Christ the Physician.
In Christ we are allied to the highest and the largest ideal of the most disinterested efforts for the physical and moral welfare of man that our earth has ever seen. Times, indeed, there were in His ministry when it might even have seemed that the human body had a greater claim on His attention than the human soul.
I. Now it would be a great mistake to suppose that this feature of our Saviour's ministry was accidental or inevitable. Nothing in His work was accident; all was deliberate; all had an object. Nothing in His work was inevitable, except so far as it was freely dictated by His wisdom and His mercy. To suppose that this union of prophet and physician was determined by the necessity of some rude civilization, such as that of certain tribes in Central Africa and elsewhere, or certain periods and places in mediæval Europe, when knowledge was scanty, when it was easy and needful for a single person at each social centre to master all that was known on two or three great subjects this is to make a supposition which does not apply to Palestine at the time of our Lord's appearance. The later prophets were prophets and nothing more neither legislators, nor statesmen, nor physicians. We may infer with reverence and certainty that Christ's first object was to show Himself as the Deliverer and Restorer of human nature as a whole not of the reason and conscience merely, without the imagination and the affections not of the spiritual side of men's nature, without the bodily; and therefore He was not only Teacher, but also Physician.
II. What is the present function of the human body? We see in it at once a tabernacle and an instrument; it is the tabernacle of the soul and the temple of the Holy Ghost. And thus the human body is, in our idea, itself precious and sacred; it is an object of true reverence, if only by reason of Him whom it is thus permitted to house and to serve.
III. And again, there is the destiny of the body. As we Christians gaze at it we know that there awaits it the humiliation of death and decay; we know also that it has a future beyond; the hour of death is the hour of resurrection. The reconstruction of the decayed body presents to us no greater difficulties than its original construction; and if we ask the question how it will be, we are told, upon what is for us quite sufficient authority, that our Lord Jesus Christ "shall change our vile body, that it may be fashioned like unto His glorious body, according to the working whereby He is able even to subdue all things unto Himself."
H. P. Liddon, Christian World Pulpit,vol. xx., p. 81.
References: Matthew 9:35. C. Kingsley, The Water of Life,p. 18 Matthew 9:35-38. Homiletic Magazine,vol. viii., p. 354; R. M. McCheyne, Additional Remains,p. 157.