St. Luke, Physician of the Soul
Today, my fellow disciples of Jesus, we remember St. Luke. Luke is called an Evangelist, a writer of one of the four Gospels. Besides writing the Gospel that bears his name, Luke also wrote the Acts of the Apostles. These two books make up more than one-third of the New Testament! He traveled with St. Paul on his second missionary journey, and then again with Paul on the journey to Rome.
Luke shows a keen interest in the healing miracles of Jesus, which makes sense given his vocation as a physician. Paul in Colossians refers to Luke as “the beloved physician.” The prayer for today calls Luke a “physician of the soul.” That’s the idea I want to consider today: what does it mean to call Luke a physician of the soul?
It implies that our souls, like our bodies, need a doctor, need medicine and healing. With our bodies, the need for a physician becomes obvious over time. Eventually, we find out that there are quite a few things that the physicians cannot help us with. We have to suffer with them for the remainder of this life, until life itself expires, and no physician can help at all.
Christianity is often presented as a religion that only deals with the soul, or the mind, and not the body. I suspect we also often think of it this way. Calling Luke a physician of the soul seems to imply that it is a different and greater thing than being a physician of the body, because ultimately the body does not matter.
And that is simply not true. The body – your body – does matter. God didn’t create our first father Adam to be a spirit, but to be an embodied soul, a living creature whose soul inhabited and was joined to a body. The death of the soul, when Adam sinned, led to the death of his body. Body and soul are meant to go together. If the soul is damaged, so is the body. And the reverse is also true: if the soul is healed, so, ultimately, will be the body.
We are guilty of sins, and need to be forgiven. But we are also wounded, damaged, broken in our souls. Ps. 41 says, “Lord, be merciful to me; Heal my soul, for I have sinned against You.” Forgiveness from God removes the guilt of our sins, justifies us; when God forgives us, He declares us to be righteous, holy, saints – but our souls remain wounded, sick, in need of healing.
People may have harmed you, broken faith with you, failed to help you, and you are damaged. Or how can you not lose a parent, a spouse, a child, and not be damaged? And the sins we ourselves have committed have damaged us. We need God’s forgiveness, and the cross of Jesus has obtained that already for you. And we also need to be healed in our souls, we need medicine for the damage we have incurred and the damage we have done. “Lord, be merciful to me; Heal my soul, for I have sinned against You.”
The Eucharist, the Lord’s Supper, is the special medicine that pertains both to the healing of the soul and the body. Dr. Luther summarized the early Christian teaching about this connection between the healing of the soul and the healing of the body when he said this about the Lord’s Supper:
If we eat of [Christ] spiritually through the Word, he abides in us spiritually in our souls; if one eats of him physically, he abides in us and we in him. For he is not digested or transformed but ceaselessly he transforms us, our soul into righteousness, our body into immortality.
In the Supper, our Lord Jesus joins us to Himself both physically and spiritually. Our mortal bodies are joined to His immortal body in the Lord’s Supper by a secret, hidden power that will transform our bodies from death and decay to resurrection and life. And spiritually, we are joined to Christ such that He again and again cleanses us from our sins, renews the Holy Spirit in us, and strengthens our faith.
You see, we must not look at the Christian life just as a matter of a transaction, like renewing your driver’s license every few years or getting your car inspected and then having that done and out of the way for another twelve months. Sins are not just debts for which we need to get the bill paid. We are wounded by sins; and we are especially wounded by the sins we commit repeatedly, knowing that they are not the thoughts, attitudes, and actions of Jesus.
You’ve probably made a mess of things this week, this month, this year. It may be that no one around you knows it. But you know it, and God knows it. We don’t just need God to make it right; we need Him to make us right. We need forgiveness, and we also need healing.
The Lord Jesus established this Supper for both – for the forgiveness of your sins, and for the healing of both your soul and your body. I want you to think about today’s prayer calls “the diseases of our souls.” What in your soul is corrupt? What needs to change? What needs to be made new, and different? Are you holding on to grudges and hurts, refusing to forgive? They are wounding you. Are you stingy with your property, greedy and jealous? It is to your harm. Do you covet another man’s house, another man’s wife, another man’s position? It will destroy you.
On this day set aside to remember St. Luke the beloved physician, the best way we can honor Luke is to seek from Jesus the great physician the healing that we need. Let us pray in earnest, “Heal my soul, for I have sinned against You.” Here in this Supper Christ comes to us with healing medicine. It’s a medicine we will need for the rest of this life, until the day comes when our souls are fully restored, and our bodies are risen from the dead. Follow Jesus unto death, and long for that day, fellow disciples! And until that day, let us keep asking our Lord not only to forgive us our sins, to but to cleanse us from them, to heal our souls such that we would not even desire the things that now make us ashamed.
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