How Should Christians Care for the Sick and Dying?
By Tracy and Michael Balboni
Advances in modern medicine have caused many in the church to neglect what used to be a core part of its ministry: care for the sick and dying. In this excerpt from Walking Lois Home, physician Tracy Balboni and theologian Michael Balboni trace the history of Christian care to encourage Christians to walk in Jesus’ footsteps by caring for the sick.
As scientific medicine has grown, Christians have largely lost the centrality of Jesus’s call to care for the sick, both body and soul. But caring for the sick is a fundamental spiritual practice for Christians.
When Jesus performed powerful, healing miracles, he did so as a sign that his kingdom—the kingdom of God—had arrived. Then Jesus empowered his disciples to do the same: “Jesus called his twelve disciples to him and gave them authority to drive out impure spirits and to heal every disease and sickness” (Matt. 10:1 NIV).
How the Early Church Cared for the Sick
Responding to Jesus’s calling, Christians have cared for the sick as a sign that Jesus remains King and Healer. Church history is replete with examples. Early Christians attended to persons suffering from the plague. Looking to God’s heavenly kingdom, Christians risked and at times contracted deadly diseases from those under their care.
In the third century, Bishop Dionysius of Alexandria described the commonplace poor treatment of the ill during the plague and its sharp contrast to the response of Christians:
At the first onset of disease, they pushed the sufferers away and fled from their dearest, throwing them into the roads before they were dead and treating unburied corpses as dirt. . . . [By contrast] most of our brother Christians showed unbounded love and loyalty, never sparing themselves and thinking only of one another. Heedless of danger, they took charge of the sick, attending to their every need and ministering to them in Christ.
Among the Greeks and Romans, the responsibility to take care of the sick fell fully on family members. With the exception of well-paid physicians, strangers were not involved. When people fell ill, it was common to believe that the illness was divine punishment. The sick were considered judged and in that sense responsible for their illness. Jesus’s vision of the sick led Christians to reject Greco-Roman beliefs about illness. Illness was not a punishment. Rather, God was believed to be present in suffering. In contrast to being cursed, to suffer illness meant to be uniquely joined with Christ, the Ultimate Sufferer (Matt. 25:40). Likewise, care for the sick was not exclusively a family responsibility. Jesus taught about the good Samaritan who poured “oil and wine” on a nearly dead stranger. The effort and cost of providing care to the sick were responsibilities of Christians, motivated by love of neighbor, regardless of whether the ill person was family or a stranger (Luke 10:29–37).
Walking Lois Home
Living Out Our Christian Call to Love the Sick and Dying
Serious illness can leave patients and their caregivers feeling isolated, confused, and overwhelmed. This hopeful and research-based book offers insight from Harvard professors and experts in the palliative care field who cast a vision for communities of healing within the church to live out Jesus’ call to care for the sick and the dying.
Christians and the Hospital
Boldly caring for plague victims in the early centuries after Jesus’s death and resurrection was only the beginning. Christians throughout history have demonstrated a recognition of Jesus’s call to show hospitality to the sick. In the fourth century, Basil the Bishop of Caesarea began the first hospital, located in modern-day Turkey. The three-hundred-bed facility included a hospice and a dedicated ward for those with leprosy. This was the first of many hospitals built by Christians, from ancient times to the present day.
Even the term hospital echoes Jesus’s call to care for the sick. The Latin root hosti means the embrace of stranger as guest—or love of stranger. In the New Testament, the Greek word for hospitality is philoxenia, or “love of stranger.” During the Middle Ages, Benedictine monks bowed before the sick person arriving at the monastery for their care, poignantly displaying their love for the sick person as Christ himself. In the 1800s, Florence Nightingale, responding to a call from God to care for the sick, revolutionized care for wounded soldiers and spearheaded the development of the nursing profession. And in the twentieth century, Dame Cicely Saunders, responding to a “tapping on the shoulder” from God, dedicated her work as a physician to improve care for the dying, ultimately inaugurating the hospice movement. Jesus’s kingdom vision of care for the sick as if they were Jesus himself has shaped medicine’s history as well as its practice today.
Is the Church Still Called to Care for the Sick?
How does the contemporary church answer Jesus’s call to care for the sick?
Though the response has continued in an unbroken stream since early Christians’ hazardous embrace of plague victims, it is a trickle now in comparison.
Is the church willing to take the same bold risks today?
This article has been adapted from Tracy Balboni and Michael Balboni’s Walking Lois Home: Living Out Our Christian Call to Love the Sick and Dying, published by Baker Books. In this book, a physician and a pastor show how the church can recover its ancient calling to care for the sick and dying.
Tracy Balboni, MD, and Michael Balboni, PhD, serve as researchers, professional caregivers, and codirectors of the Harvard Initiative on Health, Spirituality, and Religion. Tracy is a professor at Harvard Medical School, an internationally known researcher in palliative care, and director of the Harvard Radiation Oncology residency program. Michael is a theologian and scholar on spirituality and medicine at Harvard and serves as a pastor at Restoration Fellowship in Boston, Massachusetts.
