spirit and healing in africa - University of the Free State

ody, and thus his or her vulnerability. It involves the Spirit to understand the need for
detachment of ideas about invulnerability, while these shields of invulnerability usually become
tangible in the body and in the way we handle our body.
Vulnerability as the realm of the Spirit generates the idea that one’s vulnerability is related to the
cross and the resurrection of Christ through the work of the Spirit. One’s vulnerability means
that one is susceptible to suffering as well as to healing. Suffering can be understood as
everything that opposes or undermines the intrinsic quality of creation, while healing implies life
that becomes whole (again) in its broadest sense. Even though in the human condition suffering
is unavoidable, God does not want the suffering, and therefore God’s Spirit seeks restoration,
healing, re-establishing broken or missing relationships. The Spirit aims at the transformation of
vulnerable suffering life into vulnerable healed life. Vulnerable healed life does not mean that
the Spirit turns evil into something positive, or that afflicted life will be somehow ‘fixed’. The
Spirit aims at a redefinition towards the self-understanding of one’s vulnerability as quality of
God-given life.
However, the shift from the vulnerable broken life to vulnerable healed life is a process that does
not move in a direct line. The cross stands in between the two dimensions of vulnerable life. The
presence of the cross implies the presence of the Spirit as well: “the story of the suffering of the
messianic Son of God is the story of the suffering of God’s Spirit too. But the Spirit does not
suffer in the same way, for he is Jesus’ strength in suffering, and is even the ‘indestructible life’
in whose power Jesus can give himself vicariously ‘for many’” (Moltmann 1992:64). Through
the cross of Christ, the Spirit reveals the truth about God’s love for creation, and about the
quality of life that comes from God. The wounds of Christ’s body deconstruct any kind of shield
of invulnerability. The crucified and impaired Christ introduces a new understanding of
vulnerability that is necessary in order to speak of healing. Creation needs the Spirit to see the
depth of the cross, and to die of one’s own body in the sense that one is to surrender the
irrepressible tendency to deny and betray one’s own vulnerability. Dying of one’s own body then
implies that one has to surrender the strategies of invulnerability and the mechanisms of
autosalvation. The Spirit of the incarnated God connects the cruciform death of Christ with the
cruciform experiences that we have, in order to grace our vulnerable life. Willimon (2006:97)
contends that “there is no other way for God to get to people like us without suffering our blood
and injustice. And there is no other way for people like us to get to this God other than the way
this God ordains, through death and resurrection, life from death, death as a way to life”.
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