“And [God] gave
skill to human beings that he might be glorified in his marvelous works.”
Sirach 38: 6
“Down in Guatemala,” he told me, “I
had to be a real doctor, and it scared the heck out of me.” Now don’t get me wrong, according to the
standards of the American Medical Association and the licensing agencies of his
rather lucrative specialty, my parishioner was very much a real doctor. He had been in practice for decades and was
highly regarded in our community, sought out by people in need of surgery. But things were different, he was telling me,
when he went to Guatemala on a medical mission trip with his son’s church.
They were working in a remote area,
with very minimal equipment, you see.
There were no MRI machines and it was a day’s journey over rugged roads
for an x-ray. They could do simple blood
tests, and had a few diagnostic tools, and some basic medicines but that was
about it. My parishioner said he had
learned all about diagnosis back in medical school, but it was so much easier
just to run a test and be sure. Here in
Guatemala, he had to listen to the stories, mark just how people described
their symptoms. It was really
challenging work, and he wasn’t certain about a few of the cases he had
seen. There were some maladies he just
couldn’t treat.
Malpractice insurance companies, of
course, don’t tolerate this much guesswork here, and that’s probably a good
thing. But it was interesting to me that
my parishioner didn’t think of his work within these narrow limits as
useless. “A real doctor,” that’s what
he called himself, someone stretched to use all his ingenuity, to listen more
carefully, to treat the whole person and not just the symptoms. He left that time in Guatemala a bit wistful
about the more accurate and lucrative way he practiced medicine the rest of the
year, and anxious to get back again to a place where he really do justice to
his profession.
Today we give thanks to God for
Saint Luke the Evangelist, called by Saint Paul, “the beloved physician.”[1] He is the patron saint of those who work in
the various medical professions, and our Old Testament lesson appropriately
gives thanks to God for the work these people do in bringing healing to the
world. Now we don’t know anything at all
about how Saint Luke practiced medicine, but as someone who worked in a time
when there were even fewer diagnostic tools than my former parishioner found in
that Guatemalan clinic, I think he must have gained the kind of skills that
made for a “real doctor.”
You can see many of those on display
in the third Gospel and the Book of Acts, which he wrote as an “orderly
account”[2]
of the life of Christ and of his earliest followers for a reader named
Theophilus. First, he was a learned man, as all doctors
have to be, a master of complicated patterns and unusual symptoms. Of all three Gospels, Saint Luke’s abounds
most in historical and geographic detail, and there’s even more of this in the
Book of Acts. When historians or Holy
Land tour guides want to place a given Biblical event in time, it’s usually
Saint Luke who provides the anchoring facts.
Saint Luke was also a very gifted storyteller, someone who had
obviously been trained to listen carefully as people described their
afflictions. Legend also says he was an
artist, and I once saw a painting that was attributed to him, in the Syrian
cathedral in Jerusalem. I’m not so sure
about that, but Saint Luke certainly painted his accounts with colorful tidbits. And they give us a fuller understanding of,
say, Christ’s gentleness toward the suffering and the boldness of Saint
Paul. Many of the best known and loved
stories from the life of Jesus are recorded only in his Gospel. The Nativity story, for example: the Virgin
Mary’s encounter with the Angel Gabriel, her joyful meeting with Elizabeth, the
birth in the stable, the angels filling the Bethlehem sky with song, that’s
only told in his Gospel. Those stories
from the beginning are matched by extensive and evocative descriptions of
Christ’s appearance after his resurrection at the end, especially the story of
that mysterious encounter on the road to Emmaus, where Christ appeared to His
disciples “in the breaking of bread.”[3] Luke alone recalled Jesus’ parable of the
Good Samaritan, and that sequence of tales about the joy of reconciliation that
ends with the story of the prodigal son.
He also has what we might call a more inclusive vision, and was
especially careful to recall the role of women and the poor in the Gospel
stories. The great canticle of praise
offered by Zechariah in chapter one, for example, is echoed by another sung by
the Virgin Mary a few verses later.
Simeon rejoices to receive Christ in the temple, and then so does Anna
as well. Saint Luke tends to group
Christ’s parables so that one that has a man as the protagonist, like the
shepherd seeking the lost sheep, is followed immediately by one with a woman in
the primary role, like the woman with the lost coin. He also recalled many of Christ’s teaching
about the hazards of wealth, and God’s desire to bless and strengthen the poor,
as in the dramatic sermon at Nazareth that serves as our Gospel lesson. Now, Saint Luke might have been more interested
in outsiders because he was a Gentile himself.
But his profession had also accustomed him to treat all kinds of people,
men and women alike, “master or servant, bond or free,” as the Hippocratic Oath
has always stated.
“[God] gave skill to human beings that he might be glorified in
his marvelous works.” That’s what old
Sirach said about the way doctors can lead others closer to God. He was talking of course, about their medical
skills. But for Saint Luke, the saying
was true in an even deeper sense.
Because it was his skill as a doctor that trained him to bear witness to
God’s most marvelous work, His redemption of the world through Christ, in a
truly powerful and unique way. “Why are
there four Gospels?,” I’m sometimes asked.
Well because to see Christ in the full, we need four different
observers: rabbinical Matthew, breathless Mark, meditative John, and Luke—the
historian and storyteller, perhaps the one who had the widest vision of them
all. Each of the Gospel writers gave a
distinct account, shaped by his own passion, his own experience in the rest of
life. God inspired them to write His
word in the midst of their own stories, not in spite of them.
In Baptism we all promise to “proclaim by word and example the
Good News of God in Christ,”[4]
that is to say, we all promise to be evangelists. We each tell our own Gospel—not that we all
write Holy Scripture, of course, but we tell the story recounted in Scripture
in our own particular way. Your
education, the work that consumes so much of your life, your experience as a
spouse, a friend, a parent—these all shape the story you have been given to
tell to others about God’s love and His purpose for human life. Maybe you haven’t thought much about this
before. How is Christ revealed in the
work of a paralegal, an accountant, the third chair clarinet in the high school
band? What’s the spiritual value
implicit in what you know about lesson plans, defense strategy or professional
football? Every talent, every passion,
all the truth we have learned, all the goodness and beauty we have created is
meant to be drawn up in this noblest task of all—revealing God to the
world. Think about your own story and
how it tells the big story. If you
don’t know quite know to start, ask the good doctor for some help. He shows us all how to do it so very well.
No comments:
Post a Comment