Richard Hays AYR Interview

“On Scripture's resources for Healing” was a promo video by Richard Hays for the 2011 After the Yellow Ribbon conference at Duke University. Interview by Logan M. Isaac, videography by Pilar Timpane.

Transcript

 Part of what we need to do is to let the nuance and complexity of our response to people mirror the nuance and complexity of scripture in which we do recognize the fallenness of the human condition. We recognize that people are hurting and desperately in need of reconciliation to God and reconciliation to one another. And we don't try to pretend that it's otherwise, we don't try to pretend that we all have it together and are just happy because we're good American Christians or something like that. We recognize that all of us have deep places of brokenness that require healing.

What in the New Testament might speak to this question of how wounds of war are to be healed? As I thought about healing, I thought about the ministry of Jesus who went about healing people who were sick and people who were oppressed by demons. And I thought about the story of the Geresene demoniac in the fifth chapter of the Gospel of Mark, which offers this incredibly powerful account of a man who is living out, it says, among the tombs. And he's acting in ways where he's damaging himself and he's frightening people, and he seems out of control and no one knows what to do with him. And he encounters Jesus, and Jesus casts out the demons. And Jesus asks the name and the demons reply, "My name is Legion." And of course Legion is an allusion to the units of the Roman army.

And so the story doesn't say that this demon-possessed man was a soldier. I've never even thought about it that way before, but it does strike me that that symbol of legion might be a way of thinking about the internalized damage left as a result of military conflict of some kind. But the thing that particularly interested me and made me actually first think about the story is that after Jesus drives the demons out, it said the man is restored to his right mind.

And Jesus says to him, "Go back." Go back to your own home, to your own people and tell them what the Lord has done for you. And so that image not only of healing and driving out of oppressive powers that are eating this man alive, but also the restoration to family and community that comes at the end of the story struck me as an incredibly powerful sign of hope for the way in which Jesus might be able to address people who are suffering from wounds of war and who feel that there's even powers and forces that are overwhelming them. He offers the hope of healing and restoration to family and community.

 There's a passage in the Old Testament I thought about too. It's the passage in the prophet Joel, where he's described the way in which Israel has been afflicted by a plague of locusts.  And commentators tend to think that the plague of locusts may be a metaphor for a military invasion of Israel. But there's a passage sort of deep in the middle of the book in which God speaks to Israel and says, "I will restore to you the years that the locust has eaten, the years that the locust has consumed." And that I think has gotta be the hope that we're looking towards.

We're looking towards God's restoration of those parts of our lives and those years of our lives that may have been consumed by things that are destructive. If we ask, what is the real hope of healing that scripture offers? It's finally the hope of resurrection. The hope of resurrection from the dead, and it's that promise that none of these destructive powers can finally separate us from Christ.