Call a Doctor, Call this Doctor

            In today’s Gospel, when Jesus is asked a moral question---“Why do you eat and drink with tax collectors and sinners?”---He curiously gives a medical response:        “Those who are healthy do not need a physician, but the sick do.  I have not come to call the righteous to repentance but sinners.”  Christ speaks and acts like a doctor, walking the earth as a physician makes rounds in a hospital.  He looks at the sinner medicinally, seeing through the spiritual disease to the health that needs restoration---even by radical means like surgery.

            I have always found medical exams to be odd, because I instinctively also interpret them morally.  As the dentist’s pick moves over each tooth, I do not want to get one (or more!) “wrong” on this test.  Given how quantified medical testing has become, the temptation increases to strive for the “perfect score,” be it blood pressure or cholesterol levels, etc.

            When my dentist initially told me several years ago that I should consider getting adult braces, I felt a sense of failure:  Yes, my dog ate my retainer when I got my braces off as a teenager.  But deep down I knew that I was glad Skippy attacked that plastic annoyance; I could be rid of it.  But I was now being called to account to accept responsibility for my teeth slowly shifting out of place over the course of all those years.

            Truth be told, when I went to see my new orthodontist as an adult, my concerns were more cosmetic than medical:  How long is it going to take for these teeth to get straightened?  I really didn’t have any deep interest in the interior health of my jaw bone and bite symmetry and root structure.  Still less did I have any understanding whatsoever of TMJ problems; I could barely guess from forgotten conversations that the initials stood for temporomandibular joint.  And I had no symptoms, so why should I care?

            In the course of orthodontic therapy, there was an intervention that catalyzed a cascade of problems, eventually leading my orthodontist to admit that I needed to see a specialist---and not just any specialist but Dr. Mark Piper of the Piper Clinic in Florida.  He was the best for what I needed.  And so I went this past September for my evaluation by him.

            But this time, I wanted the doctor to find what was wrong with me!  I would have been at my wit’s end if I had somehow “passed” his exam with a declaration of health according to his tests.  In terms of my jaw and its debilitatingly painful symptoms---to my great relief (to paraphrase the psalmist)---Dr. Piper “probed me and he knew me.”  I was examined literally from early in the morning to late into the afternoon. 

            Toward the end of the visit, I remember being so happy and reassured as the doctor himself talked me step by step for a whole hour and a half through the images from my CT-scans and MRI.  He gave every indication that he had seen this before and had helped other people in similar situations---what a strange relief to know that I was on some spectrum of “normal’ serious TMJ pathology!  The greatest consolation, however, was that Dr. Piper knew the particularities of my own situation and actually gave a chronology of this problem as it had been developing over the course of my whole life. 

            He noted as a caveat that the only way he would be able to know more would actually be to operate on the joints of my jaw, and yet he gave me various options short of surgery for how I might wish to proceed.  Obviously I did eventually opt for the surgery, and I was so struck after the operation when Dr. Piper said that he found “decades of damage” to my cartilage and bone and more scar tissue than he had expected.  Such was the trajectory from my initial exam to eventual healing.

            What would it mean to read every word and gesture of Christ in the whole Gospel as if the Lord Jesus is---quite simply and to the marrow---a doctor, our doctor, the Divine Physician singularly and infallibly qualified to examine us, diagnose us, operate on us, and restore us?  Lent is now the appointed time to allow Him to fill this prescription in us.  This is urgent care indeed, and there is no waiting room.