The Good Physician and the Bad Priests

The Pharisees looked down on Jesus because Jesus kept company with gutter scum. There’s a saying today: "You can’t soar with eagles if you hang out with turkeys." "Exactly", the Pharisees would say. And they were the eagles.

Jesus explained himself this way:

"Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick; I have come to call not the righteous but sinners." [Mark 2:17 (NRSV).]

In the Bible, both priests and physicians had a role as to disease. The difference between Jesus and the Pharisees was which of those roles they took.

1. Physicians.

In a way, Jesus’s choice of metaphor is odd. From the beginning to the end of the Bible, no physician cures anyone. Their only success was when they acted as embalmers. In Genesis, Joseph gave the body of his father Israel to Egyptian physicians for embalming. They also embalmed Joseph. Thus, physicians earn their only hits in the first inning.

Physicians don’t heal the army-commander Naaman’s leprosy. Physicians aren’t even mentioned. God heals him through the prophet Elisha. (2 Kings 5.)

King Asa of Judah was a godly king. (There’s some biblical controversy about this – which is not my subject now.) Two years before he died, his feet became diseased. In Second Chronicles, he sought cure from physicians instead of from God, and they failed.

Then there’s Job. Buried under serial catastrophes, Job suffers his friends. His friends are great men, righteous men, men of understanding, even prophets in their way. And they accuse him.

They demand that he blame himself for his own loss of all comfort and happiness. Job refuses. He calls his accusers "worthless physicians." (Job 13:4.) They are giving him the shaming cure, and he won’t drink that medicine.

Job uses physician as a metaphor for a spiritual healer. Like Job and Jesus, the Old Testament prophet Jeremiah used physicians to stand for spiritual healers:

      Is there no balm in Gilead?
         Is there no physician there?
     Why then has the health of my poor people
         not been restored? [Jeremiah 8:22 (NRSV).]

Physicians appear in the New Testament in four ways. In addition to Jesus using them as a metaphor for his ministry, there was the woman who had bled for many years. Over the years, she poured out her purse to physicians, but they failed to stop her bleeding. She became worse. But she touched Jesus’s robe, and she was healed. (Mark 5.)

And there was Luke the physician. His occupation seems incidental.

Finally, Jesus spoke to men and women that he grew up among. He said, "Doubtless you will quote to me this proverb, ‘Doctor, cure yourself!’" (Luke 4:23 (NRSV).) I suspect that he is using doctor in the same way that Job, Jeremiah, and he himself used physician.

2. Priests.

Not only physicians dealt with disease. So did priests. Leviticus 13 & 14 describe the priestly duty to diagnose leprosy. (Leprosy, as used in the Bible, covered a number of skin diseases.)

A leprous person was an outcast. He could wear only torn clothes. When he walked, he had to cover his lip with his hand and call out "Unclean! Unclean!" He had to live outside the camp. (Leviticus 13:45-46.)

Priests declared when a person was cured. That’s why Jesus told the man he cured of leprosy to show himself to a priest. (Matthew 8:4.)

The casting out of lepers was real, and it had real consequences to the outcasts and their loved ones and friends.

3. Physicians, priests, Jesus, and the Pharisees.

Approaching sin like priests approach disease, the Pharisees gripped a thicker biblical strand than Jesus did in comparing himself to a physician. Like Levitical priests diagnosed leprosy, they diagnosed sin. And then they shunned the sinner, as lepers were shunned. They offered no help to the shunned, except their hard-hearted example.

      I do not sit with the worthless,
         nor do I consort with hypocrites;
      I hate the company of evildoers,
         and will not sit with the wicked. [Psalm 26:4-5 (NRSV).]

Psalm 26 was a diamond-tipped proof-text that the Pharisees could judge Jesus with.

Jesus was the highest of high priests, but he saw himself as a physician. He was the healer of sin. He believed that sinners could be made good.

And physicians don’t heal from a distance.

4. The Great Healer.

The priestly Pharisees of gospel telling self-certified their own perfect spiritual health. Maybe we Christians shake our heads at them for that reason. Maybe we put ourselves above them, because we know our own sinfulness. But maybe we know our own sinfulness so glibly that we really don’t know it at all. If so, that would make us just like them.

So we might go to the Great Healer, and we might ask him to show us our need of healing. Personally, I go to my doctor only when I have a worry. Some people go regularly for a check-up. They don’t want a problem to go un-known until healing is hard or not possible. Those people are wiser about their bodies than I am about mine.

I heard of a physician who poured mineral oil into a patient’s ear and instantly dissolved an earwax build-up that had kept the patient from hearing. I heard of a drunk wastrel who cried out to God in drunken desperation, and he instantly became sober, and he never touched alcohol again. Maybe the Great Healer will lay hands on us and cure a problem instantly.

Maybe he’ll tell us to cut out the cigarettes-of-the-spirit, or the suggary-treats of the soul. And maybe we’ll be wise enough to hear him. (Hopefully, he’ll treat the earwax build-up first.) Maybe he’ll give us spiritual exercises to do.

It would be nice if he said that we were stressed out and sent us on vacation.

But we have to wait and see what he says. If we knew all that a doctor knows, we wouldn’t need a doctor. We don’t know, and we do need.

5. Prayer.

Lord, show me my sin. Speak of my condition. Teach me how I should live, and make me wise and brave and hopeful to live as you direct me to. Speak soundness to my bones and flesh, and health to my spirit. If you choose, you can do these things. Amen.