Part of the Mystery

Acts 5:14-16

And more than ever believers were added to the Lord, multitudes of both men and women, so that they even carried out the sick into the streets and laid them on cots and mats, that as Peter came by at least his shadow might fall on some of them. The people also gathered from the towns around Jerusalem, bringing the sick and those afflicted with unclean spirits, and they were all healed.

N. T. Wright, Acts for Everyone (Part One)

One of the peculiar things about both Jesus’ healings and those of the apostles is the way in which, at certain times and places, things seem to happen which don’t happen anywhere else. . . . There is always a strange unknown quality about God’s healing. In our “democratic” age we tend to suppose that if God is going to do anything at all it would only be fair that he would do it all the same for everybody, but things just don’t seem to work like that.

All of that is part of the mystery of living at the overlap between the present age, with its griefs and sorrows and decay and death, and the age to come, with its new life and energy and restorative power. I don’t think it has anything much to do with the devotion or holiness of those involved. In the apostolic age they seem simply to have accepted that God can do whatever he pleases and that, when people pray and trust him, he will often do much more than we dare to imagine—while accepting also that frequently things don’t work out as we would like, that people still get sick and die . . . and that many sad and tragic things continue to happen for which we have no particular explanation (85).