Chapter 27 2 min read
Hiddenness, Suffering, and the Unequal Distribution of Healing
From the minimally refined research manuscript
A theology of miracle becomes pastorally and intellectually distorted if it implies that the unhealed lacked faith or that divine love is measured by spectacular intervention.
Theology of suffering and the non-universality of healing. This is essential because miracle theology otherwise generates a cruel inverse inference: “If God healed her but not him, she must have had more faith.”
Catholicism rejects that. The Catechism explicitly says even intense prayer does not obtain the healing of every illness. Christianity promises resurrection, not universal exemption from suffering before resurrection.
Miracles are therefore eschatological signs, not the ordinary suspension of creaturely mortality.
The person miraculously healed eventually dies. Lazarus dies again. The sign points beyond itself toward the final victory that it does not yet universally instantiate.
The eschatological character of miracle explains both its significance and its rarity. A healing can be a sign of the kingdom without being the kingdom in fullness. The healed person remains mortal. Lazarus was restored to this life but did not thereby escape the human condition permanently. The final Christian promise is resurrection and communion with God, not universal immunity from suffering within history.
The fuller Catholic trajectory is not simply sickness to cure but creation → wounded nature → grace → sanctification → participation in divine life → resurrection and glorification → final communion with God. In this horizon, a healing is a sign because it anticipates the restoration and elevation of the whole person without pretending that temporary health is salvation’s final form.
The tradition’s language of deification or theosis, properly understood, names participation by grace rather than absorption into the divine essence. The creature remains creature even in glory. That same Creator-creature distinction allows miracle to manifest divine life without collapsing the recipient into divinity.
Divine hiddenness therefore remains even in a miraculous world. A miracle may manifest divine agency without unveiling the divine essence, may invite faith without coercing every observer, and may reveal a particular providential good without explaining why every comparable suffering is not removed.
2 Corinthians 5:7; CCC §§1500–1505, 1508; John 11; Aquinas, ST I, q. 12; 2 Peter 1:4; CCC §§460, 1997, 1002–1004, 1023–1029.
A closer look
Questions raised here.
What distinguishes a miracle from an ordinary act of divine providence?
Every natural event already depends upon divine providence, so divine causation by itself cannot define miracle. Ordinarily, God governs through the created powers and causal relations he has given things. In a miracle, God produces an effect outside the proportionate operation of the created causal order by which that sort of effect would ordinarily be realized. The distinction is therefore not God versus nature, but ordinary and extraordinary relations of divine action to secondary causality.
Why does God sometimes heal miraculously while apparently leaving equally deserving people unhealed, and how can miracles remain compatible with divine hiddenness and suffering?
The manuscript refuses the inference that the unhealed must lack sufficient faith or divine favor. Miraculous healing is an eschatological sign, not a universal promise that mortality and suffering will already disappear within history. Even the miraculously healed eventually die; Lazarus was restored to mortal life. Healing therefore anticipates the final restoration promised in resurrection without fully realizing it here and now. A miracle may disclose a particular providential good while leaving the wider mystery of unequal suffering unresolved, and it may manifest divine agency without abolishing divine hiddenness.