A child is killed by an automobile and someone attempts to comfort the parents with the assurance, "It was God’s will."
A husband is lost to ravages of cancer, and we are blithely told, "It was meant to be."
A whole town and its inhabitants are erased from the countryside by the waters thundering down upon it from a seriously compromised dam and the newspapers label it "an act of God."
Judgments such as these, well-intentioned though they may be, stand on the ragged edge of blasphemy, for they make God the source of evil as well as of good. Yet it is one of the most persistent religious ideas in the world today, despite the good news of Jesus Christ.
As we read the gospels, Jesus never saw it that way. It is quite evident he regarded illness and brokenness as the enemies of God. The evil spirits he cast out of the possessed were never addressed in friendly terms, as if they were God’s "little helpers."
Healing and the bestowal of wholeness were always regarded as a divine victory over the power of evil, the vanquishing of a mortal foe. If God was sometimes or ever the sender of illness, Jesus didn’t seem to know it.
If we closely examine Jesus’ ministry of healing in Luke, the gospel that gives the greatest emphasis to Jesus as healer, we find even when he was approached by what would be considered the less desirable elements of society, we never see him saying, "I’m sorry, you are not righteous enough to be healed," or even, "You are too sinful for healing to be effective."
Although requests for healing frequently came from those who were not even Jews, he never turned anyone away because they had the wrong theology, doctrine, creed or ritual – or lack of them. People were not qualified or disqualified to receive healing because of the correctness or incorrectness of their religious beliefs and practices. In fact, healing was never meted out to people because they deserved it.
Nor do we ever find Jesus saying, "I’m sorry, but I think you will be better off ill." He never suggested God had made them ill for their own good or to stimulate their spiritual growth. He never told anyone their illness was the "cross" God had sent for them to bear, or suggested illness would bring out the best in a person.