Research usually shows that when people are having difficulty with mental illness, they usually go to their primary care physician first. Often they will go to their doctor with medical-sounding symptoms, such as pain, fatigue, heart-related symptoms, or insomnia. Hopefully, that is where the doctor’s expertise takes over. It is the doctor’s job to have the knowledge to conglomerate the patient’s symptoms with medical knowledge in order to suggest treatment. Even though it’s just television, I love to watch Dr. House and his team go through this process.
Unfortunately, I have seen many individuals whose doctors obviously did not have quite enough expertise in the area of mental health to make evidence-based recommendations. It seems that doctors just do not always have the time to investigate all of the recommended possibilities and patients rarely report symptoms accurately. As Dr. House says; “Everybody Lies.” Therefore, the doctor may treat the symptoms instead of the disorder. Then the patient and the doctor are surprised when the treatment does not bring relief.
In Matthew 9, it seems like people start to treat Jesus as solely a miraculous healer. This is the story of the men who broke through the roof of someone’s house to bring their paralyzed friend to Jesus for healing. Jesus seems to have thought that was really cool. Then he proceeded to tell the man that his sins were forgiven, a statement that would have lit the fires of heresy amongst some of those listening. Finally, Jesus healed the man’s physical ailments as well.
Although Jesus did heal people on many occasions, it seems like he is telling them that physical healing was not his only purpose. Many of them probably had yet to understand the universal significance of the mission of Jesus. He had not come to merely treat those fleeting physical deformities of life, but to alter the eternal states of a broken species.
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