By Water & Blood

Homily 8.1: Christ the physician

That our Lord Jesus Christ is called a physician in the divine Scriptures we shall be led to see even by the Lord's own saying, as he says in the Gospels: “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick. For I came not to call the righteous but sinners to repentance.” Every physician composes from the juices of herbs or trees, or from the veins of metals, or from the natures of animals, medicines that will benefit bodies. But if someone happens to see these herbs before they are compounded according to the method of the art, if they are in the fields or on the mountains, he treads on them and passes them by as cheap hay. But if he sees them arranged in order within the physician's surgery, although they give off a gloomy, strong, and harsh smell, he will nevertheless suspect that they contain something of cure or remedy, even if he does not yet know what or what kind of power of healing and remedy there is. This we have said of ordinary physicians. Come now to Jesus the heavenly physician; enter this station of his medicine, the church; see lying there a multitude of the sick. There comes a woman who has been made unclean by childbirth; there comes a leper who has been separated outside the camp because of the uncleanness of leprosy; they seek from the physician a remedy, how they may be healed, how they may be cleansed. And because this Jesus who is the physician is himself also the Word of God, he procures medicines for his sick not from the juices of herbs but from the sacraments of words. If anyone sees these medicines of words scattered rather roughly through the books, as through fields, not knowing the power of each saying, he will pass them by as cheap and having no polish of speech. But he who has learned in any measure that the medicine of souls is with Christ will surely understand that from these books which are read in the church, as from fields and mountains, each one ought to take healing herbs, at least the force of the words, so that if there is any sickness in his soul, he may be healed not so much by the outer leaf and bark as by drawing out the power of the inner juice. Let us see, then, against the uncleanness of childbirth and the contagion of leprosy, how diverse and how various are the medicines of purification which this present reading prepares.