This Monday (October 18) is the Feast of St. Luke. I’ve always loved St. Luke, in part because Luke’s gospel combines the aesthetic beauty and the concern for social justice that I think the Church reflects at its best. While Luke’s is the most polished Greek prose and his Gospel provides the texts for the famous canticles so often sun at Morning and Evening Prayer, the Benedictus and the Magnificat and the Nunc dimittis, Luke’s is also the Gospel in which Jesus most clearly advocates for the poor and the marginalized.

Tradition holds that St. Luke was, among other things, a physician. So the Old Testament given in the lectionary for St. Luke’s Day is as follows:

Honor physicians for their services,
for the Lord created them;
for their gift of healing comes from the Most High,
and they are rewarded by the king.
The skill of physicians makes them distinguished,
and in the presence of the great they are admired.
The Lord created medicines out of the earth,
and the sensible will not despise them.
And he gave skill to human beings
that he might be glorified in his marvelous works
By them the physician heals and takes away pain;
the pharmacist makes a mixture from them…
My child, when you are ill, do not delay,
but pray to the Lord, and he will heal you.
Give up your faults and direct your hands rightly,
and cleanse your heart from all sin.
Then give the physician his place, for the Lord created him;
do not let him leave you, for you need him.

Sirach 38

Ben Sira, the author of this text, wrote around 180 BCE, in a world in which the practice of medicine was a radically different thing. To put it mildly, they weren’t exactly manufacturing mRNA vaccines in Hasmonean Judea. But even then, Ben Sira put forward this remarkably-apt summary of the appropriate relationship between faith in God and trust in your physician: “Pray to the Lord… Then give the physician his place.” God created medicines; let the pharmacist mix them, and the physician wield them!

One of the strangest reversals of the last year has been the treatment of physicians and nurses. The “healthcare heroes” of Spring 2020, honored every night with banging pots and pans, soon became mistrusted messengers, trying their hardest to promote public health practices, and later vaccination, to a public that had grow tired and, in part, skeptical. Article after article tells the story of healthcare workers who are burnt out, unable to believe that some people still won’t take the threat seriously, even after everything they’ve seen. Perhaps the problem is that it’s easier to honor someone for their sacrifice than to honor them by listening to their advice, and making some sacrifices of our own.

So I hope that you pray, once again, this St. Luke’s Day, for all the physicians and nurses and pharmacists, janitors and cafeteria workers and CNA, who are instruments of God’s healing for us. Pray for all those who suffer, of any sickness. Pray, when you are ill, to the Lord—then give the physician her place!