Today is the feast day of St Luke.
Luke at once interests me, inspires me and challenges me. He wrote what is I
think my favourite Gospel and I love his poetic touch; he’s a prime source for
my faith in Jesus Christ. Luke’s Gospel lays great stress on the prayerfulness
of Jesus, the social care and concern of Jesus, and the work of the Holy
Spirit. And Luke is also, of course, the author of the Acts of the Apostles; Acts
and his Gospel really belong together as one, even though in our Bibles we bind
St John’s Gospel between them.
Both Luke’s books are well written
and finely structured. Luke was an educated man: he might have been a non-Jew
who’d accepted the Gospel message in the very early days of the Church, or a
Jew from the Greek diaspora or dispersion, in other words one of those who
lived away from the Holy Land and had been immersed in Greek culture and
learning. Luke presents his Gospel as a journey, from Bethlehem to Nazareth and
on to Jerusalem; and in Acts he continues that journey from Jerusalem to Rome.
And he made some of that journey
himself; most of the Acts of the Apostles is written in the third person about
things happening to, or done by, other people; but there comes a point, in
Troas I think, at which Luke ceases to write ‘they’ and begins instead to write
‘we’. These verses are first-hand experience, Luke was there. As we heard Paul
write to Timothy in our first reading, Luke was Paul’s constant and faithful
companion through much of his mission.
Mary the mother of Jesus has a
higher profile in Luke’s writing than anywhere else. Her song, the Magnificat,
is found in Luke’s Gospel, as is the Benedictus (Zechariah’s song) and the Nunc
Dimmitis (words from Simeon in the Temple). Luke is a very poetic writer; he
also explicitly tells us that Mary was present when the Holy Spirit fell upon
the disciples of Jesus at the first Christian Pentecost.
It’s perhaps because Mary has the place
she has in his Gospel that Luke was popularly believed to painted Mary’s
portrait. The idea that Luke was an artist has no historical foundation, but
the belief, that Luke was a physician, a doctor of medicine, is much more
credible, so he’s become a patron saint for doctors and all who work in the
healing professions. His feast day today is often used as an opportunity to
celebrate and pray for their work.
And also to reflect on the healing
ministry of the Church. The Church has always had a strong presence within the
world of medicine, of course. Many of our great hospitals had a Christian
foundation, as does the modern hospice movement. Although in many places their
jobs are under financial pressure, chaplains are still seen as important within
hospitals, and chapels are well-used. When I worked for a mission agency, a
very substantial part of our fund-raising and expenditure had a medical theme;
and I found it very moving a few years ago to be able to visit one of the
hospitals, Milo in Tanzania, that I’d been supporting and reading about for
many years.
But here is also where I’m
challenged: to take seriously the healing ministry of the Church, not as a sort
of optional bolt-on to what else we do, or as a fund-raising exercise to
support those bits of our health service that are not fully funded by statutory
means, but as something that is or should be an essential part of our mission.
The New Testament record as a whole would seem to suggest that if the Church
isn’t doing healing, the Church isn’t really doing mission.
When Jesus sent his disciples out
to prepare the way, as we heard in this morning’s Gospel reading, his
instructions to them included, “Heal the sick.” When Jesus himself preached to
the crowds, there were always miracles of healing. And when, in the Acts of the
Apostles, the Gospel is taken out into the world, message and healing are
intertwined.
This challenges me partly because I
do believe the Church at every level should be taking the call to heal more
seriously than it often seems to; but also because a lot of the healing
ministry I come across causes me some disquiet. I confess I find myself pulled
in two directions.
I’ve attended some events where
healing ministry has been conducted in what seemed to me to be an exercise in
whipping up hysteria. And that felt a million miles away from how I see Jesus
operating in the Gospels. There’s a type of faith healing ministry that seems
to require a high profile and high emotion environment before healing can happen;
and to me that seems a world away from healing as the essential life blood of
the Church in mission, which is what I believe.
We have to be in the healing
business, because God is in the healing business; God desires wholeness and not
brokenness, so his Church must be a place where broken people are healed and
restored and made whole. We shouldn’t be afraid to offer healing when we invite
people in; we shouldn’t be afraid to campaign for healing when we go out into
the world; and we shouldn’t be afraid to believe that healing might be true and
possible within ourselves. Our living and our praying should reflect this and
express it.
But our understanding of what
healing is may be too narrow, while God’s response to our praying may not be
what we expect or require of him. My father attended healing services in his
local church when he was terminally ill; at one I was among the ministers who
laid hands on him. It didn’t work; he still got more ill and died. Or maybe it
did work; my father was very much reconciled in spirit by the time of his
death, and it was a good death, and many of our memories of that sad time are, perhaps
surprisingly, good ones. It wasn’t the answer we wanted, but I think my father
did receive a healing touch. Healing isn’t only physical healing, and we all
remain mortal, and will experience physical death.
If healing isn’t only physical
healing, nor is it only personal healing. There’s the healing of families, of conflict
situations, of relationships, perhaps also the healing of histories and
memories that are the cause of separation and suspicion. The healing of
communities and societies, the bridging of gaps, the need to learn or
rediscover what it means to belong together - I am sure that all of this too is
part of the healing ministry we’re called to as Church.
Personal physical healing is
certainly part of what we should be doing, but only part. Through most of my
ministry I’ve arranged and led healing services, seminars, prayer groups and
other activities. But we need to be engaged with the need for healing on every
front, and with a real breadth of vision. Too much of the world’s religion, and
certainly too much of the religion that shouts loudest and makes the biggest
headlines, maims rather than heals (maiming spiritually, ethically, mentally,
societally as well as physically), excludes rather than includes, bullies rather
than invites, frightens rather than consoles. Many people, when they see that
sort of religion in action, say, “If that’s what religion does, I want none of
it!” But nor do I; such religion, though powerful and, sadly, often persuasive,
is false, and it denies the God whose healing touch we see in Jesus, especially
in the Gospel picture of Jesus painted for us by Luke.
True religion is about healing,
because God is about healing; for me the challenge of Luke is this: that it’s only
when we’re passionately involved ourselves in working to make ourselves, our
families, our friends, our communities, our nations, our world better that we can
really even begin to preach the Gospel. But there’s also a promise in Luke:
when we’re sure ourselves that the love of God can change things, that it can heal,
restore, set right and enliven our world, then the way is open for marvels and
miracles to happen among us.
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