Then Jesus said to his disciples, The harvest is abundant but the laborers are few; so ask the master of the harvest to send out laborers for his harvest.” …Then he summoned his twelve disciples and gve them authority over unclean spirits to drive them out and to cure every disease and every illness…”As you go, make this proclamation: ‘The kingdom of heaven is at hand.’ Cure the sick, raise the dead, cleanse lepers, drive out demons.” (Matthew 9: 37-38; 10:1, 7-8).
[At the Last Supper, Jesus said] “Amen, amen, I say to you, whoever believes in me will do the works that I do, and will do greater ones than these, because I am going to the Father. And whatever you ask in my name, I will do, so that the Father may be glorified in the Son.” (John 14: 12-13).
Jesus invites us to join his company—in fact his family. He wants us to co-operate in his adventure of saving this sinful and screwed up world by allowing him to come to life within us and act through us in the power of the Holy Spirit.
The “conditions of enlistment” are the ten commandments and the New Testament instructions: love God, love your neighbor, love your enemy as I have loved you and died for you. The kingdom of Heaven is “at hand” — not coming in some vague future, but here now when we have eyes to see and hearts to accept it. We are called to live in it now, in the midst of the kingdom of this world, despite the cost.
When Jesus proclaimed that the Kingdom of God was at hand, he showed what that meant by destroying the power of Satan to hold us in bondage to illness, hatred, and despair. Open the Gospels nearly anywhere, and you will note that Jesus is healing someone, or has just healed someone, or is about to heal someone. Then he sent us to do the same.
The Church grew for the first three centuries because people did just that. Christians told their neighbors, “Our God is the true God; your gods are no gods at all; and we will show you by calling on God to heal you in the name of Jesus.”
I have seen it in my own ministry. In 1997 Jesus rescued from death a blind, three–year-old girl in final stages of brain cancer who, two decades later, although still blind, graduated from St. Olaf College. I saw an elderly man totally healed of Stage 4 tongue cancer that had metastasized throughout the body. Another amazing healing that comes to mind that shocked physicians was when two St. Thomas students who suffered massive brain trauma because of being struck by a car completely recovered with normal brain function.
Satan would like us to believe that Jesus came to give us good advice and then left us on our own. New Testament healings and exorcisms were just to get the Church started. Embrace the supernatural and believe in miracles today. Accept your adoption into God’s family, and do your family proud!