The passage: “Luke, the beloved physician.”
The Collect for today is grounded on this verse, which speaks of St. Luke as a physician of both body and soul. If this seemed a forced analogy, a play on words, it would have grated on your ears in prayer. I believe the two ideas are not joined by any trick of fancy but are actually and essentially related.
We think of St. Luke first as the companion of St. Paul, before we think of him as writer of a Gospel or of Acts. He gained his understanding of what he would write in a Gospel meant for the Gentiles by first preaching a Gospel to the Gentiles. He saw the Church grow, and helped it grow, before he described its growth. It is in this character that his profession as physician becomes important to us.
No one imagines Paul chose his companion lightly; he would have denied he could choose at all in the strict sense. He was appointed to his work, a dispensation committed to him, woe to him if he did not preach. Those joined with him must share that calling, and Paul used the spiritual discernment given him to judge whether they did. He suffered what was perhaps his greatest sorrow—separation from Barnabas—rather than be attended by one he judged unfit. John Mark, whom he rejected, must have had many merits, and was himself, like Luke if the similarity of names is not misleading, destined to be a historian of Christ’s works. For one disqualification Paul would not have him; surely the man taken in his place must have had special fitness for that work.
Yet it must strike many that being a physician was a more serious objection than Mark’s Jewish timidity ever was. On the common theory of spiritual gifts, it mattered greatly to Paul’s success that he prove himself able to break through the laws of nature, especially in healing the sick—this, we are told, is the great difference between an Apostle and a modern missionary. Think how it would affect the impression of such acts to have constantly at his side a man known as a healer, who cured not by breaking the laws of the body but by understanding them better than others. Would you not say this is the very last person such an Apostle would keep as a companion, let alone an honoured one?
Perhaps this very consideration led the makers of legend to insist, against Paul’s plain words, that Luke was a painter rather than a physician—an ingenious compromise: granting him some ordinary human art while relieving him of anything scientific. The early chapters of his Gospel give the fullest account of the Virgin Mother; why not suppose he painted her, and that this was the origin of image-worship in the Church? Those who know the fancy at work in hagiographies know it sets no limits to its guesses; each one, however false its starting point, becomes in time as fixed in popular belief as anything Luke actually wrote.
But we, who trust Scripture’s words more than the best-attested traditions, must ask how Paul’s simple, unstudied statement—made in the midst of greetings to friends—that Luke was a physician, fits with what we, Protestant and Romanist alike, suppose an inspired Evangelist of that age must have been. If we cannot reconcile our assumptions with this plain statement and with the whole tenor of Apostolic history, must we not abandon the assumptions? Would that be a loss to our faith, or might our faith be deepened by finding it allied with science rather than opposed to it? Would our hope for the Gospel’s spread today be weakened, or might we find that some hindrances to it are of our own making, that none of God’s ancient helps to His servants have been withdrawn—leading us instead to a profitable acknowledgment that it is not God who straitens us, but we who resist His purposes of love?
I. I have noted before that the powers described in Acts as gifts of the Spirit were exercised precisely where enchanters were at work—often to confound them. This is a marked feature of both Old and New Testament narratives. Moses’ rod confronts the magicians of Pharaoh; Elijah withholds rain and raises the dead in his struggle with the priests of Baal. The Roman Empire under Claudius and Nero swarmed with miracle-workers, some of them Jews like Elymas and Simon who used their knowledge of Scripture to practice fraud. At Philippi and Ephesus these magicians thrived, protected by government, patronized by the rich; and as Greek scepticism eroded the old worship, these workers kept alive the dread of unseen powers better than the regular priests could. Fear and curiosity gathered round them; materialists mocked in vain, for the sense of the invisible would not yield to ridicule, and even the scoffer secretly consulted the diviner. Why not trust these lies as readily as any of the ordinary lies of society?
Paul had no doubt these miracle-workers served a Spirit of Falsehood—the same spirit behind the lies of tradesman, politician, and state-augur—and that part of what drew people to them was nonetheless true. He did not tell Philippi and Ephesus that our world and the unseen world are sundered by an impassable veil. He announced the opposite: that the veil had been torn, that the Son of God by His death had opened a new, living way between earth and heaven. The proof of this union was that the very Spirit who broke Pharaoh’s tyranny and triumphed over Baal’s gods now dwelt among men, freeing them from bondage to spirits of sea, earth, or air, claiming them as children of the true God. That Spirit had dwelt in Christ as He healed bodies and souls, and what He did, He now enabled His followers to do—preaching and manifesting redemption, showing that men are not slaves to the powers the magicians served, that they have a Father and Deliverer, and that the Spirit of Power is the Spirit of Truth.
II. I am not straining the New Testament’s language here, but quoting and illustrating it plainly. Is it then inconsistent with this teaching that Luke the physician should be Paul’s chosen companion? Would it undercut this testimony to be attended by a healer? Did Paul’s mission require that his acts seem a defiance of divine order rather than proof of it—proof that we live under a righteous, not a capricious, Ruler, confuting those who subjected the world to chance and lying? Was not Paul’s deliberate choice of Luke—a choice he took as gravely responsible, believing a hair’s breadth departure from divine guidance would be sin—itself a declaration to the world: “I do not come as an enchanter, working tricks to make you marvel at me, but in the name of the God of Truth, to vindicate unchanging laws, to expose all false wit and wicked inspiration set against them, and to claim every true power of healing, every honest study, as gifts of God’s Spirit meant to proclaim His kingdom”?
III. On this day I have a right to ask that Paul’s clear doctrine here be seriously pondered. Is it not true that Paul has been regarded, even by some who profess deep reverence for him, not as the enemy of magicians but as merely a superior magician working under another name? This charge fits, perhaps, the miracle-workers of the Middle Ages, or modern priests who commend the vision of the Lady of Salette—for them, saint and juggler are alike. I will not dwell on such cases except to note one thing: they are set forth as a trial of faith, and serve that purpose well. Those who do not believe a Spirit of Truth has been given to guide men’s consciences and reason may in time be brought to accept such stories, along with the doctrine that faith’s merit grows in exact proportion as evidence for it shrinks. Whoever truly confesses the Spirit of Truth as his abiding guide will hate these stories, and hate still more the corrosive atheism hidden in their defense.
My aim, though, is not to flatter ourselves by condemning others, but to ask whether the same mischief takes another, scarcely less harmful form among us. What does our complaint mean—that we lack the power to recommend the Gospel to unconverted nations that Paul and Luke once had? Do we not secretly think their gifts were not, as Paul said, spiritual gifts testifying to the invisible God who gave the sea its bounds and sent His Son to fulfil the law, but merely magical gifts, proved true only by their effect on the senses, marking certain men as holy enough to violate law—contrary to what Peter said, that all health and life come from that same name? If instead we held those gifts to be spiritual, not magical, what would stop us from believing that every honest, scientific cure today is likewise proof the Spirit of God is at work, guiding the physician from darkness to light, using him to witness God’s healing purposes toward mankind? Is not our abandonment of this belief, we clergy, a practical denial of what the apostolic signs were meant to teach—a refusal to acknowledge Christ’s kingship over the highest realm, the human spirit? But whether we persist in this or not, physicians, I trust, will see the necessity of claiming for themselves what we have refused them: for how else can they fight superstition and trickery, discard every theory—however sanctioned—that ignores the facts, resist making their own opinions or wills the final authority, and keep the highest ends before them amid constant temptation to lower ones, unless they confess that all their insight and healing power are gifts of a Spirit of Truth watching over them, making them truly His agents and witnesses?
IV. Throughout, I have wanted to keep before you that Luke the beloved Physician was as much a missionary as Paul himself. I welcome this day’s return amid our Indian troubles, because I believe it points to one of the plainest solutions to the difficulties of Christianizing that part of our Empire. You go to a land where religion fills every corner of life—can mere doctrine prevail there? A land possessed by charms and enchantments—will announcing a charm-free religion break them? A land where malignant powers are believed to afflict men’s bodies—will sufferers listen merely to words, without proof that those words carry power to remove such afflictions? We maintain that when the Gospel was first preached to idol-worshippers, its preachers did reverse the enchanter’s wand, healed sicknesses, and declared themselves messengers of a God of health who cared that men be freed from their plagues. We know from experience that the deepest Hindu prejudices have yielded before the proclamation of physical laws, once people saw that observing those laws actually removed disease. This interference with old superstition is one governments cannot prevent, and indeed share in—though standing alone it threatens whatever good, along with the evil, those superstitions contain.
Why should word and act not be joined? Why should the missionary not declare that the God he preaches sent His Son to redeem bodies as well as souls, taking human nature to bear its infirmities and fight its enemies? Why not say, “We come to defy the enchantment of evil men and evil spirits; we bring you health, and health is meant for you”? True, the cures would be imperfect and temporary, ending at last in death—so it was with the Apostles’ cures too. But that very imperfection helped rather than marred their message: they were sent to preach not escape from death but resurrection from it; they themselves bore the dying of the Lord Jesus in their bodies, and were glad to depart. Their whole message was one of restoration and life.
I have asked why we put asunder what God joined; I might ask whether it has even been possible to separate them. Has not the missionary, preaching salvation from a New Testament full of Christ’s cures, been forced to recognize the connection? Have not his converts felt it—even the surrounding Hindus and Muslims? What hinders the same cooperation today between Gospel-preacher and healer that existed in the early Church? I answer: our own faithlessness at home; our low estimate of God’s goodwill toward mankind; our insistence on separating the redemption of the soul from that of the body; and above all, our refusal to connect the discovery of truth in any field with the gift of a Spirit of Truth. If we truly believed in God as the Bible teaches—unchanging in the purpose Christ revealed, concerned with the whole man, as His earthly acts prove—and studied Paul’s whole history in light of what we’ve considered today, we could not help seeing Pentecost’s promise fulfilled in every advance in the understanding of language, in the patient labor and discoveries of every scientist, and in the power to help mankind that comes with such knowledge. Without this belief we risk two errors: treating God’s acts as capricious, as if He revealed Himself chiefly by overturning His own laws; or turning science into an abstract deity, a new superstition.
But when we truly and warmly accept this faith, and keep it alive by doing the works God has set before us, what a new day will dawn on our land and its farthest possessions! Its brightness may be too much even to look at from afar—perhaps we do better to hasten it than to dwell on its splendor, which God will show us or not as He sees fit. But there are signs, encouraging signs, that such a day may be coming. In every field of science and art, I trust, are men with a sense of the weight of the powers entrusted to them, and a deeper sense of the weight of truth itself. Today, an enemy of science would gain little by turning Luke from physician into painter; our artists would answer that if he was righteous and a painter, he must have been a man of science too, seeking truth in the forms of nature and in the human face, a witness for the real against the false and idolatrous—claiming his gift, as we must claim ours, from the Spirit of Truth, or else abusing it, as we must not, to mankind’s harm rather than blessing. May we all—clergy, lawyers, physicians, artists—hold this conviction ever more firmly, and act on it! Even the direst sorrows, which lead the people of our land to feel that each has a gift from God, to be submitted to His guidance and used for His glory and His children’s good, will prove blessings for which Englishmen may give thanks for generations to come.