Almighty God, who inspired your servant Luke the physician to set forth in the Gospel the love and healing power of your Son: Graciously continue in your Church this love and power to heal, to the praise and glory of your Name; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen. [1]
October 18th is the day set aside in the church calendar for the Feast of Saint Luke the Evangelist. Being a pediatrician who became a priest, I have a special place in my heart for Luke the Physician/Evangelist. The tradition naming Luke as a physician finds its root in Colossians 4:14, where Luke is referred to as the “beloved doctor.” But he is best known for his eloquent account of Jesus’ life and that of the early Church.
Personally, I wonder about Luke’s journey from physician to preacher. Did he continue to try to cure bodies even after he devoted himself to the healing of souls? Or, coming as he did before Descartes and Kant, did it ever even occur to him that the two existed in such separate spheres anyway? Was touching a broken arm or a distended abdomen every bit as much a sacrament as the Eucharist—his hands an instrument of healing grace in much the same way as the bread and wine?
His hands. Did the rituals of a doctor blend into those of a preacher/evangelist? I imagine Luke’s medical knowledge was so deeply ingrained and localized in his hands that it looped through the neocortex almost without notice. That’s the way physical diagnosis works. A physician does exam after exam, the hands mechanically making their way down the body in a ritual that began early in training and is honed through practice day in and day out. But no matter how routine, the hands signal when finding something that isn’t quite right—awakening the brain with a jolt.
If Luke ever celebrated Eucharist, I wonder if he did so with this same kind of ritualized knowledge—the bread placed on the paten, the wine poured into the chalice, first the bread held up and then the wine, and now the sign of the cross over both, the hands speaking Eucharist as clearly as words coming from the mouth. Or did his hands always feel most at home while resting on the arm of a dying parishioner, or lying on someone’s head while prayers for healing were uttered from above? True, in Luke’s progression from physician to evangelist, medical healing melted into spiritual healing, but I suspect they had really always been one and the same for Luke.
Touch is inherently healing and powerful, regardless of its diagnostic or interventional success. It’s something the Church has always known—no wonder all the sacraments incorporate touch in one way or another. The celebrant must touch the water of baptism as it is blessed, and makes the sign of the cross with oil on the forehead of the one who is baptized. During Eucharist, the celebrant must touch the bread and wine as they are blessed, and skin inevitably meets skin at least a little as bread is placed in eager hands. The marriage ceremony is marked by the joining of right hands—and ordination, confirmation, reconciliation, and healing by the laying on of hands. Perhaps the touch of Luke the doctor communicated as much grace as did the words of Luke the evangelist.
Disembodied word has a shallowness to it—it floats away without effecting any change at all. Jesus’ own ministry was anything but disembodied. With every healing proclamation of the gospel he gave a bit of himself away—a touch to the leper, a piece of the hem of his garment to the woman who had suffered through twelve years of hemorrhaging, his outstretched hand to Jairus’ dead daughter along with the words “Child, get up!” Until at last he had given all he had, his broken body an offering for the life of the world.
On the Feast of Saint Luke the Evangelist, the Church is reminded that gospel and healing, word and body, are forever intertwined. And so our prayer on this day and on all days is that we may be instruments of God’s healing love. May God’s grace make it so.
[1] From Holy Women, Holy Men: Celebrating the Saints (New York: Church Publishing, 2010).
An Honest Hope 