Suwa Karanna Ma Lyrics by Rookantha Gunathilaka

Heal me…
Lord Jesus
touch me,
lift up your hand,
raise me up, O divine
physician

As you healed from afar
the centurion’s servant, sick with paralysis,
heal me now
with your divine healing touch

As you took away the blindness
of the blind men who cried out, “Son of David,”
lift me up now
out of my world of darkness

As you took away the muteness
of the man struck dumb by a demon,
so break my silence, my Lord,
forever, break it

This is a healing hymn, a direct and trusting prayer to Jesus the “divine physician,” and it is beautifully built out of the healing miracles of the Gospels. Its plea is simple and repeated, “heal me, Lord Jesus, touch me, lift up your hand, raise me up.” The believer comes exactly as the sick came to Jesus in the Bible, asking to be made whole by his touch.

What makes the song rich is that each verse recalls a specific Gospel healing and turns it into a personal request. First, “as you healed from afar the centurion’s servant, sick with paralysis,” remembering the Roman officer whose servant Jesus healed at a distance, “heal me now with your divine healing touch.” Then, “as you took away the blindness of the blind men who cried out, ‘Son of David,'” recalling blind Bartimaeus and others who shouted that title of faith to Jesus, “lift me up out of my world of darkness.”

The final verse reaches for the healing of “the man struck dumb by a demon,” whom Jesus set free to speak, and makes it an image of the singer’s own silence: “so break my silence, my Lord, forever.” Each physical healing becomes a spiritual one, paralysis, blindness and muteness standing for the ways a soul can be trapped, darkened and silenced. What the listener is left with is a hymn of hopeful faith, a believer laying every kind of brokenness before the same Jesus who healed in Galilee, certain that the touch which cured bodies long ago can still make him whole.