John Swinton worked for over a decade as a mental health nurse, and was a mental health chaplain for several years, serving people with severe mental health challenges who were moving from the hospital into the community. He is chair in divinity and religious studies at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland, and has published widely on topics of mental health, disability, and pastoral care. In this interview, Plough’s Joy Clarkson speaks with Swinton about how the Bible can help us understand health.

Plough: How does health show up as a theme specifically in Jesus’ ministry, and how do we think about that from a theological point of view?

John Swinton: The first thing we need to notice is that health, as we understand it today in a kind of biomedical context, hadn’t been invented in second-century Mediterranean culture. At least in the West, we tend to frame health in terms of the absence of illness. With this way of thinking about health, if something goes wrong, we go to a doctor or a psychiatrist so they can identify what the broken part is, whether it’s a tumor in your lung or some kind of mental health challenge. You get a diagnosis and then you get treatment from health care professionals, which helps you to overcome that.

But the biblical understanding of health is quite different. In fact, there’s no equivalent word for the biomedical understanding of health. The closest term I can think of is shalom, which means peace. But it’s a big peace. It’s peace with God, peace within yourself, peace between ourselves, and peace with creation. There are theological, social, and ecological dimensions to that understanding of health.

The key thing about this understanding is that health is not defined by the absence of illness but by the presence of God. You are healthy when you dwell in God’s presence. You are healthy when you live in alignment with how you were created to be. And that does not always mean the removal of suffering or the healing of disease. Some illnesses will remain. Some wounds will not heal. But that does not exile us from peace. Chronic or enduring illness does not place us outside the realm of health, because health, in the biblical imagination, is not the same as cure. It is about wholeness in the midst of brokenness. It is about living within shalom – a space where the pain is real, but so is the presence of God. In that space, health is not the triumph of the body, but the nearness of the Spirit.

The implication of this way of thinking is that healing also isn’t the opposite of illness. Healing in this biblical model becomes a way of connecting with God, with other people. Not necessarily getting rid of your ailment – that would be cure – but actually living in shalom in the present no matter what your state is. So that tension between healing and curing is actually very important because we oftentimes assume that healing necessitates curing, but the two are not necessarily the same thing.

We see this in the Gospels – take the woman with the discharge of blood in Luke 8:43–48. Her condition renders her ritually impure, socially isolated, and theologically marginalized. She lives as a nonperson – untouchable, unseen, cut off from her community and, by extension, from the presence of God. When she reaches out and touches the hem of Jesus’ robe, the flow of blood stops. She is cured. But the story doesn’t end there – because cure is not the same as healing. Jesus halts, looks for her, and insists on encounter. And when she comes forward, trembling, he listens. He speaks. And he names her: daughter. It’s a stunning reversal – from exclusion to belonging, from silence to speech, from marginalization to kinship. And only then does he say, “Your faith has healed you.” Healing here is not merely the cessation of symptoms; it is the restoration of personhood. She is healed not when the bleeding stops, but when she is seen, spoken to, and drawn back into communion – with Christ and with her community. This is a radically different vision of health: one grounded not in bodily perfection, but in relational presence, recognition, and the reconstitution of the self in the gaze of grace.

That aspect of healing is so important because one of the greatest griefs of ill health is how it isolates us and can separate us from community with others.

When you have a diagnosis, it can take on the whole of your identity. For the woman in the story, her discharge of blood defined who she was and what her place within society was. And diagnoses often can have the same effect today. But Jesus calls her daughter. It’s such a subtle but profound thing to do. And the equivalent of that in terms of mental health would be you’d give people back their names. You don’t think about schizophrenics or depressives, you think about people. And even physical illnesses are the same because a lot of physical illnesses are quite stigmatized in that way. There’s something very powerful in that dynamic of giving people back their names, respecting them for who they are, rather than allowing whatever condition they’re living with to overtake the whole of who they are.

When I was in grad school we discussed a painting depicting the resurrection of the dead. The artist had painted what he thought would be resurrection bodies: healthy, flawless thirty-three-year-old bodies, the age that Jesus was resurrected. While most of us would reject the idea that Kim Kardashian is more spiritual than a normal person by virtue of her perfect body, it does bring up an interesting question: How do we think about resurrected bodies and imperfections?

When it comes to heavenly things, the first thing to notice is that the Bible doesn’t give us very much information. We’re constantly projecting onto our ideas of heaven and resurrection bodies from where we are. And who tells you what is beautiful? The media. You look at images on the internet or in magazines and you think, oh, that’s beautiful, that’s perfection. So therefore, that’s probably what I look like in heaven. We don’t realize that these constructions of beauty are exactly that: they’re there to sell you things. And they’re created by powerful people who have lots and lots of money to shape how you think. But the Bible doesn’t do that. It doesn’t give you that kind of information. In fact, it’s quite mysterious when it comes to these things. But the apostle Paul in 1 Corinthians 15, when he is talking about the resurrection body, doesn’t say that the body will be replaced. He says it’ll be transformed.

N. T. Wright points out that something similar goes on in Revelation when the new Jerusalem comes down upon the old Jerusalem. The old Jerusalem is not replaced, it’s transformed. There’s something about our bodies that we have just now that have some kind of durability, some kind of eternal significance. And the fact that we don’t know what that significance entails means that we need to respect everybody irrespective of what you look like, irrespective of the way your body or mind functions. Something about you as a person has durability. When you think about the resurrection in that way, then it has significant implications for how you look at people now. Likewise, the scars Jesus has. If you have a vision of beauty that is perfect in the way that perhaps a magazine will tell you is perfect, then either Jesus’ body was imperfect, or we’ve got something wrong. And I think I’d rather go for the latter.

How do you imagine health? What does health feel and look like to you?

I’ve been thinking about this word called homefulness recently. I found it in a very brief comment by Walter Brueggemann. It’s to do with how you feel at home in any given situation. I suppose it’s probably linked in with the doctrine of creation – that God created the world and said this is your home. But to have a sense of homefulness means that you have a sense of who you are and why you’re here, and that you have some kind of awareness and control over your circumstances. Because home is a place where you find your identity. Home is where you do everything with your family or community. It’s a central point.

Homefulness is a concept that, I think, resonates deeply with both health and the vocation of health care workers. To be a healing presence – in the fullest sense – is to become someone with whom others can feel at home. Illness, in so many of its forms, is a kind of exile. It dislocates. It estranges you from your body, from your story, from your community – sometimes even from God. And so, the work of healing must involve more than diagnosis and intervention; it must participate in the work of rehoming. To offer homefulness is to offer presence that is spacious, hospitable, and trustworthy – a space where people feel recognized, safe, and named. It’s in that space, even amid ongoing suffering or unresolved symptoms, that people might begin to feel they are coming home – to themselves, to others, and perhaps, in some deep way, to God.