Copyright © 2003 by Stephen S. Bilynskyj
A worker on the pyramids may have been treated with brain surgery. In 1998 Egyptian archaeologists discovered an ancient skeleton which shows evidence of the skull being opened, a tumor removed, and the man surviving afterward for at least two years.[1]
In junior high I wrote a report on ancient Egyptian medical practice. My mother took me to the U.C.L.A. medical library and I paged through books picturing strange looking tools and jars which held drugs. Some of you saw the picture of surgical instruments we took last year in Greece at Epidauros, a great ancient center for healing. We’re all very aware now that China and other Asian cultures have venerable traditions of medical practice. In the western hemisphere it appears that the Aztec, Mayan and Incan civilizations also had sophisticated healing arts. The beginning of medicine is a complex and fascinating story. Human beings the world around for millennia have looked to the care of physicians. Doctors have been crucial members of society since the dawn of human history.
Because their work matters so much to us, it’s only natural that the intelligence and skill of good physicians is highly regarded. Egyptian physicians operated on a man’s head. And I don’t know if a foreman overseeing work on the pyramids ever scolded a worker who got a stone in crooked with the words, “Look, it’s not brain surgery!” But for us, along with “rocket science,” “brain surgery” implies the most difficult and complex of vocations. “Brain surgeon” is almost synonymous with “genius.” We regard our doctors as some of the brightest people among us.
So in this process of viewing Jesus as the genius He is, it seems only right to consider His qualifications as a physician. It makes sense, then, to turn to Luke’s Gospel. It has long been thought that this Gospel was written by a doctor. The evidence is sketchy. In just one verse, Colossians 4:14, the apostle Paul mentions a co-worker “Luke the doctor.” That Luke has come to be identified with the writer of the third Gospel and the book of Acts. And it does seem as if you can find a medical perspective in the way he tells the story. Luke pays more attention to the details of some of Jesus’ healing miracles. For instance, in the first verse of our text, he tells us that “Simon’s mother-in-law was suffering from a great fever.” The words “suffering” and “great” don’t show up in Matthew and Mark. They seem to be technical medical terms. Luke is interested in just what sort of fever the woman had.
Luke the physician gives us a picture of Jesus as a physician. If you back up to verse 23 of chapter 4, you find the only record of our Lord quoting the proverb, “Physician, heal yourself.” He was chiding His hometown for their lack of faith. They were thinking that He needed to do for His own people the healing miracles which He had done other places. But in the process Christ implied that He is in fact a physician, a doctor with the power to heal all sorts of illness. The text we read today from Luke lets us see both a specific example and a general description of Jesus’ medical practice and genius.
Now you might be thinking that it is silly and a bit disingenuous to claim that Jesus Christ practiced medicine. After all, He healed people without almost none of the methods and paraphernalia used by doctors then or now. His cures were accomplished through faith and by the miraculous power of God, not by technical skill and the natural healing powers of the body. Why think of Him as a physician at all?
In part, the answer is tradition. From the earliest church fathers, one of the names we Christians have given to our Lord is “the Great Physician.” Some of you probably sang the old hymn, “The Great Physician now is near, the sympathizing Jesus.” Christ offers us wonderful gifts of healing. It’s only fitting to think of Him as the greatest practitioner of the great art of curing human illness and suffering.
But, yes, we have to admit that Jesus as a physician is very different from the doctors, nurses and other medical people we consult in brightly lit offices and antiseptic hospital rooms. While He definitely reached out and healed, as verse 40 says, a whole variety of illnesses, His goal went beyond simply extending bodily health and lifespan. Ultimately, the purpose of the Great Physician was and is the healing of body and soul for eternity.
So let’s look at the healing work of Jesus in its different aspects. If He is a physician, then we may expect that His curative power will display itself in some of the ways ordinary doctors proceed.
The practice of medicine begins with diagnosis. The first step in curing anyone of anything is to discern what the problem actually is. It would be a horrible mistake to prescribe an antacid for appendicitis or to perform brain surgery for a migraine. The doctor needs first of all to know what injury or illness he or she is dealing with. Only then can proper treatment be offered. Many of you know the frustration of waiting for a final diagnosis. A while back I went to a doctor for a problem I was experiencing and he was unable to find the cause. So he looked at me and said, “Well, three things could happen. It could either get better. Or it could get worse. Or it could stay the same.” I sat there thinking, “I studied logic. I could have figured that out for myself!”
Jesus, though, was a master of diagnosis. Never once do you see Him hesitating or confused by the symptoms His patients present. In particular, He was not at all baffled by those cases with which even brilliant physicians today struggle, those strange and difficult ailments whereby mind and body interact and it’s difficult to know if it’s a matter of physiology or of psychology. Jesus Christ grasped the condition of the whole person, soul and body, and healed either or both exactly as needed.
Luke shows the divine diagnostician at work here by distinguishing in verses 40 and 41 between Jesus healing those who had diseases and those who were afflicted by demons. He knew whether a condition was spiritual or physical. He knew how to apply His power to body, soul or both as needed. For Peter’s mother-in-law it appears there is a hint of some sort of spiritual attack, because this is the only occasion when Jesus speaks to a disease, rebuking the fever it says in verse 39.
Jesus also clearly discerned when a person’s spiritual condition was not the source of a problem. At the beginning of John chapter 9, His disciples misdiagnosed a blind man. They wonder who it was, the man or his parents, who sinned and caused his blindness. It’s not sin at all, Jesus tells them. God has a purpose for the man’s blindness, but it has nothing to do with the condition of the man’s soul. It’s a simple physical malady.
So the medical genius of Jesus is demonstrated by His diagnostic skill. He is the perfect pathologist. Discover Magazine has a monthly column called “Vital Signs.” It’s written every month by a doctor who has dealt with a difficult diagnosis. Cancer is mistaken for indigestion, or lungs scarred by smoke are mistaken for cancer. Mysterious blood tests or CAT scans beg for interpretation. Usually the story comes out well. Finally the mystery is unraveled, the disease is found and treated. Sometimes it’s a sad ending. Not until it’s too late and nothing can be done does the diagnosis become apparent. But it’s never like that with Jesus. He always sees through to the heart of the matter. He knows and understands everything which troubles us, physically, mentally and spiritually.
A correct diagnoses is only the beginning, however. It’s often the case that ordinary physicians can tell you what is wrong. But more often than we would like they must sometimes go on to say that there is nothing that can be done. You have to live with your condition. Or they can treat your symptoms but not cure you. Or that you only have a little more time left. Only Jesus has the power to both diagnose and treat any sickness.
This text is representative of an element which was often included in Jesus’ treatment of illness. He touched people. In our time, the element of touch in medical care has generally been moved away from the physician. The doctor diagnoses and then prescribes medicine and courses of treatment. But it is someone else, a nurse, a physical therapist, perhaps a chiropractor or someone else who offers a healing touch, actual physical contact which helps heal.
The Great Physician never shied away from touching His patients. Verse 40 says that He laid “his hands on each one.” Luke omits the detail, but Matthew and Mark tell us that Jesus didn’t just speak over Simon’s mother-in-law. He reached out His hand and touched her as well. The hands of Jesus were filled with skill and power and love. And so His touch was always therapeutic.
Even touching Jesus could be enough to heal. In Luke 8 we read about the woman who had been bleeding for twelve years. She reached out just to brush the edge of Jesus’ clothing in a crowd and she was made whole. Luke, being the doctor that he was, left out the detail that this happened after she had already spent all her money on other doctors.
I’m going to repeat this several times. Jesus heals soul and body. That’s one reason His touch is so important. His medical care was nothing like Christian Science or some new age spiritual healing technique that focuses completely on the mind or spirit. Christ the Son of God came into the world as a human with a body and He touched people so that He could save them completely as whole people made by God as body and spirit.
Jesus touched even those patients no one else would put a hand on. In the very next chapter from our text, He reaches out and touches a man with leprosy. The man was untouchable by Jewish standards, but Christ laid His hand on him and made him clean.
There’s genius in a skillful touch. Intelligence is not just all in the head. In a novel I’ve been reading there is a description of brain surgery that says,
It was nothing short of a miracle, the way his slender fingers moved with such unhurried sureness. Probing the pathways, moving to stanch heavy bleeding, testing damaged areas with his fingers—not a single wasted movement… he demonstrated that instinct to move directly to the correct spot… almost as if his fingertips could think on their own.[2]
Jesus has that kind of genius and more in His hands. In His touch flowed the power of the Holy Spirit, applied with perfect skill to each of His patients.
If you are like me, you may frequently lament the fact we do not have quite the same opportunity for the touch of Jesus which Simon’s mother-in-law did. Our fevers and pains and sorrows all cry out for His healing hands, but we cannot feel physical contact with our Savior.
Yet He is still the Great Physician. He continues to offer us a physical connection with Him in an act He paid for with the complete sacrifice of His own body. By blessing the bread and the cup of Holy Communion as His own body and blood, Jesus invited us to touch Him and know His touch upon us. In the act of coming to the Lord’s Table we come into contact with our Lord and He offers us His healing.
As far as we know, Jesus never dispensed any medicine. One time He made a little mud from His own saliva and put it on a man’s eyes to heal His blindness. But all the rest of the time He did without potions and pills and salves and all the other drugs which doctors used then and still use now. But Ignatius of Antioch coined a phrase which early Christians came to love to describe the Lord’s Table. He called it “the medicine of immortality, the antidote ensuring that we shall not die but live in Jesus Christ forever.”[3] His own life offered up on the Cross was all the pharmaceutical skill the Lord needed. In John chapter 6 verse 54 He gave the prescription, “Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up at the last day.”
That’s one of the reasons we celebrate the Lord’s Table weekly on Wednesday evenings. I am convinced that it is our Lord’s prescription for healing, for knowing His touch, for receiving a medicine which makes us fit for eternal life. The Doctor told us, “Take and eat.” He told us, “Drink of it all of you.” Let us take our holy medicine.
There is one more part of medical care I invite you to see in the work of Jesus Christ. After diagnosis, after treatment by touch or by medicine, there often comes a medical task that is only partly the doctor’s work. For complete healing, the cooperation of the patient may be required in a season of therapy. The patient leaves surgery or treatment and goes away with a set of exercises, a new diet, a change in lifestyle. It is therapy designed to ensure that full health is restored and that sickness does not return.
Many students of the Bible have seen significance in the fact that verse 39 tells us that immediately after being healed Simon’s mother-in-law got up to wait on Jesus and His disciples. You can be cynical like my wife has joked, saying that He just healed her so that someone would make Him supper. But that’s not it at all. Serving Jesus was the rest of her healing. Waiting on her Lord was the therapy which would make her completely well.
Jesus calls all of us beyond the mere healing of our personal ills into the therapy of service. He knows that we will never be entirely healthy as long as we are focused only on our own well-being. If He heals and raises us up either spiritually or physically, He is setting us on a course of therapy which ministers to Him and others.
That is why Christians down through the ages have regarded the healing occupations as divine callings. Doctors, nurses, therapists, all kinds of caregivers have a call and vocation given by the Lord. Christians founded the first hospitals. Christians took in the sick and dying whom nobody else would touch. It was all part of this understanding that we are healed to help, healed to serve, healed to bring Jesus’ healing to everyone else.
Next year in Minneapolis, the Covenant Church will observe the fortieth anniversary of the life and martyrdom of one of our missionaries. Dr. Paul Carlson grew up in a Covenant Church and went to North Park College. He studied medicine at Stanford and received his M.D. in 1957. Along the way he began to doubt his faith. He found it hard to believe in the Trinity.
Then in 1961 he got a letter that awoke something in his heart. It was a call from the Christian Medical Society to do short-term work in Congo. Leaving his wife and children at home he spent four months serving in Congo. It was the therapy which gave him back his faith. He was overwhelmed with the need. He came home and in 1963 took his entire family and moved to a remote mission station in Wasolo, in the Ubangi Province. He set up a makeshift clinic, rode a little motorbike to calls in the villages, and often operated by the light of a flashlight.
A little over a year later, the Simba rebels were threatening to overrun defenses in Ubangi. Paul took his wife and children over the border to safety in the Central African Republic. He himself went back to the clinic to treat those wounded in the fighting as well as his usual patients.
Paul made one visit to his family on a Sunday and promised to return on Wednesday. He never made it. The rebels captured and held him for three months. He was tortured. On November 24, 1964 the good doctor was shot even while Belgian paratroopers were trying to rescue him and other prisoners. Paul Carlson knew what it was to serve Jesus. He knew that the healing of ministry of Jesus belongs to us all. We in the Covenant continue our commitment to run hospitals and retirement communities, inspired by Carlson’s example of answering our Lord’s call to service.
We are not all called to be missionaries. We are not all called to medical careers. We are certainly not all called to be martyrs. But the Great Physician has called every one of us into His practice. We are His patients first and then His partners. Each of you who have been touched by Jesus has a healing role to play in the life of someone else.
I just read an article written from his bed by Bill Bright not too long before he died. He expressed the frustration of relinquishing his busy ministry of writing, traveling and speaking. But then he recalls that one can serve even from bed, just by praying. Those of us who can are called to serve in ways other than prayer, but anyone who knows the healing power of Jesus can pray for others in need.
As we offer prayers for healing by the Great Physician this morning, I invite you to experience both the touch of His hand and the call to His service. That is the therapy we all need.
Amen.
Valley Covenant Church
Eugene/Springfield, Oregon
Copyright © 2003 by Stephen S. Bilynskyj