Health and Human Flourishing: Religion, Medicine, and Moral Anthropology

9 Vulnerability within the Body of Christ: Anointing of the Sick and Theological Anthropology

c h a p t e r c h a p t e r 9 Vulnerability within the Body of Christ Anointing of the Sick and Theological Anthropology M. Therese Lysaught The philosophical anthropology that dominates medicine and bioethics too often reduces human identity to rationality and autonomy individualistically construed. Yet for such an anthropology, the realities of illness—a sine qua non of medicine and bioethics—stand as anomalies. Illness quickly marshals empirical evidence against its truth claims. Rather than standing as a confounding glitch, illness and healing have been central to the Christian tradition since its beginning. What one finds in early Christian sources is easy to miss or dismiss, given our habit of reading such narratives and practices with lenses shaped by modern philosophy. But if we listen carefully to these sources, we will, I submit, discover a more accurate and adequate account of who we are and what it means for us to flourish. This chapter stands as a first step in developing a more truthful anthropology for bioethics, namely, a theological anthropology. 160 m. therese lysaught Healing and the Kingdom of God A theological anthropology for bioethics cannot but begin with the Gospels. To state the obvious, in the Gospels, Jesus heals the sick.1 Until the Passion, healing is one of his signature actions, along with preaching, teaching, and the occasional multiplication of loaves. But the less obvious question is this: Why do the gospel writers focus so much attention on Jesus’ healing activities ? Why, in sending out his disciples, did Jesus command them to heal the sick? Why does healing loom so large in Jesus’ project? Three passages from Luke help to clarify and complicate this question. Part of the larger narrative of Jesus’ life and of God’s way of dwelling with the world that begins with the opening chapter of Genesis and extends through the end of Revelation, they are but three of dozens of examples that could be mustered to demonstrate the centrality of healing to that narrative. God, the tradition attests, wills life, wellness, wholeness, and embodied flourishing. Healing is central to the God disclosed in scripture. God’s healing, however, is not a generic, disembodied concept. “Healing” cannot simply be affirmed, lifted out of scripture, and filled with just any content. The scriptural narrative gives God’s relationship to healing a very particular, very complex shape. Consider Luke 7, where Jesus responds to John the Baptist’s query whether Jesus is “he who is to come, or shall we look for another?” Is Jesus, in other words, the Messiah who will inaugurate the kingdom of God? Jesus replies, “Go and tell John what you have seen and heard: the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, lepers are cleansed, and the deaf hear, the dead are raised up, the poor have good news preached to them. And blessed is he who takes no offense at me” (Luke 7:22–23).2 Here we hear the familiar tropes—the poor and the sick, healing and raising up, preaching the good news and (obliquely) the kingdom of God. But it ends on a jarring note: clearly, some have taken offense. Three chapters later, Jesus sends forth seventy-two disciples, two by two, who are to precede him in the places he intends to visit. In doing so, he says to them “Be on your way, and remember: I am sending you as lambs in the midst of wolves. Do not carry a walking staff or a traveling bag; wear no sandals and greet no one along the way. On entering any house, first say ‘Peace to this house.’ . . . Into whatever city you go, after they welcome you, eat what they set before you, and cure the sick there. Say to them, ‘The reign of God is at hand’” (Luke 10:1–9). Again the healing of the sick is connected to the evangel, the good news of the in-breaking of the kingdom Vulnerability within the Body of Christ 161 of God. But again, conflict lurks: he sends them as lambs in the midst of wolves. Their first word, the word to frame their practice of healing and preaching of the kingdom, is peace. These interconnections burst forth boldly in chapter 11, the heart of Luke’s narrative: Jesus was driving out a demon that was mute, and when the demon had gone out, the mute man spoke...