Medicine and the Church: Being a series of studies on the relationship between the practice of medicine and the church's ministry to the sick
Religion
Medicine and the Church: Being a series of studies on the relationship between the practice of medicine and the church's ministry to the sick
Medicine -- Religious aspects; Pastoral medicine
Similarly, in the raising of Jairus’s daughter an emphasis is laid on
the necessity of a sympathetic atmosphere: first, by the fact that only
three, the elect among the chosen Twelve, SS. Peter, James and John,
were allowed to attend their Lord; secondly, by the exclusion of all
others in the house, except the father and mother of the child. The
professional mourners and musicians were turned out--not merely because
they ‘insulted the dumbness of sincere sorrow and the patient majesty
of death’ (Farrar), but because they diffused, as their behaviour soon
showed (κατεγέλων αὐτου̑), an atmosphere of unbelief. The Lord wishes
to remove all antagonistic and disturbing human presences and to speak
Himself in power to the innermost soul of the departed maiden. On the
other hand, if the air was charged with unbelief, if those He wished
to help were without faith, as was the case in His own village of
Nazareth, ‘He could there do no mighty work.’[78]
[78] Mark vi. 5.
We trace the same principle in His dealing with those whom He had
healed. Sometimes He bids them ‘go and tell their friends how great
things God has done for them,’ as when he refused to keep the Gadarene
demoniac by His side. At another time he bids them tell no man of
the cure which had been wrought. This difference of treatment can be
explained most simply, if we suppose that in the one case Christ knew
that the patient’s ordinary _milieu_ was favourable to his progress in
bodily and spiritual health, in another case He knew that this was not
so. So it was in the case of the leper of St. Mark i. 44. And, again,
this difference of treatment may have been ‘grounded,’ as Archbishop
Trench says, ‘on the different moral conditions of the persons healed.’
It is so still, for human nature remains constant to certain broad
types. Some overwrought people require the absolute isolation of a
‘rest cure’; others, who are moody and self-centred, can only rally
their disused powers in contact with invigorating companionship.
They are the unhappy victims of that numbness of spirit of which R.
L. Stevenson writes so pathetically in his essay entitled ‘Ordered
South.’[79]
[79] Cp. the medieval complaint of ‘accidie.’
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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