciled with God" (2 Corinthians 5: 20, 21) What a wonderful vocation we have as Christians. In the power of the Holy Spirit we are able to speak in the name of the Risen Christ about the healing and reconciliation which changes people's lives as it has changed ours.

As Christians we all need the Holy Spirit to take over our lives and deepen our faith in the Risen Christ so that ultimately it is the Holy Spirit who speaks through us and gives us the privilege and authority to speak and act in Christ's name. Our primary aim in our ministry is to profess our belief in the resurrection of Jesus Christ and in following his example to give glory to God the Father as we encourage people to be healed and reconciled in the power of the Holy Spirit perfectly seen in the person of Jesus Christ.

The essential teaching of Christ was enshrined in his healing ministry through which in the Holy Spirit he reconciled people to God the Father to their neighbour and to themselves. I believe that if the Church, which claims to speak in Christ's name, did not promote healing and reconciliation as its top priority then it would have stripped itself of the real meaning for its existence, which was to be the spiritual leader of Christian people through its dedication to CONTINUE in Christ's work of healing and reconciliation.

There is no indication in any of Christ's statements that his healing mission would end with his physical death. In fact from the coming of the Holy Spirit at the first Pentecost the healing and reconciling mission took off in an extraordinary way. Great things were being done by the Apostles empowered by the Holy Spirit to act in the name of Christ. Wonderful healings took place in the name of the Risen Lord. In fact healing grew so enormously in the Early Church that it became as big if not a bigger threat to the Jewish Religious leaders than it was in Jesus' own time.

The Early Church expected that the healing ministry would increase and intensify even more in the future than it had in their time. The preaching of Christ rising from the dead and the sending of the Holy Spirit were accompanied by healings of such power that it was obvious that God the Father's love and presence was with them. What happened in those times could also apply to us today if we commit ourselves to the Holy Spirit and healing. The commitment Jesus gave to his disciples applies also to us in our approach as Christians. "Go out to the whole world, proclaim the Good News to all creation, and these will be the signs that will be associated with believers; 'they will lay their hands on the sick who will recover' (Mark 16:18)

During his public life Jesus saw clearly the desperate need of the people for healing. 'He made a tour through all the towns and villages, teaching in the synagogues, proclaiming the good news of the kingdom and curing all kinds of disease and all kinds of illness. And when he saw the crowds he felt sorry for them because they were harassed and dejected, like sheep without a shepherd.

Then he said to his disciples, "The harvest is rich, but the labourers are few, so ask the Lord of the harvest to send out labourers to his harvest." (Matthew 9: 35 - 37) In the power of the Holy Spirit we believe that as Christians we have answered the Risen Christ's call for the healing and reconciliation of people and it is in his name that they are healed and reconciled. If we are true Christians then we must model our lives on him so that in all we say and do we are continuing the work which he did during his short time in his public mission.

Jesus as a person was a reconciler and healer. His life was a complete and total mission of reconciliation and healing. Healing was not an extra in his life or something he did to prove his message. It WAS the message.

It was an end in itself because through it he made people whole and able to live the new life of reconciliation. He healed people because he loved them, and in this he was reflecting the caring, sharing, serving love of God the Father. "The words I say to you I do not speak as from myself," he said "It is the Father living in me who is doing this work." (John 14: 10)

His healing was ORDINARY to him in so far as this is what he came on earth to do with his life. The first time he spoke publicly was in the synagogue of his home town of Nazareth where he spelled out quite clearly how healing was so essential to his life that this is how he wanted people to remember him so that they would continue to develop his mission.

Healing was so fundamental to the gospel of Christ that if you take healing out of it the message would be essentially changed. At the end of his life, as he hung dying on the cross he continued his healing work when he prayed for forgiveness for those who crucified him, promised paradise to the repentant thief, and comforted his grieving mother by bequeathing John to her to take his place. His final words on the cross were 'it is accomplished.'

His mission in his earthly life of healing and reconciliation was now complete. From his place in heaven as God's son he promised that the Father and he would send the Holy Spirit on his followers who would continue his work of healing and reconciliation. (John 14:26)

1 believe that the miracles of healing which Jesus performed during his physical life were not so much a proof of his divinity but rather a statement that God the Father wants us whole and healthy in our human nature.

This is why he sent his Son Jesus who was sinless to be one of us. He was the perfect man who as St Paul says "did not cling to his equality with God but emptied himself taking the form of a slave becoming as human beings are and being in every way like a human being he was humbler yet, even to accepting death, death on a cross.' (Philippians 2: 6-8)

Jesus had all the gifts of the Holy Spirit he needed to live a full human life in total harmony and peace with God, everyone and himself. The gifts of the Spirit are spelled out for us by St Paul in Chapter 12 and 13 of his First Letter to the Corinthians.

Jesus had them as well as the special gifts of faith, hope and love. In faith, he knew (believed) God was his Father, in hope trusted him completely with his life and in love was in perfect peace and harmony with God, everyone and himself.

He lived as we would have lived today were it not that our human nature had been damaged by sin until it was healed and restored through the life, death and resurrection of Christ our Lord. "If death came to everyone through the offense of one man how much greater an effect the grace of God has had - coming through the one man Jesus Christ." (Romans 5:15)

At Nazareth he said that he came to set the prisoners free when he outlined his manifesto for himself and for those who would follow him to take up the challenge of his life: "The Spirit of the Lord is on me, for he has anointed me
to bring the good news to the afflicted, He has sent me to bring liberty to captives, sight to the blind, To let the oppressed go free To proclaim a year of favour from the Lord. (Luke 4:18)

I believe that Jesus did not heal solely as God as if his body was an appendage. He was truly a man, and he healed as a man with a divine mission to heal and restore people. In his human nature he was both in love with God his Father and with everyone in his world. Through his healing love and humanity Jesus showed to people the 'acceptable face' of God as a Father.
Jesus healed people for their own sake as a sign of God the Father's love for them. As a person he healed the person who came to him in faith. He healed whatever needed healing in them. The secret of his healing was love in action which placed no limits within itself.

He healed every form of sickness whether it was spiritual, emotional or physical. He saw all forms of sickness as a result of sin which he came to conquer. Jesus healed and restored people in whatever they needed; this is why I have always placed DISCERNMENT as a very high priority in my ministry of healing. Jesus did not divide a person into body, soul and emotions. He healed the person because all Christian healing however intensely physical is personal and is related to the whole person and to reconciliation.

All forms of Christian healing whether physical, emotional or spiritual are complementary and interactive. In Christian healing and reconciliation we become more fully human fully alive. We are at peace with God, our neighbour and ourselves. Whenever we mention healing we automatically include reconciliation and vice versa.

Every healing has many facets to it. To study the life of Jesus is to study the mystery and ministry of healing. If we make this essential to our spiritual life then our healing ministry will increase a thousand fold because it will have the blessing of the Holy Spirit. Unless we really love the person, seeking healing there will be no healing on our part.

By love I mean a deep awareness within our spirit that the person in need of healing is a child of God the Father who wants to heal them, and is willing to use us as his instruments. Jesus so loved his Father that he lived out his life in complete trust doing whatever the Father wanted him to do. Healing for Jesus was the work of the Kingdom, the business of his Father.

He put healing before his own tiredness or any form of personal suffering. Trust is the other side of the coin of faith. Whenever Jesus was called to heal, once he discovered in prayer what his Father wanted him to do he did it, and then left the final result to his Father. Unlike Moses he never stuck the rock twice!! This trust towards his Father left Jesus in command in every healing situation.

Jesus, because he was human, was not aloof from the pain of the people around him. He too was wounded and felt compassion for them. In every healing session in which 1 have shared 1 am often overwhelmed by the sense of pain around me. In suffering we discover a sympathy with the person to be healed. Everyone who engages in Christian healing is bound to suffer. Jesus said 'If anyone wants to be a follower of mine let him renounce himself and take up his cross every day and follow me."(Luke 9 :23)

The road to healing and reconciliation is a rough one which Jesus trod and others try to follow. The healings which Jesus did led to his death. The Jewish religious leaders were aware of his healings even raising the dead Lazarus to life, and so they were determined to kill him. (John 11 ;53)

They saw his healing mission as a threat to their religious and political power. Jesus had become too well-known and crowds followed him everywhere because they knew that he had committed his whole life to healing people. They had made him in point of fact their spiritual leader and this called for drastic action by the Jewish Religious leaders. '

The chief priests and Pharisees called a meeting."Here is this man working all these signs," they said, "and what action are we taking? If we let him go on in this way everybody will believe in him, and the Romans will come and destroy the Holy Place and our nation." One of them, Ciaphas, the high priest, said "you can't seem to have grasped the situation at all; you fail to see that it is better for one man to die for the people than for the whole nation to be destroyed."

They conjured up a political charge in order to make the punishment of death fit the crime. Jesus claimed that his healings were a sign of his special relationship with God the Father. He said to the Pharisees, "If I am not doing my Father's work there is no need to believe me; but if I am doing it even if you refuse to believe in me at least believe in the work I do; then you will know for sure that the Father is in me and I am in the Father." (John 37:38)

They refused to believe that the healings were genuinely a sign from God the Father confirming that Jesus was the Son of God, and so they accused him of blasphemy which was punishable by death. They realised that if they acknowledged the source of his power then they would have to admit who he was, and this would put an end to their unique religious and social power.

Healing was a threat which they could well do without because they pretended it was for the common good to portray Jesus as someone who was an enemy of Israel and their religion. No wonder Jesus had called them hypocrites!!

The healings of Jesus had thoroughly upset their ordered way of doing things to which they had grown accustomed over the years. The risen Jesus was well aware of the hostility that his healing caused during his public life and in order to protect his followers he promised them in his final discourse that he would not leave them orphans. "I shall ask the Father and he will give you another Advocate to be with you for ever.

The Advocate the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name will teach you everything and remind you of all I have said to you." (John 14: 16,26) Previously Jesus did all the healings which they witnessed now they would heal once the Holy Spirit came down on them. Their novitiate was over, from now on they would be fully fledged Christian healers.

God the Father and Jesus Christ His Son wanted the pattern of life and healing love to continue. That is why they gave us the Holy Spirit to be our new life. Just as the Father breathed life into man at the beginning of creation, so now the risen Christ would breathe the new life of grace into his followers who would preach and live by his gospel of healing and reconciliation.

The Father, Son and Holy Spirit are in our Christian Mission and in this way the Blessed Trinity is at work in every aspect of our healing. St Paul reminds us of who we are "Didn't you realise that you are a temple of God with the Spirit of God living in you." (Corinthians 3:16) As Christians, we are missioners with the same mission as God the Son of healing and reconciliation, and this mission was the outstanding characteristic of the Early Church. "The Apostles continued to testify to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus with great power.

The many miracles and signs worked through the Apostles made a deep impression on everyone." (Acts 4: 33,2:43) We are living today, as I said in the wonderful age of the Holy Spirit who restores us to the new life in which we look on God as our loving Father and the Risen Christ as Lord of our lives. (Romans 8: 14-17)

Without the power of the Holy Spirit helping us would not know God as the Father He really is.The twin aspects of the Fatherhood of God and the Lordship of Christ are both essential for healing, and are exclusively the work and gift of the Holy Spirit so that we can truly say it is the Spirit who heals. In order to be open to healing and reconciliation we need to pray and again this is the gift of the Holy Spirit.

When we do not know what to say in prayer then in the Holy Spirit we will leave it to the Spirit and rest in his living presence. "The Spirit too comes to help in our weakness. For when we annot choose words to pray properly, the Spirit himself expresses our plea that could never be put into words and God, who knows everything in our hearts knows perfectly well what he means." (Romans 8 : 26,27)

The quality of our ministry of healing and reconciliation should be judged by the periods of ilence in which we listen to what the Sprit is saying to us. Our prayer in the Spirit expresses our elationship with God in whom we trust in faith that He wants our healing and ministry to be done in a special way in which we and those we pray for are healed. The healers and the healed are members of the family of God who heals them both In healing and reconciliation we must never cease to pray for a deeper awareness of the Holy Spirit in our lives.

Without Him we would never be able to witness to His presence and power in our lives. Without the Holy Spirit there would be no mission to people because we would not be true evangelists with a sense of mission of the meaning of the resurrection of Jesus Christ. When you read the Acts of the Apostles in a prayerful way prompted by the Holy Spirit it will be obvious to you what an extraordinary effect the Spirit had on the whole society in which the Apostles lived.

They were aware of the dangers of witnessing to the power of the Christian gospel among the Jewish religious leaders. Christian healing of its nature has always presented problems to authority as happened to Jesus Christ in his lifetime. One of the first conflicts caused by healing involved the Apostles Peter and John.

They were brought before the Jewish Senate to answer how they healed a man crippled from birth. "They made the prisoners stand in the middle and began to interrogate them. By what power and by whose name have you done this? Then Peter, filled with the Holy Spirit, addressed them. 'Rulers of the people and elders, if you are questioning us today about an act of kindness to a cripple, and asking us how he was healed, you must know, all of you, and the whole people of Israel, that it is by the name of Jesus Christ, the Nazarene who you crucified, and God raised from the dead, by his name and no other that this man stands before you cured.

This is the stone which you, the builders, rejected but which has become the cornerstone. Only in him is there salvation; for all of the names in the world given to men, this is the only one by which we can be saved. They were astonished at the fearlessness shown by Peter and John, considering that they were uneducated laymen, and they recognised them as associates of Jesus, but when they saw the man who had been cured standing by their side, they could find no answer. So they ordered them to stand outside while the Sanhedrin had a private discussion.

"What are we going to do with these men?" they asked. "It is obvious to everybody in Jerusalem that a notable miracle has been worked through them, and we cannot deny it. But to stop the whole thing spreading any further among the people, let us threaten them against ever speaking in that name again." 'So they called them in and gave them a warning on no account to make statements, or to teach in the name of Jesus. But Peter and John retorted, "You must judge whether in God's eyes it is right to listen to you and not to God. We cannot stop proclaiming what we have seen and heard."

They repeated the warnings and then released them; they could not think of any way to punish them, since all the people were giving glory to God for what had happened. The man who had been miraculously cured was over forty years old.' (Acts 4: 6-22) It is patently obvious that Peter was completely changed by the coming of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost. On the night of Jesus' passion in the courtyard of Pilate, Peter denied three times that he even knew Jesus. Here before the highest leaders in the land Peter gave a powerful witness to the resurrection of Jesus Christ in whose name he worked a miracle so extraordinary that even the prejudiced leaders could not deny it.

Before the Holy Spirit came the Apostles who had seen Jesus work many wonderful miracles and were witnesses to the Risen Lord when he showed himself to them, did not publicly proclaim the tact and significance of the Resurrection but when the Holy Spirit came it was a case of all heaven being let loose!!
The Holy Spirit totally changed Peter.

On the night of Jesus' passion he denied that he even knew Jesus when he was questioned by a servant girl. After Pentecost when he was brought before the highest Jewish religious leaders in the temple accused of healing a man crippled from birth in the power of the Holy Spirit he gave the most powerful witness to the resurrection of Jesus and how he worked a miracle in his name.

This DVD of one hour includes the teaching and experiences of El Shaddai missions. Over the past twenty years Monsignor Michael Buckley gives clear insights on healing with many recordings of the Annual Scarborough Conference. It will be helpful for personal or group viewing. If you have any difficulty with the DVD please return it to El Shaddai when a new one will be sent to you free of charge. Cost £10.00 payable to 'El Shaddai'.
CDs and DVDs will not be available until June 18th.

May the Holy Spirit bless and inspire you, to continue Christs Mission of Healing and reconciliation.

Love
Fr Michael.

 

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'El shaddai'
9 West Ridings
East Preston
West Sussex
BN15 2TD