Spiritual Maladies

Bourguet, Wilkinson

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781498281836
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

To love is to live and to live is to love; this is God's intention for humanity. However, humanity falls ill along the way; its love of God and neighbor becomes diseased, infected with other loves, the love of money, of pleasure.... To these malaises God becomes our physician; he draws alongside us to heal and to restore us to fullness of life. The author enables us to rediscover this obscured face of God, the face of God our physician, full of compassion and very attentive--a God before whom it is best to lay bare all our ills in order to be healed.

chapter 1

God the Physician

The face of God as physician is a profoundly biblical reality; I would like to begin with a review of the theme, investigating the degree to which it is a constant through the Bible.

In church history, the view of God as physician was an approach adhered to particularly by the Greek Fathers. The Latin Fathers, little by little, left it aside, and the result is that today it is being increasingly forgotten; instead, the image of God as judge was emphasized, at times to the point of distortion. This Western tradition is so strong that today, despite its importance, we need to take great pains if we are to recover the biblical revelation of God the physician in its true proportions.

I will therefore rest my case on biblical texts, but if I also mention the Greek Fathers, it is in simple thankfulness since it is they who have helped open my eyes to this aspect of revelation.

Indebted as I am to the Greek Fathers, I am also to Jean-Claude Larchet; he became their spokesman in an enormous book1 which is also very present in what I will be saying; however, so as not to overburden my remarks, I will not actually be citing it. Where Larchet is almost essentially patristic in his approach, I wish to stay close to the biblical testimony which forms the basis and the support for the Fathers’ elaborations.

One of the major difficulties we will encounter stems from the fact that in the Western world the discourse of psychology has prevailed over the spiritual. Words which are common to the two methodologies have come to be somewhat booby-trapped; they don’t have the same resonances, and this leads to misunderstandings. I will be using them according to their spiritual acceptation, whereas they can be all too easily understood according to the psychological; thus, there is ambiguity today if we speak of maladies or sicknesses of the interior life. My intention is to keep to a discussion of spiritual maladies, knowing full well that doubtless others may immediately think in terms of psychological illness; this is to be avoided. Spiritual maladies are those such as pride, avarice, or lust; not schizophrenia, neurosis, or psychosis. Please be careful! There is a wide range of potential misunderstandings.

Our interior life can be understood along two separate lines, the psychological and the spiritual; complicating matters further is that God does not occupy at all a similar role in the two methodologies. In modern psychological discourse God may be taken into account, but is then generally regarded as just one of the possible factors in traumas. In the spiritual discourse, God is ever present; it is he who fills the role of therapist, and, indeed, is seen as the only therapist, encounter with whom is far from traumatizing! In short, we see that to approach God as the physician for our spiritual life goes rather against our normal mind-set; we will press forward nonetheless!

May our proceedings be truly spiritual, which is to say born of and illuminated by the Holy Spirit, without whom we cannot but become enmeshed in misunderstandings! May he guide us now in our quest for God the physician!

What the angel said about the name of Jesus

The idea of God as physician is really neither marginal nor secondary in the Bible and finds a source in one of the key biblical words, salvation, and again, in the very name of Jesus. What we are looking at is a major aspect of Christian revelation.

In the Bible, a person’s name, a proper name, reveals the essence of the person who bears it; it reveals the deep mystery of the person’s identity. The name “Jesus” means “the Lord saves,” which is to say, “God saves.” This name is a confession of faith in one of the most important activities of God. A person who bears this name is invited to witness through his life to the saving activity of God.

Matthew’s Gospel (1:21) teaches us that Jesus’ name was proposed to his supposed father by an angel; it was neither Mary nor Joseph who decided to give their son this name, but God himself, who made it known by his messenger. When the angel came to propose the name to Joseph, he gave an explanation at the same time, but with a gloss on the sense which is of great importance. The angel did not say, “You will give him the name of Jesus because God saves . . .” but rather, “You will give him the name Jesus because he will save,” this “he” being a designation of the heralded child. It is this “he,” this child, who will save, not “God.” But rather than leading us to deduce from the angel’s words some opposition between the child and God, we must simply understand that there is an equivalence; “this child will save” means indeed “God saves,” which comes to saying that this child is God himself, the God who saves.

Here then is a first comment to make on the text in Matthew; the child announced, Jesus, is presented by God’s messenger as being God himself. This is astonishing enough in itself, but it is confirmed by the rest of what the angel says. The angel proceeds to add to the verb “save” by saying that “he will save his people from their sins.” The only one who can “save from sins,” which is to say, is able to pardon sins, is God himself, as is taught in Mark 2:7, and also throughout the Old Testament, where the verb “pardon or forgive,” salah, has only one subject, God. It is therefore very clear from the message of the angel announcing the child that, as a savior from sins, Jesus is none other than God.

This is the intent of the angel’s words about Jesus before his birth.

What Jesus himself said

At one particular moment in his life Jesus gave clear expression to his ministry in a way that forms a commentary of sorts on his name; this is found in John 12:47: “I am not come to judge the world but to save it.” Here Jesus is in full accord with the angel; his purpose is solely to save. This is the content of his ministry, the meaning of his existence, of his very being. He bears his name truly. He confirms the saying of the angel and assumes his vocation to save; indeed he confirms the angel’s words simply by accepting his role as the subject of the verb “save.” Jesus was not content to be a prophet who would announce that “God is coming to save”; he says openly, “I am come to save”! We can understand those who saw this as a blasphemy; nevertheless, Jesus enters into what the angel had spoken of him; this son is God!

“I am come to save”; this comment of Jesus is extensively illustrated by the evangelists who take pleasure in enumerating various saving acts of which he was the author during his life. However Jesus’ saving activity is not limited to that time frame. We find in fact that after his death and resurrection, Jesus again uses the verb “save” with future reference; “He who believes and is baptized shall be saved.” Jesus says this after his resurrection (Mark 16:16), meaning that his saving activity was not fully accomplished on the cross and that it contains another aspect to be fulfilled later, at his return at the end of time, as other texts tell us (see Matt 24:13).

Salvation before and after the cross

In this way, two important stages in the work of the Savior become apparent, one before his death and resurrection, and the other at the end of time. For the angel, these two stages both belong to the future (“he will save”), but for us today the first is past and the other still future.

In the Gospels the two stages are presented under very specific colors:

– before Easter, Jesus presents himself very much as a savior, but a savior who has nothing of the judge about him. His saving activity is altogether outside the juridical. “I am not come to judge but to save,” or again, “I judge no one” (John 8.15). Indeed, Jesus did judge no one. We will need to specify the way in which Jesus is savior without being a judge.

– after Easter, Jesus again speaks of his activity as future savior, but now taking on in full his role as judge, as is seen in this parable where he depicts himself actually judging: “When the Son of man shall come in his glory, in the company of all the angels, then he shall sit upon his throne in glory . . .” (Matt 25:31–46). The continuation of the text describes a great tribunal, the last judgment. It’s in this eschatological, juridical context that we hear, “he who holds fast to the end shall be saved” (Matt 24:13), or again, “he who believes and is baptized shall be saved, but he who believes not shall be condemned” (Mark 16:16), where the verb “condemn” clearly shows that this is judgment.

Certainly, the last judgment has a present aspect, to the extent that it is anticipated by the cross. The “not yet” of the eschatological kingdom is “already here,” through the cross in its judgment on sin. Salvation is indeed held in a tension between the already and the not...

Table of contents

• Translator’s Note
• Preface
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: God the Physician
• Chapter 2: A Divine Consultation
• Chapter 3: The Fathers’ Medicine
• The Prayer of Bartimaeus