Symptoms

Everyone’s sick lately.  The stomach bug has gone around.  Colds and sinus infections and fevers have all made an appearance.

God has given us effective, if slightly uncomfortable, mechanisms for knowing when to pay attention, take a day off, or crawl into bed.  They’re called symptoms. 

Sneezing, coughing, throwing up, and the runs are all symptoms.  They’re not the sickness itself; that’s some far more ominous invisible thing going on inside.  They’re just the red flags that indicate a disorder.

Thankfully, humans continue to develop increasingly potent ways to attack our symptoms: Nyquil and Pepto; Tylenol and Sudafed… all symptom relievers.  They make us feel better while whatever is actually wrong runs its course.

The dark side is that in suppressing our symptoms we create an illusion of health, not true health itself.  Some studies suggest that medicating a virus may actually extend the length of time we’re ill.  Apparently the body, in the absence of symptoms, doesn’t fight as furiously against the underlying bug.

Of course we’re happier – our nose isn’t running as constantly, our throat doesn’t hurt as much, and our aches and chills are eased.  And we’re also more presentable; we can function socially without the embarrassment of a trail of snot, a hacking cough, or a sudden departure for the restroom.

Jesus said, “When an evil spirit comes out of a person [when the symptoms disappear], it travels through dry places, looking for a place to rest, but it doesn’t find it.  So the spirit says, ‘I will go back to the house I left.’” (Matthew 12:43-45 – NCV)

Much of what passes for spirituality is little more than symptom management: the suppression of outward behaviors that stem from our fallen condition.  Churches are filled with presentable people who’ve dried up their moral mucus and soothed their outward fever – but is it legitimate healing or only superficial alterations?

Is the Christian faith primarily about the absence of symptoms?  Or the presence of Jesus?

Certainly, symptoms are a definitive sign that something’s wrong (a reality we can find it equally convenient to ignore).  But a lack of symptoms for a day or week or month doesn’t necessarily indicate that we’ve been cured.  Maybe we’ve just duped ourselves into believing that a good moral life is somehow a substitute for the genuine transformation only Jesus brings.

Which is what we need, by the way: not just a solution for our symptoms, but the saving power of Christ.

And while we’re at it we need to cease being surprised by the spiritually runny noses and high fevers of people who do not yet know Christ.  Stop trying to fix their symptoms.  They’re sick, but you’re not the cure: Jesus is.

Symptoms are a sign that’s something’s wrong, but their absence doesn’t mean something’s right.  Maybe we need to get honest about what’s really wrong with us so Jesus can heal us – rather than procrastinating the truth while hiding behind our symptom management.

Comments

[Gretchen Thompson]

Absolutely right on.