Health, Care, and the Gospel - Christianity Today

When I was a child, my teachers in the faith said that the healing stories of Jesus were merely attempts to illustrate “deeper” spiritual truths. Various diseases and physical debilities, I heard, were merely pictures of sin, and the Lord addressed them only because he wanted to highlight the awfulness of sin and his power to overcome it.

When I began to grow in my appreciation of Jesus, I grasped a bigger idea: that the incarnate Christ was not only attuned to humanity’s sin problem but was remarkably sensitive to the physical and social issues he faced on the streets every day of his public life. For him, it was not either-or, but both-and. He not only hated sin; he hated human suffering.

Aware that I do not write with the exactitude of a professional theologian, let me say what’s on my mind this way: in his day and within the limits of his earthly mission, our Lord did far more than simply engage the spiritually curious. He had an eye for the physically desperate, and he left a stream of healed people in his path. It occurs also to me that what he did was without preconditions. Healing was in his nature. In other words, he didn’t say, “I will heal if you join my movement, or get a job, or send me a monthly check.” He healed not to illustrate a spiritual principle but because he is by nature a healer. In so doing, he appears to have said that a truly converted person looks at the world through the eyes of a healer.

Throughout history, this healing idea has been the trademark of the Christian movement: bring to the human predicament whatever resources you have, be it a scalpel or five breadsticks and two fish. Thus, a marvelous tradition of Christian healers and comforters whose love and respect for humanity has led them to care even at the risk of death.

In his thoughtful book, The Rise of Christianity, Rodney Stark claims that the secret of expansion in Christianity’s earliest days is explained far more by the sacrificial care that followers of Christ demonstrated in crisis moments for their neighbors than all the words that were preached. In more recent times, similarly caring Christians have employed the resources of modern medicine and healing technique to convey Christ’s love to the world. The global network of hospitals, clinics, missionary doctors, nurses, and care-givers has been a remarkable part of Christian history. Century after century we have tried to be a people who, like Jesus, believe in bringing to the human situation whatever we have: prayer, loving presence, generosity, education, medicine. Often this has resulted in people going on to discover the Christ who redeems and offers eternal life.

All of this, then, makes me curious as to why my people (the Evangelicals) seem so quiet in the debate on health-care and why the matter has been (fatally?) abandoned to the politicians and those who have a financial position in the matter. Isn’t the national discussion on health-care simply an enlargement of the act of helping needy people to find healing?

I admit to being something like a deer in headlights when I listen to the health-care discussion and try to sort out issues such as public option, pulling the plug on Grandma (who is startlingly close to my age), the role of lobbyists, compulsory insurance … and lots of others. More than once, as I have tried to figure things out, I have found myself to be the disciple of the last person who has spoken.

But the one issue of which I am sure is this: providing access to health-care benefits for every one of my fellow citizens is, at the very least, a Christian position. Despite the Great Recession, we are a wealthy nation and, as Jesus did in his day of visitation, we must do what we can do. In this case it is a matter of defining our national economic priorities so that no one is turned away or shabbily treated when there are physical needs.

If I were to select the most annoying of Jesus’ stories, it would be the one where an unnamed, obscenely rich man (“dressed in purple and fine linen and lived in luxury every day”) ignored Lazarus, the sore-infested beggar, who laid at his gate. Even the dogs, the Gospel writer says, showed more compassion for Lazarus at the gate than did the man inside the gate, and that’s getting pretty low. Is the reference to “dogs” a code word for Gentiles?

The story does not have a happy ending for the rich guy. And, at first, I find myself glad that, in the end, he gets what he deserves.

But then the story begins to haunt me. I hear it pronouncing strong heavenly disapproval on those who ignore or neglect what is going on just outside their gates. That in turn causes me to wonder: who of the two players in the story am I closest to?

In a sermon on the Good Samaritan, German preacher Helmut Thielicke said (and I am paraphrasing), “If you are the broken man by the side of the road, you can think of a reason why every person passing by should stop and help you. And if you are traveling down the road and see the broken man, you think of every reason why he is someone else’s responsibility.”

Assuming I am one of the travelers, God help me if I do not stop and do what I can do.

These thoughts make me lift up my voice to say to our “leaders” in Washington—be you Democrat or Republican, be you conservative or liberal–stop the political games. Do something statesman-like. Act as if you care that millions of people need access to healing, to the kind of health-care that we have been blessed with.

I am not smart enough to propose a specific solution. I only know that a nation that has fathered a Marshall plan, a trip to the moon, and a victory in the Cold War, plus near universal cell phone coverage and a thousand other technological marvels ought to have the brains and the wherewithal to gets this one right.

And I can’t help but add: if he were physically present to our generation as he once was to another one, what would Jesus do?

Gordon MacDonald is editor at large of Leadership and lives in New Hampshire.