Isaiah 58:9–14. Psalm 86. Luke 5:27–32.
Luke was a doctor seeing the world from a physician’s point of view. He even looks at Jesus from a medical viewpoint. In fact, he makes Jesus into a doctor. In Luke’s gospel, when Jesus introduces himself in the synagogue of his hometown, Nazareth, he tells them: “No doubt you will quote me the saying: ‘Physician, heal yourself’” (Lk 4:23).
Jesus here called himself a doctor. It wasn’t the only time in the gospel of Luke that he did this. He also did it when he was accused of eating and drinking with sinners. He answered his accusers: “It is not the healthy that need a doctor, but the sick.”
According to Luke, Jesus came to heal a world and a humanity that was sick and needed a doctor. You don’t need to be a health expert or a doctor to note that the world around us is sick. Acid rain is killing trees; fish and waterfowl are dying in polluted rivers and lakes.
Sometimes you can hardly breath without doing damage to your lungs, and you even have to be careful when you take a shower, because the water you use might be full of chemicals. We all need a doctor; we all need to be healed, not only we, but also the plants, animals, rivers, seas, forests, and deserts.
Something has to be done; you always have to take some steps to regain your health. Jesus suggests repentance. A doctor won’t use that word when recommending a diet or discontinuing one or another habit in order to restore your health. What he or she recommends, however, often comes to the same thing: you have to change your life to make up for what went wrong in the past.
The healing we need also requires more than a personal and individual transformation. It asks for a structural revision of our society and of the world, a change we have to be interested in if we want to be touched by the healing power of that physician Jesus!
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