Trust your Physician, even if the cure hurts; Church Fathers: Day 246

Last updated on: March 29, 2018 at 5:31 am by Pete Socks

Trust your Physician, even if the cure hurts; Church Fathers: Day 246 2018-03-29T05:31:11-05:00 Pete Socks

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We trust medical doctors even though they do all sorts of unpleasant things to us, says St. John Chrysostom. Shouldn’t we trust God to heal our sin—even if the remedy is unpleasant?

The physician is not to be praised only when he leads the patient into gardens and meadows, or baths and pools of water, or when he sets a well-furnished table before him. He is also to be praised when he orders him not to eat, when he oppresses him with hunger and lays him low with thirst, confines him to his bed, making his house a prison, and depriving him of the very light, and shadowing his room with curtains. When he cuts and cauterizes, when he brings disgusting medicines, he is just as much a physician.

Isn’t it preposterous, then, to call someone a physician when he does so many bad things—and then to blaspheme God, and reject his providence over all, if he does any of these things, if he brings on famine or death? Yet he is the only real physician of our souls and of our bodies.

For that reason he often takes hold of this nature of ours when we’re wallowing in prosperity, and shaking with a fever of sins, and cures us of the disease by means of want and hunger and death and other disasters.

But only the poor are hungry, someone says. But God doesn’t chasten us only with hunger, but also with countless other things. He has often corrected the poor with hunger, but the rich and prosperous with dangers, diseases, and untimely deaths. He is very resourceful, and he has many medicines for our salvation.

–St. John Chrysostom, Homily 1 on the Power of Demons, 5

IN GOD’S PRESENCE, CONSIDER . . .

Even in bad times, do I trust that God has my ultimate good in view?

CLOSING PRAYER

God of light, giver of wisdom, send your all-holy Spirit to enlighten me, so that I may learn to call you Father.

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