I have lived on the expanding edge of the kingdom of God. I have seen God do miraculous healings, both of bodies and hearts. I have also seen people remain sick or die. It makes one ask, “What is the purpose of prayer?” I would argue that the purpose of prayer is to bring a person or a situation before the throne of grace and ask for the outpouring of God’s grace.

Many church people, especially those who participate in healing or intercessory prayer, are quite kind. This kindness, when it encounters illness, disability, and death, revolts against suffering. We live in an era of painkillers, anesthesia, and technology that can treat a multitude of diseases that used to be incurable. On some level, we believe that everything should be fixable. We read of the healing miracles of Jesus and the apostles and pray for the same grace to be bestowed on our loved ones. (I find it interesting that we rarely pray for raising the dead, however, even though instances of resurrection are also present in the Gospels and Acts. Our intercessory imaginations seem to be bounded by our perceived limits of current medical science.)

However, kindness can hurt when untempered by a theology of prayer. I have a chronic illness. I have been sick since 2015. There is little treatment available, let alone a cure. I had a debilitating mystery disease that removed me from society for several years; my main presence in people’s lives was online. When I did finally receive a diagnosis, it wasn’t one that people were familiar with, and it had been going on for so long that many had essentially forgotten. Chronic illness is a very difficult subject for your average intercessor. There is no end in sight: while there is no cure, there is no immediate and impending death. Give praying people a crisis and they will storm the gates of hell. Give them a long, uncertain, and vague diagnosis and many become afraid.

I brought this observation up on X to my community of chronic-illness folks. I posted about some unpleasant encounters I’d had with people who were praying for me to get better. I was flooded with responses from people, Christian and non-Christian alike, who had experienced the same set of conversations during the course of their illnesses.

From these stories, I have compiled a Do-and-Don’t list. I should note that these apply to most other illnesses and conditions as well, but are especially pertinent to what is unexplained, long-term, or permanent.

When praying for someone with chronic illness:

Don’t

• Question their faith if they do not get better when you pray.
• Berate them for not getting better.
• Announce “I’ve been praying for you. Do you feel better?” or any other sort of pressure for positive updates to make you feel better. This only makes them avoid you or lie.
• Demand medical details or tell them about your cousin’s friend’s roommate who had that condition and was cured.
• Tell them it’s spiritual warfare or all in their head.
• Attempt to exorcise them.
• Confidently declare healing over them. You do not know God’s will. This is especially detrimental to non-Christians.
• Pretend they don’t exist anymore. This is not a good coping mechanism.
• Lecture them on yoga, diet, marijuana, or any other treatment that you think will cure them.
• Blame them for being sick.
• Tell them to fight harder.

Do

• Ask “How may I pray for you?” And then pray that way.
• Pray consistently and faithfully, and be prepared to do it for years.
• Have faith that your prayers are efficacious, even if you don’t see the results you want.
• Pray for everyday pain and difficulties. Momentary relief is a grace not to be underestimated.
• Ask how often you should check in to see if the prayers you’re offering need to change in any way.
• Listen to them as they deal with the crises of faith and the questions of “why” and other emotions that accompany life-altering circumstances.
• Pray for faith to persevere, both for you and them.

Allow intercession for those with chronic illness to deepen your faith. Allow the uncomfortable questions, and don’t avoid them. Why do you pray? Does your faith in God allow for miracles? Does your faith in God need miracles to survive? Is there a place in your faith for people who don’t get better? Does God really love us if he allows suffering?

That last question is the crux of why people are uncomfortable praying for those who don’t get better. And the answer to that question is yes. Jesus Christ suffered and died for us. We, in our sufferings, participate in that suffering when we offer it to God as a sacrifice, and in the words of St. Paul, “fill up what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions for the sake of his body, that is, the church” (Col. 1:24).

I was visiting a church recently on vacation and a woman asked if she could pray for me. I sighed and prepared for some of the usual. But apparently, she’d had several students with my condition in the past. She prayed for daily strength and perseverance, and added, “God, if you want, do something crazy and make her better.” That’s the kind of prayer I can get behind.

Leviticus 19:2 provides the foundational reason behind all the laws given in the Old Testament: “For you shall be holy as I am holy.”

Holiness means separation, being set apart. The ordering of Israelite society, the necessity of all the (fairly monotonous) purification laws, the laws about who may or may not enter which space, the ordering of time, and the laws about sacrifice all equate to creating an understanding for Israel of the holiness of God. It creates an entire lifestyle focused on the idea of God being set apart, only approachable by the most pure and whole of those who have been set apart for his service from a people who have been set apart from all the other peoples of the earth. God is special and Israel is special because God graciously gave that one people a way to come close to him. That is the foundational identity of Israel, established in the laws of the Old Testament.

In his massive two-volume study of Leviticus, Jacob Milgrom suggests that the logic of the law and its configuration of Israel may be summarized in the idea of concentric circles — like a target. At the center is God, and each circle further out from God is less holy. This idea applies to people, space, diet, and time.

In Exodus, the Israelite camp centers on the tabernacle. God is at the center, with his seat in the holy of holies. The only person who may enter is the high priest, after purification. The circle outside of the center is the holy place, accessible to all unblemished priests. Beyond that, the temple. Then the outer courts, the Levites’ encampment, the people of Israel, the outer camp for the unclean, and then the wilderness. Israel is spatially set up in rings of decreasing holiness around the presence of God in their midst.

The whole of Israelite life is arranged in levels, or concentric circles, of holiness and defilement. Time is divided this way, with the sabbath at the center as the most holy time. Animals are arranged this way: unblemished ruminants with cloven hooves are acceptable for sacrifice to God, blemished ruminants are not, but are permissible for the clean Israelite to eat. Then follow animals that do not meet these qualifications (most notably pigs), with carrion-eaters and creatures that swarm on the ground at the bottom of the list.

Likewise, people are arranged in levels of holiness. The high priest, followed by unblemished priests, all clean Israelite men, clean women, and then there is a great divide. The unclean Israelite comes next (with various degrees of defilement in that category), followed by the Gentile (the least of the Gentiles being Ammonites and Moabites because of that whole Balaam and the talking donkey problem). Last in the hierarchy are the dead.

Those who are clean may approach God; those who are unclean may not bring that uncleanness into the presence of a holy God without fearful repercussions. Defilement is contagious; if you have been in the presence of a corpse, you are unclean. Even holy and consecrated priests bringing unconsecrated fire and censers into God’s presence had dire consequences (Lev. 10), much less bringing the contamination of disease or death into the holy places.

What does this have to do with the incarnation? Fast forward to the Gospel of Mark. God is made human. The full holiness of God walks among the uncleanness of humanity without any buffer zone between defilement and holiness. But Mark takes the understanding of the contagious nature of defilement and turns it on its head.

From the moment of Jesus’ declaration of his ministry, “The kingdom of God is at hand” (Mark 1:15), he demonstrates what the kingdom of God means for the world. His first act is to cast out an unclean spirit from a man. He then heals the sick and cleanses the leper. From there, he declares all-out war on the uncleanness that separates humanity from God. Instead of uncleanness being contagious, wholeness and cleanness are contagious, emanating from the person of Jesus.

In Mark 5, Jesus, the living temple of God, the walking holy of holies, goes out to find a Gentile man living in the tombs of the dead, possessed by an unclean spirit, cleanses him, and sends the unclean spirits into the equally unclean pigs as a nice dramatic touch. Immediately after this, his holiness flows out of him to heal an unclean woman of bleeding, and then the incarnate God touches a dead person, reversing even the most final and defiling uncleanness.

He then cleanses a woman who had experienced 12 years of bleeding, making her unclean and unfit to be in the presence of any observant Jew, as contact with her would make him unclean. She touches merely the hem of his robe; instead of making him unclean, he makes her clean. He does this while on the way to the bedside of a dead girl. Death, as the ultimate uncleanness, defiles those in its presence for a week. Jesus not only is untouched by the defilement of death, but his touch reverses death itself. Finally, Jesus himself is untouched by death — God did not allow his holy one to see corruption, but rather raised him from the dead.

Christ’s incarnation changes the way the world works — the kingdom of heaven is indeed at hand and God dwells among us, rendering the uncleanness and defilement of this fallen world impotent, and ushering in a new era. It is an era of contagious holiness, a ministry of the advancement of the kingdom of God. We, as the temples of the Holy Spirit, are mini-Christs, bringing the holiness of God to bear on all the fallenness of this world. The coming of the holiness of God into contact with humanity was reality-shattering. We have the privilege of carrying out that work of advancing the kingdom of heaven until all things are made new and holy and the dwelling of God is with us forever.

Then there is the Easter Vigil. Many churches do not use all of the readings, but no matter how many there are, it is a Scripture-heavy event. Traditionally, there were 12 readings, each followed by a Psalm. That’s 24 Scripture passages, largely Old Testament, before we even get to the resurrection.

Why did we read so much Scripture during Holy Week? Why so much Old Testament, when it’s the New Testament that tells us about Jesus?

It is popular for people to dismiss the Old Testament as irrelevant, difficult, or too violent to be associated with Jesus, our kind and loving Savior. People often fling around the phrase “God of the Old Testament and God of the New Testament” to separate a loving and forgiving Savior from God’s judgment and laws in the Old Testament.

This is not Jesus’ witness about himself, however. “Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets,” he said. “I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them” (Matt. 5:17). Holy Week’s readings show us how Christ fulfills them in real time.

And here we are now, post-Resurrection, walking to Emmaus with the disciples, trying to make sense of what has happened. The disciples are well-steeped in the Old Testament Scriptures. But there is not, to them, an obvious link between the Scriptures they hear regularly and the crucifixion (and rumored resurrection?) of the Messiah they have been following for several years.

Jesus joins them on the road and, “beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, he interpreted to them in all the Scriptures the things concerning himself” (Luke 24:27). To quote Rod Whitacre, my former New Testament professor, “Now that’s a biblical interpretation lecture I would like to have heard.”

Moses and the prophets, which encompasses the entirety of the Old Testament — the law, the prophets, and the history of Israel — all make sense of Jesus. Without the laws concerning the sacrifices and the building of the temple, without the understanding of what sin and uncleanness do to our relationship with God, we would have no understanding of the need for Jesus, nor what his sacrifice on the cross accomplished. Without the history of Israel, we would not understand God’s nature as both judge and redeemer. Without the prophets, we would not anticipate a Savior, much a self-sacrificing one; we would not have any idea of a God who was powerful over death. The Old Testament provides the framework and the knowledge of God’s nature necessary to understand Jesus as God incarnate, crucified, and resurrected.

Without the Old Testament witness to Christ, we simply have a man who healed sick people, fed hungry people, partied with tax collectors and prostitutes, taught people how to live, challenged the religious authorities, was killed for it, and inexplicably came back from the dead. Separating Jesus from the witness of the Scriptures removes any understanding of the import of his birth, life, death, resurrection, and ascension. It erases the prophetic power of the healings in Mark that reversed the human condition of uncleanness. It removes the evidence of divinity in the feeding of the 5,000 and walking on water. It reduces the creation-shaking events of Christ’s sacrifice for all sin, and the inauguration of a new humanity, to the death and resurrection of a single man.

On the road to Emmaus, Jesus connects the dots for the disciples. He begins with the tragedy of the recent events and, beginning with the law and the prophets, opens their minds to understand the works of God. He shows them how he fulfills all the Scriptures and how the Scriptures reveal who he is.

The revelation of Christ in the Old Testament is the subject of a good portion of the New Testament. Many of the epistles (and early church writings and councils), written by various authors inspired by the Holy Spirit, focus on understanding and explaining Jesus in light of the Old Testament Scriptures. To our Western minds, a number of the connections that they make are obscure, dealing with figures and types and patterns rather than the historically or empirically demonstrable data that our modern scholarship has trained us to expect.

But if we sit with the Old Testament and steep ourselves in the symbols and the gritty reality of God revealed through images and shared story and actions, we can find ourselves changed. We find it easier to understand Jesus as revealed in the New Testament through action and symbol and image. We see Christ in Adam, Noah, Job, and Jeremiah. We know salvation in serpents, bread, blood, and boats.

As someone who deeply loves the Old Testament, with all its difficult and gnarly passages, inspiring prophecies, boring repetitions of sacrifices, and long genealogies, I urge you to push through the initial difficulty and boredom and let it saturate your mind and spirit. It will help you know the good news of Christ Jesus more fully.

The Gospels tell the story of Jesus, interpreting his life in light of the simple statement that Jesus fulfills the law and the prophets. If we are steeped in the Old Testament as our history of salvation, as the authors of the Gospels and the Epistles were, we begin to understand Jesus, the shocking revelation of his divinity, the import of his death, and the cosmos-altering results of his resurrection and ascension.

Most especially, I remember the time my college orchestra performed and recorded Messiah with a world-class conductor. That experience brought the music and the text to life in a way I had never experienced before. We saw glimpses of the heavenly host in that auditorium, we shed tears over the rejected Son of Man, we joined with the scoffers while Jesus was on the cross, and we proclaimed the greatness of the lamb on the throne.

Performances of Messiah abound in the weeks leading up to Christmas (although it was intended for Lent). I usually manage to attend at least one every couple of years. I can never hear the Scripture readings in Advent, Christmas, Lent, and Holy Week without strains of Handel floating through my mind on repeat.

As a biblical scholar, I spend a good deal of my time reflecting on methods of biblical interpretation. I have come to the conclusion that Messiah formed how I understand Scripture on a visceral level. When I was in seminary, I was presented with many different methods of interpreting Scripture. The one that made the most sense to me was the idea that Jesus was the fulfillment of the Old Testament, and that without those Scriptures, we cannot understand who he is. This idea sparked my first conscious interest in studying the Old Testament. But that idea had been planted in my mind long before, in the guise of Handel’s music and the Scripture choices of Charles Jennens, the librettist who put the words together.

When I was a kid listening to/singing/playing Messiah, I always found the first part before Christmas boring. Get to the action already, Handel. But actually, it perfectly encompasses Advent. It sets the stage for the expectation of the Messiah and who God is. “Comfort ye, comfort ye my people.” “But who may abide the day of his coming, for he is like a refiner’s fire.” “And the glory of the Lord shall be revealed.”

Very often, we listen to Messiah with the ears of our 12-year-old selves. We put up with the boring parts to reach the good parts. We want the angels’ Glory to God, the Hallelujah chorus, and the bombastic Worthy is the Lamb.

Unless we listen to the whole, however, we miss the message of the high points. Messiah very carefully creates a theology of who Jesus is. It doesn’t dwell sentimentally on the manger scene. It describes the nature of the one who is God with us: king of glory, judgment, and comfort.

The first act focuses on the birth of Jesus and his earthly ministry. It is the Christmas act. It begins with a stately royal march for an overture, and the opening words are not the birth of the Messiah, as one might expect, but where two of the Gospels begin: with John the Baptist. A solo tenor speaks words of Isaiah 40, spoken to the Israelites, who have been told of their future exile: Comfort ye, comfort ye my people. Her iniquity is pardoned. Prepare the way of the Lord; the crooked ways shall be made straight and the rough places plain. After this, a complex choral fugue continues in Isaiah 40, preparing us for what we shall see when the Messiah comes: the glory of the Lord shall be revealed to all.

One might expect the revealed glory of God to be the story of Christmas. Instead, the deep bass of a prophet ushers in Advent. He foretells the shaking of all creation and the revelation of God in his holy temple (Hag. 2:6-7 and Mal. 3:1). These two passages describe the temple rebuilt after Israel’s return from exile, smaller than the first and lacking the glory and the presence of God. Putting the texts of Isaiah 40, Haggai 2, and Malachi 3 together, Messiah compiles the promises of the coming Messiah with the return of the glory of God into his temple.

A gentle alto solo continues through Malachi 3 and suddenly bursts into a frenzy of judgment and purification by fire that will come with the anointed of the Lord. The glory foretold in Isaiah comes with purifying fire: the good and terrifying news of Advent, that the comfort of the coming of Christ comes with purification and judgment.

Suddenly, there is a pause in the cacophony. A moment of stillness strikes all of creation, and a solitary voice sings out above a barely noticeable accompaniment the promise of Isaiah 7:14: Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a Son, and they shall call his name Immanuel. God with us.

The chorus takes up the good news, returning to Isaiah 40, and the tone (finally) turns to rejoicing. However, once again, the tone dramatically drops as a baritone solo intones the darkness that blinds the nations, winding about with a tune that itself seems lost but then swells to beautiful hope as he sings of the light that brings light to the world. The people that walked in darkness have seen a great light (Isa. 60:2, 9:2).

Finally, after all the preparation, we reach Christmas. For unto us a child is born! Wonderful Counselor, Almighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace (Isa. 9:6). The chorus is unleashed in praise. We have reached the familiar portion of Messiah. All is joy and excitement — the Messiah has come. Through all that has come before, we know exactly who the child is that we celebrate.

We pause for a moment for a pastoral interlude and listen to a tune meant to evoke simple shepherd music and the baaing of sheep settling down for the night. And then the soprano solo narrates the Christmas story and the coming of the angels to the shepherds amid an increasing crescendo of orchestral background as the glory grows brighter and brighter until the whole chorus of the company of heaven bursts forth in an unrestrained exclamation of “Glory to God in the highest, and peace on earth!” (Luke 2:14)

It is easy for us to end with the climax of the angelic chorus and stay on the high note of that Christmas night when heaven was rent and the glory of God foretold at the beginning of Messiah has come to fruition. But Handel’s intent was to describe who Jesus was, and so he does not end the Christmas section with the angels. He continues with a dance of rejoicing and a description of Jesus’ ministry — opening the eyes of the blind and making the lame walk.

Two sections remain of Messiah; the second deals with Christ’s passion and resurrection and the third with who the resurrected Christ is revealed to be, both through the Church and in his final coming in glory. But it is telling that this first section that centers on the Incarnation does not end with the glory of the angels, although for many of us this would be an emotional high point for an ending. It ends with the sweet and gentle call of Jesus to sinners from Matthew 11:28-30: “Come unto me, all ye that labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me; for I am meek and lowly in heart: and ye shall find rest unto your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.”

This is the one we celebrate at Christmas: the one who brings at once purification and rest. Immanuel comes with glory, judgment, salvation, and healing. During the 12 days of the celebration of Christmas, I invite you to take some time to listen to Messiah and soak in the nature of the one whose birth we celebrate. Hear the revelation of the Word made flesh through the words of the Old Testament prophets, brought to life through Handel’s music. And knowing him more fully, come, let us adore him.

And thus, I discovered the Death Café movement. Death Cafés are not incredibly new; they’ve been around in multiple countries since 2011. In the pandemic, they increased exponentially. More important, they went online and became accessible to people who were actively dying. These are, at their best, gentle groups of people who find themselves faced with their mortality. Either their imminent death or the death of a loved one has led everyone present at these meetings to search for answers and companionship as they face the great mystery.

Over tea and cake, people ask the questions that have been weighing them down. People share their experiences, their belief systems, their death rituals that give closure and meaning. Grieving people share. Dying people share. There is none of the hiding that we so often find in the ways we talk about death; there is simply the knowledge that death and loss are common experiences to us all.

We all, even Christians, share the awe and fear of that moment when our spirits leave our bodies. And so, I share of the hope of the resurrection, but in a death group that hope is tempered with the grief of letting go, the holiness of the moment, and the weight of the unknowable.

We discuss rituals to make death meaningful — rituals that help us grasp what is happening or prepare us for death. In this, Christianity brings a rich heritage to the table. We all share the need for death rituals. In a culture that increasingly puts off funerals and mourning for a more convenient time months or even years down the road, we have rituals that help with death, with grieving, with hope, with loss. We anoint with oil. We commend to Jesus. We toss dirt on the casket. And even at the grave, we sing Alleluia.

We live in a world aching for a real, honest discussion of death — both the hope and the fear, the sorrow and the awe, the known and the unknown. Death Cafés provide that. But in the midst of various ideas of death being tossed about, be it reincarnation, nothingness, or turning into ghosts, Christians bring the hope of the bodily resurrection into deathless, glorified bodies like that of the risen and ascended Jesus Christ. We should not take that hope for granted. It is one of the greatest gifts we can give to a hurting and searching world.

I recently had a conversation with some neighborhood kids about death. We were planting some tomatoes, and they found out I was a pastor of some sort and knew (according to them) everything about God. (For the record, I did tell them that this was impossible without actually being God.) Their mother was dead. They had been told the usual sort of thing about their mother being an angel in heaven now, which they seemed to understand as some sort of ghost. They were sad about not being able to hug their mom in heaven.

So I told them about the resurrection of the body. I told them about Jesus, his resurrection, and the fact that someday he would raise us all up from the dead and that we who believe in him would never die again, just like him. And then we had a mini-Death Café on my front porch. We talked about death, the things we know, the things we don’t know, and how God fits into all that. We talked about Jesus. We talked about gravestones. We talked about ghosts. They gained some real, concrete hope through talking about their fears.

In the TV show Buffy the Vampire Slayer, I can remember offhand at least ten “hell dimensions” vividly portrayed. Popular imagination has no difficulty with the idea of a bodily hell of torment. However, there is only one description of a “heaven dimension,” described as a sort of vague, disembodied feeling of being safe and loved. This, or the idea of being an angel in heaven floating around with wings and a harp being vaguely bored, is all people can imagine of heaven.

We desperately need a “heavenly imagination.” We need to teach and preach why the bodily resurrection of Jesus is such good news — not in a “so we go to heaven when we die” way, but in a way that communicates the power found in the hope of the resurrection of the body. Jesus, in his glorified, resurrected, ascended humanity, has created a new, deathless prototype of humanity. He has opened the way to us for everlasting life in deathless glory with God in a new creation that is not marred by sin, pain, or death. In that creation we will live and walk with God and worship and delight in what God has wrought in us and all of creation. This is far better news than a weak pseudo-angelic going to heaven when we die.

The resurrection of the body isn’t just a line from the Apostles’ Creed. It brings hope to grieving children. It changes the way we understand our lives and our deaths. It gives us the strength to die well. It gives us hope in suffering. It helps us bear the sorrow and grief of death because we know that God is greater than all of it.

What would happen if we held Death Cafés for our churches? For children? For our communities?

In the Church, many of us have grief groups. We need Christian Death Cafés. We need to hold them online and in our churches; we need to join those that already exist and listen. We need to be willing to talk about great and dark and holy mysteries, to sit in uncertainties, to honor grief. And we need to talk about the concrete hope of the resurrection of the body — the fact that death is not our end. Our end is to be made like Christ, radiant with the light of the triune God. And we can hug in heaven.