Not long ago I sat in a hospital room praying for an older man dying of cancer. I asked God to heal him, but later I wondered if I did the right thing. When someone comes to the end of a long and godly life, what should we pray for? Healing? Comfort? God’s will? It’s hard to know.

Of Jesus’ recorded healings, almost all involve releasing people from a life-altering disability like blindness (John 9), deafness (Mark 7:31-37), demon possession (Mark 5:1-20), deformity (Luke 13:10-17), and other problems. Only once do we read of Jesus healing an ordinary disease: when he healed Peter’s mother-in-law of a fever (Mark 1:29-31 and parallels). Only once do we read of Jesus healing an ordinary injury: replacing the ear of the high priest’s slave in the garden (Luke 22:51). When Jesus raised people from the dead, only once do we find an indication of the person’s age, and that girl was only twelve years old (Mark 5:21-43 and parallels). We read of Jesus keeping disease from cutting someone’s life short (Luke 7:1-10 and parallel), and we also read of him enhancing people’s lives by releasing them from crippling disabilities, but we never see him using his healing powers to extend an already long life.

What to make of all this? A cynic might say that Jesus never healed someone dying of old age because he couldn’t. Jesus’ healings, such a person might claim, were not real healings but examples of the power of suggestion, and suggestion won’t stop old age. This answer doesn’t fit the gospel data, for we see Jesus healing all kinds of diseases that the power of suggestion won’t touch: leprosy, deformity, and so on. Or maybe the miracles we read about are the more dramatic ones, and Jesus really did heal people at the end of a long life and we just don’t read about it. No doubt Jesus did more healings than we read about in the Gospels (John 20:30-31), but we have only the Gospels to go on when we explore these questions, and we have to assume that if we read nothing about his keeping people from dying of old age, he didn’t do so.

More likely, Jesus healed people in their prime to restore them to the kind of wholeness God desires. As far as we can tell, he did not interfere with the natural process that ends a life after seventy years or so. If this reading of the Gospel data is correct, where does it leave us? It seems to me that we should respect the natural process that ends our lives after so many years, even though we realize that death is not God’s ultimate plan for us. When we pray for people at the apparent end of life, we do not have to ask God to keep them hanging on. Instead, we may recognize that the end is near and pray God’s comfort for the family.

People often accept this reality. Families will say things like, “We wanted to keep her with us a little longer, but that was selfish. We had to let her go.” Apparently Jesus knew this too, and if the Gospel miracles are a representative sample of the healings he did, he too was willing to let people go.