Syria - Healing the Fever

There is a moment in St. Luke’s gospel when Jesus visits Simon’s mother in law who is suffering from a fever. (Luke 4:38) She may have been in the grip of a more serious illness of which the fever was only a symptom. Jesus, as we imagine him in that moment, leans over her and breathes healing. Perhaps he speaks to her as well. We don’t know. We can only imagine. There follows, as always when fever abates, a moment of lightness for the sufferer in which she senses around her the waiting, the whispers, the silence. Then the woman pulls through, suddenly, in a moment, and rises to see to her visitors’ needs. Jesus goes back out to the fevered crowd, and draws out ‘the demons’, the fever spirits who know goodness when they see it and scream out their fear and anger. Real goodness, in the face of evil, makes evil itself afraid.

The world is in fever at the moment. High fever, untreated, can make a person hallucinate, dream terrible dreams, toss and shiver and all the time dread some further development of their illness, and death itself. It is not a good time for making life or death decisions, and yet the West and its allies must make decisions because if it waits for too long it will inevitably succumb to the illness which is causing the fever. The illness is called hatred. So the West and its allies must be instigators of healing before they do anything else. 

The way we have intervened in past conflicts has been disastrous because the work of healing was not done in time for it to overcome hatred. Neither did we seek to cleanse the wounds of the past before taking direct action. Where Syria is concerned, we are called to be healers before there is any question of military intervention. It is too late for that, in any case. Healers are people who intervene in fevered situations, as Christ did. The emotional climate which prevails in the context of the present conflict  is the fever of hatred, a fever in which all of us feel ‘tender’. None of us dares to let ourselves be touched even by a hand which heals, especially if it is the hand of the perceived enemy. But at the heart of the matter lies the suffering of two million human beings who want only for this conflict to end so that they can go home and rebuild their lives, and it will only end when real healing is allowed to begin. 

Politically, there is a glimmer of hope. It is becoming clear that Russia does not want a showdown with the West, and the US and many ordinary Americans, as well as the British, have no stomach for war. The pointless conflicts of the last ten years, in the Middle East and beyond, have left them war weary. But they feel the fever, nevertheless, and yearn for real goodness to enter into this situation and heal it before hatred takes over.

Goodness is a matter of wisdom which, properly understood, is God’s mercy and forgiveness at work healing the world of the fever of hatred. Wisdom comes with the compassionate detachment of a good doctor. Compassionate detachment is common sense worked from the hearts of political leaders to the good of all in a spirit of humility and generosity. Wisdom makes healing possible. It cools the fever of the nations by recognising and allowing them to take responsibility for evil. Wisdom comes with the right kind of fear which is the fear of God. The fear of God is not like the feverish fear of all-out disaster which occupies our thoughts so much of the time, but wonder and gratitude at the certainty of life. The fear of God leads to regeneration and growth but it requires that those caught up in this conflict (in other words, most of the world) own before God and before one another the direct contributions they have made to the present evil through the sins of the past. All have sinned and are in need of God’s healing. So all are responsible before God for its innocent victims. 

Obama’s hesitation may have bought a small amount of time for sanguine reflection in which all parties to the conflict, supported by faith leaders both in the Middle East and in the West, can take responsibility for the suffering which history is delivering to this region. For Christians, this means pausing to take our share of it and breathing Christ’s healing into the present through the way we pray, the way we think and perhaps most importantly, the things we say. Words inflame fever by fuelling fear. Fear left unchecked spreads quickly, often with fatal consequences. So let’s stand with all our leaders, confronting the hatred while feeling the fear and the pain, and so breath healing into the Middle East whose people have needed it for so long.