Reading · Faith Encouraged

Perspective changes everything.

Take, for example, the modern tendency to hold up the anti-hero as someone to admire, or at least respect, and sometimes even love. From Tony Soprano to Walter White, our media seems desperate to show us the good side of being evil.

It tells us that even though these characters break the law, they are not all bad. We have pushed this so far that we now teach an entire generation to pretend good is evil and evil is good.

On the other hand, we live in a day when so many laws and regulations exist that the average person cannot help but break several before breakfast. If authorities are looking to find fault, they can usually find a reason.

Forgive me for being nervous about where this collision of consequences is heading.

Between our obsessive law-making and our media’s obsessive glamorization of law-breaking, one has to wonder if we have all missed the point somewhere along the way.

“He came and took her by the hand and lifted her up, and the fever left her.”

Today’s Gospel gives us a hint of what we have actually lost sight of. And it comes through watching how the Lord treated two very different groups of people in very different ways.

At that time, Jesus entered the house of Simon and Andrew, with James and John. Now Simon’s mother-in-law lay sick with a fever, and immediately they told him of her. And he came and took her by the hand and lifted her up, and the fever left her; and she served them. That evening, at sundown, they brought to him all who were sick or possessed with demons. And the whole city was gathered together about the door. And he healed many who were sick with various diseases, and cast out many demons; and he would not permit the demons to speak, because they knew him. And in the morning, a great while before day, he rose and went out to a lonely place, and there he prayed.

As we continue through St. Mark’s Gospel, a pattern is becoming unmistakable.

The Lord deals with the religious and political leaders of His day in a stark, uncompromising way that eventually drives them to want Him dead. And He deals with ordinary, suffering people, like Simon’s feverish mother-in-law and the crowd gathered at the door that evening, with tender, immediate, healing mercy.

Why the difference?

First, the leaders were given back the very perspective they had demanded, while the suffering people were given something entirely different: healing.

The religious and political leaders of the Lord’s day were meant to be servants of the people.

Instead, too many of them had become obsessed with political manipulation on one side or rigid rule-keeping on the other.

They used their position to manage and control rather than to shepherd and love. (a sure giveaway of using the Faith wrongly)

When the Lord confronted them, He confronted them on their own terms. If rule-keeping was the currency they demanded, He held them to their own standard with unflinching honesty.

Be careful what you demand of others. You may just receive the same measure back.

But the crowd gathered at Simon’s door that evening was different. They were not powerful people playing games of control. They were sick. They were possessed. They were suffering in the most basic, unmistakable human ways.

And the Lord did not respond to their suffering with a new set of rules to follow more carefully. He took a woman by the hand and lifted her up. He healed many who were sick. He cast out demons.

This is the perspective we have lost. We have decided the fundamental human problem is a failure to follow the correct rules, whether those rules come from a legal code or a media narrative telling us which behaviors to admire. But the Lord’s pattern suggests something different.

The fundamental human problem is sickness. And sickness needs a physician, not merely a longer list of regulations.

Next, true holiness comes through healing, not through the accumulation of successfully kept rules.

It is not so much that you are a rule-breaker who needs to become better at rule-keeping.

You need to admit your sickness. You need to finally check into the spiritual hospital, get your soul-sickness properly diagnosed, and receive the treatment that can actually heal you.

This changes everything about how we should think of our own spiritual condition.

The Orthodox understanding of sin as illness rather than mere legal infraction is not a soft-pedaled version of moral seriousness. It is, if anything, more serious. Illness left untreated grows worse, spreads, and eventually threatens the whole person, exactly the way sin does when it is managed rather than healed.

This perspective liberates us from two equally destructive lies.

The lie that says “I’m just no good,” which leads to despair and gives up on the possibility of healing altogether.

And the lie that says “See, I’ve obeyed the rules, aren’t I good?” which produces the very self-righteousness that made the Pharisees so resistant to the Physician standing right in front of them.

The truth is that we are all soul-sick, every one of us. And the amazing grace of God, offered through the timeless wisdom of the Faith, invites us to trust the Great Physician, present in His Church, to heal us and prepare us for His eternal home.

Finally, even the Great Physician needed solitude and prayer, which teaches us that ministry flowing from love requires its own source of renewal.

“In the morning, a great while before day, he rose and went out to a lonely place, and there he prayed.”

After an entire evening spent healing the sick and casting out demons, after the whole city gathered at the door needing something from Him, the Lord does not simply move on to the next task.

He withdraws. Alone. Before dawn. To pray.

This is a remarkable detail and an instructive one. If the Incarnate Son of God needed this rhythm of withdrawal and prayer to sustain His ministry of healing and love, how much more do we need it.

The temptation for anyone engaged in genuine service, a parent, a caregiver, a priest, anyone pouring themselves out for others, is to believe that constant activity is the same thing as faithfulness. The Lord’s example says otherwise.

The healing He offered the crowd flowed from a depth of communion with the Father that required protected, solitary, unhurried time. Ministry that is not renewed by prayer eventually runs dry, however well-intentioned it began.

The Great Physician Himself modeled the necessity of returning again and again to the Source of His own healing power, His communion with the Father, before He could keep offering it to others.

Today we commemorate the Holy Prophet Samuel, one of the last and greatest judges of Israel, dedicated to the Lord by his mother Hannah even before his conception, in fulfillment of her fervent prayer and vow.

From his earliest childhood, Samuel served in the Temple like an angel, and the Lord granted him the gift of prophecy, the ability to foretell what was to come, because of his fervent faith.

Samuel is a fitting saint for today’s Gospel. He served as both a spiritual and political leader of Israel during a critical transition, anointing Saul and later David as kings.

Unlike so many of the leaders the Lord confronts in the Gospels, Samuel modeled genuine servant leadership. He held both the people and their rulers accountable to God’s actual will, rather than to his own political advantage or a rigid, loveless legalism.

Samuel also understood the necessity of prayer and withdrawal that we see in the Lord’s own example. His entire prophetic ministry flowed from a life saturated in communion with God from childhood, the same wellspring the Lord Himself drew from in that lonely place before dawn.

Today, ask yourself honestly whether you have been treating your own spiritual life as a matter of rule-keeping or as a genuine need for healing.

Where is the soul-sickness you have been managing rather than bringing to the Great Physician?

What would it look like to check into the spiritual hospital of the Church honestly, through confession, through the Eucharist, through genuine prayer, rather than continuing to measure yourself by an external checklist?

And if you are pouring yourself out in service to others, ask whether you have built in the lonely place and the prayer that even the Lord required to sustain His own healing ministry.

Then pray simply:

“Lord Jesus Christ, Great Physician of souls and bodies, heal my soul-sickness. Take me by the hand and lift me up, the way You lifted Simon’s mother-in-law. And teach me to seek the lonely place of prayer, so that whatever I offer to others flows from genuine communion with You rather than my own strength alone.”

Being Orthodox on Purpose means trusting the Great Physician to heal your soul-sickness rather than merely measuring yourself against a checklist of rules, and following His example of withdrawing to prayer so that your love for others is continually renewed at its true source!

The Great Physician

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