[I preached this at a service for clergy and their families in the Southwestern Minnesota Synod of the ELCA. It's for all of us with rather inefficient callings.]
There are several good reasons to believe that the writer of Luke’s gospel was the same Luke who is called the beloved physician at the end of Colossians. For one thing, the gospels are not signed. Names were attached to them later, and if you were going to guess a name to attach to a gospel, you would probably use the name of one of the twelve, and Luke was not one of the first disciples of Jesus.
Beyond that, the gospel itself also has some quirks that make us think maybe a doctor was behind the writing. For instance, when Luke is telling the story about the woman with the hemorrhage who is healed by touching the fringe of Jesus’ garment, Luke leaves out some of Mark’s detail. Luke omits the information that before meeting Jesus, the woman had gotten not better but worse under the care of many physicians.
Luke also tells the story of Jesus’ arrest in Gethsemane a little differently from the other evangelists. Matthew, Mark, and Luke all describe how one of those with Jesus sliced off the ear of the high priest’s slave at the time of the arrest. Only Luke adds the detail that Jesus touched the man’s ear and healed him. In all of the gospels, Jesus is a healer. In Luke’s gospel, Jesus is a healer even as he himself is about to be taken away in chains.
In the second chapter of Luke, the angel tells the shepherds: “To you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is the Messiah, the Lord.” In John, the Samaritans will proclaim Jesus as “the Savior of the world.” Otherwise nowhere else in the gospels—nowhere—except to a bunch of shepherds outside Bethlehem, is Jesus called Savior. Elsewhere he is Rabbi, Good Teacher, Son of David, Lord, Messiah, even Son of God. Here he is described with a word that comes from the same root as σῴζω, which means not only to save but also to heal. It begins here: a savior, a healer, wrapped in bands of cloth.
We do not have to look far to see how the world into which Jesus is born needs a healer. This is a world where emperors casually disrupt the lives of thousands. Rome needs more revenue, so Judeans and Galileans, along with about half of the rest of the world’s population, start walking, standing in lines, answering questions, trying to find rooms to sleep in, having babies far from home, and wondering if they will ever be able to get back to normal life.
Today, we do not call the problem “the empire” so much. We are more likely to talk about global economic forces, and we understand ourselves to be on both sides of the hurt, which is usually too complicated to think about for long. We have power and casually make decisions that hurt people we will never know. We also suffer from decisions made at great distances from us. Both of those things are true.
Yet in the 21st century as well as the first, world realities are real in the lives of one person at a time. Big events play out not so much on the “world stage,” whatever that means, but on individual human bodies. Caesar Augustus decides to take a census, and as a result, a girl from Nazareth gives birth in a barn instead of in her own bed with her mother and aunts nearby.
Large-scale broken systems still disrupt human lives as concretely as the Roman census disrupted life for Mary and Joseph.
For me, that brokenness takes on flesh in the neighbors who have been trying for more than a year to sell their house, and the daughter of my cousin who graduated from college last spring and still hasn’t found a job, and my friend’s son who is fighting in Afghanistan.
It is my student whose congregation has gone through the first vote to leave the ELCA and agreed to look for another affiliation. We were talking about preaching in a recent email exchange, and he wrote, “I love being able to share the words God gives me with people. I can't wait for the hassle stuff to be over with.”
It is my friend whose congregation voted just yesterday to stay, but who had 40 out of 140 people on the side of the vote to leave. In the tiny note he published on Twitter last night, he said, “Keep those who voted to leave the ELCA in your prayers. They acted out of their heartfelt beliefs, & are mourning. We all need healing here.” I’ve been thinking about those 140 people, wondering how many times any two of them see each other on a given week at the gas station, or a basketball game, or the grocery store. Will they still be seeing each other at church? This sort of thing, like the rest of our lives, is not significant at all on “the world stage.” It only matters if you are one of the people, or are connected to one of them.
And here is at least part of the revealed mystery of the Incarnation: the Ruler of the universe is thus connected. About God the Father’s capacity to notice his children’s lives, Jesus said, “Even the hairs of your head are numbered” (Matthew 10:30). For his own part, Jesus went through his life noticing one person at a time, from the man covered with leprosy who said to him, “If you will, you can make me clean” (Luke 5:12) to the thief on the cross who said, “Remember me when you come into your kingdom” (Luke 23:42).
The gospel is one story after another of Jesus really seeing people when others either gawk at them or simply look away. And when Jesus sees people, he also heals them. The man covered with leprosy is just the first example. Look at the woman, known to be a sinner, who anointed Jesus’ feet while he was dining at the home of Simon the Pharisee. “Do you see this woman?” Jesus said to Simon, and to the woman, Jesus said, “Your faith has saved—[or healed]—you.”
Or notice the little guy climbing a tree to see Jesus. Jesus saw the scrawny tax collector in the tree and invited himself to his house for dinner. As Zacchaeus announced that he was forsaking his role as a well-oiled cog in a corrupt tax machine, Jesus said, “Today salvation has come to this house, for the Son of Man came to seek and to save—[or heal]—the lost.”
This is how God sets about saving the world: a baby is born, and a few shepherds outside Bethlehem receive the news; this one is “a Savior, who is the Messiah, the Lord.” The shepherds share the news with the people gathered around the little family. The people are amazed. Mary ponders. It is all so small. Yet so is everything. Just as global economic forces and international political intrigue finally impact one human body at a time, so does God’s redemption of all things.
My response to this decision of God for a small fry, one-person-at-a time kind of saving plan runs in two different directions at once. On the one hand, I think of the words of Judas near the end of Jesus Christ Superstar. He says to Jesus,
If you’d come today, you would have reached a whole nation.
Israel in 4 BC had no mass communication.
I look at the baby in the manger and I think, “That is incredibly inefficient!” It may take that child longer to outgrow diapers than the man will have in public ministry. What kind of plan is that to heal the world?
On the other hand, I think, “God really ‘gets’ us.” God understands that nothing big matters to us if it is not also small. Whether it is a failure of imagination or just the way we are made, most of us cannot fathom the redemption of all things except as that redemption is manifest in something or someone close by. So God comes close, bound by time and space and the fact that he will not look past a man with a withered hand, or a whole bunch of hungry people, or a widow who just lost her only son. He sees, and he heals, feeds, even raises the dead, one person at a time.
God’s way of being in the world is incredibly inefficient and incredibly transformative at the same time. In this way, the Incarnation is a window on how God’s Spirit works in the church. Now I do not have any more starry-eyed romance about church work than I have about the prospect of giving birth in a barn. It is incredibly hard work in a place that smells bad much of the time. Even so, the fact that God did not opt for mass communication but was instead fully present in a guy walking around first century Galilee leads me to the conclusion that God is not merely likely to be present in our most inefficient work but even drawn to it and revealed in it. God is in all the inefficiencies of listening to people, or praying for them, or putting ten hours into a Sunday sermon that a few dozen of them hear.
Last summer, a friend talked with me about having spent 14 years in her first call, a parish in rural synod. The area is every bit as remote as Galilee, the ministry every bit as inefficient, and the healing a lot less dramatic than the condensed version of Jesus’ ministry that we have in the gospels. She said about those years, “I don’t know if I was someone hiding my light under a bushel, or if I was Mary pouring out incredibly expensive ointment onto the feet of Jesus.” As I listened to her, I was not sure myself. Tonight, though, in the light of the glory of the Lord shining around those shepherds outside Bethlehem, I know the answer. With all that expensive ointment in that little tiny place, God was working healing in the body of Christ, for the salvation of the whole world.
