Once in a while, usually when one of my younger friends is showing off some new “ink,” I am asked, “Jim, do you have any tattoos?” After saying “No”, I add a line attributed to the great Daffy Duck, “I’m not like other people—I don’t like pain.”
Don’t get me wrong, I get my flu shots, have had my Shingles vaccine and booster; but I don’t look for occasions to have a needle poked into me. Botox? I’ve no inclination to get the treatment, nor the money. (Besides, after seeing the “celebrities” who’ve had it, I’ve concluded the treatment only makes you look like someone who doesn’t want to look old—or ever smile again. But I digress.)
Yet, there is one needle I’m looking forward to. The needle carrying the coronavirus vaccine.
Baptists don’t usually quote The Apocrypha, that collection of Jewish writings dated from the end of the Old Testament period to just before Christ’s birth, writings omitted from Protestant versions of the Bible; but I’m going to make an exception. In anticipation of the vaccine, I’ve been thinking about verses I read years ago in Ben Sira, a book by a Hellenistic Jewish writer born about two centuries before Christ
The verses say, “Honor the physician with the honor due him . . . for the Lord created him.” After acknowledging that “healing comes from the Most High,” Ben Sira adds, “. . . the Lord created medicines from the earth and a sensible man will not despise them.” (Ben Sira 38:1-5 RSV) Indeed, Ben Sira saw the physician and “the pharmacist [who makes] compounds” as God’s partners, through whom He “heals and takes away pain.”
Although the words are not from scripture, many share the feeling. They believe the physician who saved their child’s life or the eased their parent’s pain was sent their way by God. (Ben Sira even pictures physicians praying for “success” in their diagnoses and treatments: something I’m sure happened often in 2020.)
How different the past few months would have been if more of us had honored physicians by listening to them about masks and safe-distancing. How quicker this difficult time will be over if we don’t “despise” the vaccine.
Ben Sira believed the work of physicians and their medicines “glorified” God. Many have been praying for this difficult time to be over. Perhaps the answer to those prayers is coming through the touch of a needle.
