This doctor makes house calls. He enters our condition. He takes up our flesh. He bears our infirmities.
As we approach the end of an exceptionally long Pentecost season, preachers need not be slavishly devoted to the lectionary’s numbered Propers. Reformation and All Saints are waiting in the wings, and there is something to be said for taking a festival field trip on the feast of St. Luke, Evangelist. Luke is one of the principal voices of the apostolic church, establishing the resurrection of our Lord (with some great apologetic moves too!) and laying out the early history of the Church’s life and mission. His gospel and the Acts of the Apostles are a signal service to the faith of the Church, and to your faith, too!
But whether you preach Proper 24 or the feast of St. Luke, above all preach Christ. The readings appointed for this festival offer a particularly rich opportunity to do so. Our theme will be “Doctoring.” This is ready made for thinking about Luke the physician, Christ the great Physician, and the healing our Lord accomplishes in His flesh and blood for the life of the world.
Start with the concrete, preacher. Luke is called “the beloved physician” at Colossians 4:14. Before he was an evangelist, Luke’s vocation was a calling to the healing arts. It was a divine call, as all callings are, which is how God is at work (whether we are aware of it or not), the Lord working through real people like Luke (and you and your hearer). We may imagine Luke attending to the sick, learning to recognize affliction, applying his knowledge to the needs of particular bodies, and accompanying people through suffering. His vocation was not incidental to his Christian life (none of them are – a wonderful opportunity for you to reinforce this immediately relevant doctrine for your people). Rather, Luke’s vocation as a doctor was one of the ways he served his neighbor and, eventually, one of the ways he served the apostolic mission.
There is plenty of material here for illustrations. Think of the physician who watches a patient respond to treatment, the researcher whose years of labor yield a new therapy, or the nurse whose attentiveness brings comfort to someone who is frightened and suffering. Such stories remind us both of the astonishing gifts God has given human beings and of our creaturely humility before the mysteries of the body. We can do remarkable things, but we cannot make ourselves immortal. We can treat disease, mend injuries, and extend life, but we cannot abolish death.
That is a useful distinction for preaching Christ. Luke’s work as a physician may serve as a little picture, a shadow, a type of the work of Christ. In his vocation, Luke imaged something of the healing mercy of God. But the physician is not the Physician, and the creature is not the Creator. The healing we can accomplish is gift and a sign. The healing Christ brings is the fulfillment.
But the physician is not the Physician, and the creature is not the Creator. The healing we can accomplish is gift and a sign. The healing Christ brings is the fulfillment.
In its original setting, the familiar proverb, “Physician, heal thyself” (Luke 4:23) is one Jesus takes up as He confronts the skepticism of His own townspeople. They want to see the wonders they have heard about, and Jesus knows that a prophet is not readily received in his hometown. The saying points up the contradiction of someone who prescribes remedies for others but cannot solve his own problems, highlights hypocrisy, and/or shakes a cynical head. But it also opens a door to the Gospel. What happens when the Physician himself takes on our sickness? What happens when the one who heals others does not spare himself? Be thinking about this as you craft your message. Attend also to Isaiah. The prophet announces a day when “the eyes of the blind shall be opened, and the ears of the deaf unstopped; then shall the lame man leap like a deer” (Isaiah 35:5-6). This is no abstract account of spiritual improvement. Including eyes, ears, all our members, the Lord promises the restoration of human bodies. The desert itself will rejoice and blossom, and a highway will be made for the redeemed. God’s salvation is coming into the world He made, to redeem the creatures He loves.
Jesus comes announcing and accomplishing precisely this promised restoration. Remember His words to John’s disciples: “Go and tell John what you have seen and heard: The blind receive their sight, the lame walk, lepers are cleansed, and the deaf hear” (Luke 7:22). Our Lord’s mighty works are not party tricks or demonstrations of power for their own sake. They are signs that the Kingdom of God has drawn near. As a result, the appointed gospel, Luke 10:1-9, sends the seventy-two out ahead of Jesus. They are to enter houses, receive what is offered, heal the sick, and proclaim, “The Kingdom of God has come near to you.” Notice the order and the concreteness. The Kingdom is proclaimed in words and demonstrated in deeds. The messengers do not announce an idea about God’s benevolence. They bear His mercy to actual people in actual places in actual need. The gospels (and Luke’s in particular, no surprise!) give us plenty of examples to choose from: The paralytic lowered through the roof (Luke 5:17-26), the woman who touches the hem of Jesus’ garment (Luke 8:43-48), the blind beggar whose sight is restored (Luke 18:35-43). Each story brings us face to face with a particular affliction and a particular act of mercy. Christ does not heal a theoretical humanity. He heals human beings.
Remember, too, what Jesus says when the Pharisees object to His fellowship with tax collectors and sinners: “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick” (Luke 5:31). The Lord has come not to call the righteous but sinners to repentance. Here is the great Physician’s diagnosis: Our sickness runs deeper than the body and our need runs deeper than any treatment available from human hands. Sin has corrupted us. Death claims us. We need more than advice, a moral example, or a temporary reprieve. We need the forgiveness of sins and the resurrection of the body.
The metaphor turns at this point with historical fact; toward the cross. The great Physician does not stand aloof and issue instructions, take two of these and call me in the morning or something like that. This doctor makes house calls. He enters our condition. He takes up our flesh. He bears our infirmities. He submits Himself to the slab. The hands that touch the sick are pierced. The body that restores the broken is broken. The blood that gives life is poured out and the time of death is called: Three o’clock on a dark Friday afternoon, it is finished.
The blood that gives life is poured out and the time of death is called: Three o’clock on a dark Friday afternoon, it is finished.
Isaiah’s vision of restoration belongs with the Suffering Servant’s work, as he tells us, “By his stripes we are healed” (Isaiah 53:5). The healing of the nation’s comes at a cost borne by Christ Himself. This Physician does not heal Himself by escaping suffering. He heals us by giving Himself for us, and by rising victorious over the death that held us captive. Therefore, the resurrection is better than just a happy ending. It is the beginning of the world’s restoration, the pledge that the body’s sickness and death will not have the last word. It is real life under a doctor’s care, “Following doctor’s orders,” as the risen Christ continues to distribute His healing gifts through His Church.
Think of Peter and John at the Beautiful Gate (Acts 3:1-10), as the lame man asks for alms and Peter answers, “Silver and gold have I none, but such as I have give I thee,” and in the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, he commands him to rise and walk. The apostle’s hands do not possess some independent power. This is no magic made by men. The healing comes in the name of the crucified and risen Lord. What Christ has accomplished, He now gives through the ministry of His servants.
And do not leave that gift at the church door. We have medicine in that ministry! It is no mere reminder of a distant physician or a memorial of a treatment once administered. Here, Christ gives Himself to His people. Here, we receive His body and blood, given and shed for the forgiveness of sins. The ancient bishop Ignatius of Antioch called the Eucharist “the medicine of immortality” (Letter to the Ephesians 20), an “antidote to prevent us from dying!” The phrase is wonderfully apt: Christ gives mortal creatures a share in His own life, nourishing us for the resurrection He has promised. This is no denial of earthly medicine, nor a promise that faithful Christians will never fall sick. The physician’s craft remains a good gift of God and the Church’s care for the sick remains a Christian duty. But every earthly healing is provisional as we live in the penultimate, waiting for the end. The Lord’s Supper directs us to the Physician whose remedy reaches beyond the grave, whose blood cleanses us from sin, and whose risen body is the first fruits of our own resurrection.
Finally, preacher, return to Luke. Before he was an evangelist, he was a physician, and his gifts in that vocation became part of his service to Christ and his neighbor. So, it is with us. Not everyone is called to practice medicine, preach sermons, or travel as a missionary. But every Christian is given a station in life, particular neighbors to love, and gifts with which to serve. The question is not whether we can make ourselves saviors. Of course, we cannot. The question is whether, in our ordinary vocations, we can bear witness to the Savior who has healed us. And the answer is, of course, we can and do. The physician tends the sick. The teacher instructs. The parent nourishes. The laborer builds. The neighbor visits and comforts. God is at work in every creature He calls to image Christ’s mercy in concrete acts of service.
As we see it, when our work fails, when our own bodies falter, when the diagnosis is grave and death draws near, even then, we do not pretend our healing hands are enough. We turn again to Christ, the great Physician. He bears our sickness, shed His blood for our forgiveness, and is risen from the dead for our hope and assurance. Jesus sends us to serve our neighbors, and He gathers us back to His table. Give your people that Jesus there, the medicine of immortality. There He gives us not an abstraction, but Himself, His body and blood, the antidote for death, and the pledge of the life of the world to come.
God bless you as you bring His Word to your people this week!
