Sin and health, pain and salvation

Sin and health: the maternal mediation of Mary in salvation

The relationship between sin and health runs through the whole history of salvation. To understand sin and health in the Marian key means to rediscover Mary as healing mother, whose intercession unites the forgiveness of sins to the integral health of the person.

Have you ever heard it said that a certain person went through or was going through some situation of suffering because of his sins? Or that the life of the Christian is an eternal suffering? This second part of our journey intends to present Mary with an image that is not contained directly in Sacred Scripture but that is deduced from ecclesial tradition. The state of health of Mary and of Christ is not mentioned by the sacred writers of the New Testament. They were interested only in handing on the historical-salvific proclamation, concentrating on the paschal mystery of the Lord.
However, returning to the Christian Tradition, in the year 256 we find Pope Stephen I in a letter to Basilides, Bishop of Lyon and Astorga, stating that the lapsi (people who during the persecutions renounced their own faith and then asked to be admitted into the Church again) were absolved of their sins:

“because of the Passion of Christ and by the merits of the Blessed Mother of God, who (re)led them to the unity of the Sons of God, offering health and holiness to each one of them”

This attribution to Mary of gratia sanitatum helps us to understand the relationship between salvation and health that we will now try to illustrate.

Relationship between health and salvation

The Mariological interpretation of this relationship must go beyond a position that has run through the history of the Latin ecclesial tradition: the understanding of salvation in a strictly spiritual sense. The forgiveness of sins and communion with God would be dissociated from health, the latter remaining foreign to salvation, since salvation was accomplished by being bound to the sufferings of Christ on the cross and therefore to the opposite of health. Already in the seventeenth century we find an association between grace and pain to the point of its being affirmed by the hand of Louis Chardon, a Dominican, that the more souls unite themselves with the spirit of Jesus, the more they contract the obligation to suffer. This vision is a consequence of the dolorism that led Thomas à Kempis (d. 1471), in his famous work The Imitation of Christ, the second most widespread religious book after the Bible in Western spirituality, to write ‘Tota vita Christi crux fuit et martyrium’ (The whole life of Christ was cross and martyrdom). Blaise Pascal (d. 1662), a notable Christian thinker, writes to his sister saying: I know the danger of health and the advantages of sickness… Do not weep for me, because sickness is the natural state of Christians. In the face of these testimonies we must affirm the unity between creation and redemption in order to rediscover the true role of Mary among the sick.

The will to live, respect for life, the desire to be in good health is a good, a value that constitutes an occasion for meeting God and rejoicing in praising Him for all His benefits. Health is linked to salvation because the Christian has the obligation to preserve life as a Gift of God and to place it at the service of the Kingdom. This salvific imperative turns toward life as inclusive of the healthy and the sick, of the strong and the weak and, still after Christ, it looks upon suffering and death as places of salvation. There is certainly a Gospel of suffering (let us recall Salvifici Doloris, 1984, by Saint John Paul II), but also a Gospel of life (let us recall from the same Pope Evangelium Vitae, 1995), because it is not the abundance of suffering in life that graces us but the love in these states of life that leads us to salvation. What relationship, then, between salvation and healing?

Jesus, physician of bodies and of souls

This title can be found in the most ancient Christian tradition of which there are records. Fathers of the Church such as Ignatius of Antioch (d. 108) proclaim Jesus as the one spiritual and bodily physician; later Clement of Alexandria (d. 215) will speak to us of Jesus as physician of bodies and of souls.

The biblical foundation of this title is found in the healing function to which the activity of Jesus bears witness. If in the Old Testament we find miraculous healings only three times (Num 21:9. 2 Kgs 5:10-14. Is 38:1-8), in the Synoptics we find narratives of individual healings twenty-two times and collective healings twelve times. When we look at such healings, they normally correspond to the victory over physical infirmity and to the action of exorcism (cf. Mt 8:16). Jesus therefore presents Himself as a physician, but of the whole man, for it is not the healthy who have need of a physician, but the sick (Mt 9:12). He is the physician free of all taboos or laws, for He heals on a Sabbath day with His word, avoiding every appearance of magic, for it is the plan of God enacted in creation, making justice and peace known.

Jesus heals human misery as a sign of compassion and mercy before suffering humanity. The son of Mary, healing bodies, also brings about the healing of the soul. Thus the infirmity of the paralytic is linked to sin (Mt 9:1-8). The miracles of Jesus are a sign of the messianic kingdom that restores salvation with the reintegration of man into the garden of God (Mt 11:2-3). The healings show that the incarnate Word, breaking into the world, destroys sickness and pain, which are signs of the rupture between God and man, in order to establish the Kingdom, and this same power is handed on to the disciples (Mt 19:7-8).

Mary, mother of health and healer

In this design of God the Father, witnessed by Christ, of salvation and of health, it is not difficult for us to insert Mary into this context. In the first place because Mary is the root of the work of universal health, that is, Mary in the mystery of salvation is the New Eve and the Mother of the Savior. In this regard Irenaeus of Lyon (d. 130) testifies that Mary is causa salutis and Mater salutis. We recall that in Aramaic ‘atî means to vivify and to heal and that this verb was translated as salvation and health. In this sense, to say your faith has saved you (Mk 5:34. 10:52. Lk 7:50. 17:19) means at the same time your faith has healed you, because the healings are for the totality of man. We find the same observation in the Fathers of the Church, who understand salvation in an integral sense, which includes health. We must therefore interpret the title causa salutis in the sense that Mary collaborates effectively in the work of salvation as a complete liberation that regenerates life, bringing man to the condition of paradise.

In a work attributed to Saint Maximus the Confessor (d. 662) on the Life of Mary we can read how in the last years of her life such were the miracles and the healings that the Jews came to respect Mary: “the Holy Virgin, the Mother of the Lord, was no longer despised by them; on the contrary, they looked upon her with respect, from a distance, they paid her reverence with awe .. and this not only because of the miracles that happened at that moment […] but even more, from day to day, because of the miracles that were accomplished by her grace and by her intercession, the demons were driven away, irremediable ills were healed, innumerable signs and wonders that happened through her”

Understanding that the contemplation of Mary preceded her glorification, it follows for us, as Christians, that our trust turns to Mary with the certainty that no one more than Mary can apply the verse of James 5:16: “the prayer of the righteous is of great avail.” The Contemplative not only intercedes but also participates in the divine power and possesses the power of healing. Recognized throughout the Christian tradition as bearer of therapeutic grace, the Mother of Jesus is invoked as ‘consoler of the afflicted, health of the sick, hope of those who are without hope, inexhaustible treasure of healing, healer of incurable wounds, strength of the saints, medicine that soothes the pain of every heart, medicine of our members.’

In the Christian West Mary is recognized as salus infirmorum, health of the sick, which would later be popularized by the Litanies of Our Lady. We can find the activity as healer that Mary exercises from heaven toward her sick children in the title that Richard of Saint Laurence attributes to her when he states: “Mary is the probatic pool into which the angel of the Lord, that is, the angel of great counsel, as Isaiah calls him, descended at the moment of the Incarnation. And the water was stirred by the angelic greeting before which Mary was troubled, and only those were healed who believed in one God in three persons.”

We cannot here describe how many and which miraculous healings are attributed to the intercession of Mary. We illustrate only that, if our life is a book, Mary knows our pages of pain, our alphabet of suffering and of the sorrows of society. They are signs of a passage from tragic situations to better conditions of health because of a prayer to Mary and of the experience of her help. We can even affirm that those moments were a kairós in which the fragment of the paschal mystery of death and of life found a dwelling in the dialogue between the devotee and Mary. It is these moments of salvation, intersecting with the totality of man, that make the invocation of Mary as health of the sick a witness to the love of God.

From the dogmatic point of view we can affirm that Mary anticipates the eschatological age, participates in God’s way of acting, stands beyond the most just requests and desires and fulfills the will of the Father, for she journeys as a pilgrim alongside the People of God, above all the weakest. The one mediation of Christ between God and men does not claim exclusivity, but inclusivity. As cooperator in salvation Mary is transformed by Christ as the way of the creature’s self-understanding in which the love of God acts, saving and blessing. On the other hand, since faith is dialogical, we also find the responsible answer of the believer when he carries out his witness with words, actions, and meditations.

Mary participates in the charism of the healings of Christ, as the experience of Christians throughout the centuries demonstrates. Mary is the health of the sick also because she is the Mother of health who is Christ. This title does not signify only the sphere of spiritual salvation, for the purpose of the Incarnation is to give man life and life in abundance. This transformation in man is accomplished through the new creation by the Holy Spirit in the image of Christ glorified in the body and in the Spirit. The two-thousand-year experience of Christianity tells us that Mary is alive and acts in the Church, exercising her permanent motherhood by helping the sick of body and of spirit.

Holy Mary, health of the sick, pray for us!

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In summary, sin and health find in Mary their Christian key of interpretation: the Virgin is gratia sanitatum, source of spiritual and bodily healing. To deepen sin and health in the Marian light is to open oneself to the mercy of Christ mediated by Mary. Read more about Mary as mother of the Church in Christi Matri.