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To
Heal as Jesus Healed: Jan
C. Heller, Ph.D.
Historically, Catholic health care in the United States has been founded and sponsored largely by orders of men and women religious to treat those too poor or vulnerable to find care elsewhere. It was supported mainly by the individual and collective sacrifices of the sponsors themselves, and by their institutionalized philanthropic efforts in the communities they served. More recently, however, Catholic health care--like much of health care in the US--has been transformed into an extremely complex bureaucratic institution that is now a multi-billion dollar, capital-intensive, customer-driven enterprise funded mainly by tax-exempt bonds and government insurance programs. And yet, the sponsors of these organizations continue sincerely to understand themselves as continuing the healing ministry of Jesus. This paper uses the findings of one well-known representative of recent historical Jesus research, John Dominic Crossan, 1) to summarize what we know about how and why Jesus healed and 2) to explore some the possible implications of this summary for the self-understanding of the sponsors of Catholic health care. I will argue that the use of healing by Jesus as a strategy to display and address the social inequities of his society is, in fact, still animating the sponsors of Catholic health care today, but that his vision of "egalitarian commensality" is difficult even to imagine under current institutional configurations and funding pressures.
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