T. 27. I. 6 – 9. Jesus: “Attest your brother’s innocence to him and not his guilt! Your healing, by way of the Holy Spirit, is his comfort and his health because it proves illusions are not true.
It is not will for life but wish for death that is the motivation for this world. Its only purpose is to prove that guilt is real. No worldly thought or act or feeling has a motivation other than this one! These are the witnesses that are called forth to be believed, and lend conviction to the thought system they speak for and represent. And each has many voices, speaking to your brother and yourself in different tongues. And yet to both, the message is the same.
Adornment of the body seeks but to show how lovely the witness for guilt can be! Concerns about the body demonstrate how frail and vulnerable is your life; how easily destroyed is what you love. Depression speaks of death, and vanity of ‘real concern’ with what amounts to nothing at all.
The strongest witness to futility, that bolsters all the rest and helps them paint the picture in which sin is justified, is sickness in whatever form it takes. The sick have reason for each one of their unnatural desires and strange needs. For who could live a life so soon cut short and not esteem the worth of passing joys? What bodily pleasures could there be that will endure? Are not the frail entitled to believe that every stolen scrap of pleasure is their righteous payment for the suffering in their little lives? Their death will pay the price for all of them, whether they enjoy their benefits or not. The end of bodily life must come, whatever way that life be spent. And so the worldly ones take pleasure in the quickly passing and ephemeral!
These are not sins, but merely witnesses unto the strange belief that sin and death are real, and innocence and sin will end alike within the termination of the grave. If this were true, there would indeed be reason to remain content to seek for passing joys and cherish little pleasures where you can.
Yet in this strange picture is the body not perceived as merely neutral and without a goal inherent in itself. For it becomes the symbol of reproach, the sign of guilt whose consequences still are there to see, so that the cause can never be denied. Now your function is to show your brother that his sin can have no cause. How futile must it be to see yourself a picture of the proof that what you think your function is can never be!
The Holy Spirit’s picture, given you to offer your brother, changes not the body into something it is not. It only takes away from it all signs of accusation and of blamefulness. Pictured without a purpose, it is seen as neither sick nor well, nor bad nor good. No grounds are offered that it may be judged in any way at all. It has no life, but neither is it dead!”