doctor's life support

26th August: Crisis

No one who puts his hand to the plough and looks back is fit for the Kingdom of God. Luke 9:62

The Greek physician Hippocrates set great store by the healing power of nature -- the power by which Nature tended to restore harmony to the disordered body. In Hippocratic terms, the turning point at which bodily harmony might be resolved was the 'crisis', the parting of the ways. From there the patient either went on to recovery or began the inexorable descent towards death. Fundamentally those ideas still contain a modicum of truth, though we have long since discarded the ancient humoral theory on which they were based. Today we know more about the forces that battle in our bodies and about ways to aid the powers of recovery. But we still know the parting of the ways, the triumph of success, the weariness of defeat.

And we know the close parallel in our spiritual warfare -- either winning or losing, moving either towards victory and life or towards failure and death -- in New Testament terms 'being saved' or 'perishing' (1 Cor 1:18). Some people don't like those words, and certainly they have been misused, but the ideas that lie behind them are woven into the whole fabric of Christian thought. The sense of spiritual direction implied in them is just as real as the divergence of the stream of physical life towards recovery or death.

The critical point, the watershed, is at the cross of Christ. Our course is determined by our response to that superb act of love in which the Son of God died to make us free. From there we move out in faith and obedience to follow his way to eternal life. Or we go on our own way and carry our burden to defeat. The choice is ours. But if we have set our feet on the way of life, don't let us, like Lot's wife, look back.

Lord Jesus, help me to run the face that is set before me,
looking always to you, the Author and Finisher of my faith.

Further reading: Lk 9:57-62.

RRW