Tuesday of the Fourth Week in Ordinary Time

 Lectionary: 324

There was a woman afflicted with hemorrhages for twelve years.
She had suffered greatly at the hands of many doctors and had spent all that she had. Yet she was not helped but only grew worse. She had heard about Jesus and came up behind him in the crowd and touched his cloak.

A biographer once said of King Louis XIV, "Despite the efforts of the best doctors in France, the king enjoyed excellent health." I suppose it's a very old joke and, like many jokes, has a ring of truth. History's first physician wasn't joking when he said to his students, "First, do no harm." 

As a hospital chaplain I sometimes hear the complaints of patients who did not expect to be sent to the hospital when they went to see their primary care physician. They had made their plans and the doctor's office was only one of several stops. They were expected at work, they have bills to pay at the first of the month, they really don't have time for this. Why can't the doctor just fix this problem and let's get on with it? They're not usually mollified when I cite Hippocrates, "First, do no harm." 

But, as Saint Mark says, the doctors sometimes do harm and a litigious society punishes them severely. Many doctors have given up the practice when the malpractice insurance became too costly. They might have had no lawsuits against them but the risks were too great. And they found employment in research far removed from face-to-face contact with patients. 

Another witticism I sometimes tell the patients, "Come back in a hundred years and we'll know how to treat this problem." I've met patients who decided to wait five or ten years and were rewarded with more effective medicines and methods! 

Today's gospel touches on many issues. It reminds us that the best efforts of competent physicians sometimes fail, and that some physicians don't have the best intentions. ("Pill mills" sprang up across the country to feed the nation's appetite for opioids. Only some of those doctors were punished.) 

It reminds us that we care about one another and have created an enormous, unwieldy industry to tend to our sick. (Very often, hospital patients wonder, "Who's in charge here?") The story concerns a woman with a chronic malady in the first century, and most illness in the twenty-first century is chronic, not acute. We live with these ailments and disabilities -- even the dreaded cancer -- for years! I remember one elderly couple who said, between the two of them, they visited one specialist or another every Monday through Friday. 

"Yet she was not helped but only grew worse." We human beings care for one another. We don't know how to do otherwise. We would have disappeared as a species a million years ago if we did not care for one another, and there is evidence of prehistoric people who, edentate, survived as their loved ones chewed their food for them. 

Jesus, because he is one of us, acts impulsively and compassionately. He heals the sick. He was sent to do that and he wants to do that. 

Saint Bridget's Cross
February 1 is her feastday.

This woman's story also reminds health care workers that they must know their patients. It's not enough to push the drug or guillotine the gangrenous limb, they should meet the person. "Jesus, aware at once that power had gone out from him, turned around in the crowd and asked, “Who has touched my clothes?” They're not practicing medicine for the money! 

Finally, the pandemic has reminded all of us, "If you're not taking risks, you're not doing your job." The VA instructed its chaplains we were not to visit patients with Covid. We could speak with them over the telephone from our offices or from home. If they were on a ventilator, they were beyond our care. But the VA could not restrain the Catholic priest from administering the Sacrament of the Sick. I'll admit I was very anxious when I anointed my first Covid patient. The directive had not yet come out and when it did I ignored it. I am not superstitious about viruses. I take the proper precautions, I scrub my hands and face after the contact, and I go on my way. 

You shall not fear the terror of the night
nor the arrow that flies by day,
Nor the pestilence that roams in darkness,
nor the plague that ravages at noon.
Though a thousand fall at your side,
ten thousand at your right hand,
near you it shall not come. (Psalm 91)