The Lutheran Hour
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"It’s Not the Healthy"
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Text: Luke 5:17-39
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The line of people seemed to go on forever. They just kept coming, filing past the open casket, paying their respects to the deceased. What made this viewing unusual was not only the number, but the kind of people involved. Eight hundred of the most dangerous men in the country, convicted felons, notorious sinners confined in a maximum-security prison. Eight hundred of them had come out at 8 p.m. on a Friday evening for a last look at the man many considered their only friend. They’d come to see the earthly remains of Henry Gerecke. Gerecke was a former military chaplain. He’d served as the assistant pastor at the local Lutheran church and for the last 11 years he’d been visiting the men in the prison as their chaplain.
When he started, many of the guys were suspicious and skeptical. They thought maybe he’s been sent to gather information on them and even if his intentions were sincere, how could he help them? But over the next decade, he won their confidence, and they sought him out for friendship, and he proved to be a friend of sinners. Gerecke had a heart attack on a Wednesday morning, on his way to lead a Bible study at the prison. When word came that he had died, the inmates petitioned the warden to have his remains brought to the prison chapel. The warden thought it was the first time in the state’s history, maybe in the nation’s history that such arrangements had been made for an individual’s body to brought into a prison for a viewing, an individual whose life had been guided by the belief that it’s not the healthy who need a doctor but the sick.
Shortly after Gerecke’s death, his son, Hank, was going through his father’s old desk. In the back of the desk he discovered a secret compartment, and in this compartment there was a file thick with letters, letters postmarked from all over the country. It turned out to be Pastor Gerecke’s personal collection of hate mail, hate mail that he had received over something he had done earlier in life. Hank was shocked as he read through the letters accusing his father, insulting him, some even condemning this man so loved by those convicts at the prison. Hank understood why the letters had been written.
His father had acted on the belief that it’s not the healthy who need a doctor but the sick. Author Tim Townsend in his book about Henry Gerecke titled, Mission at Nuremberg, tells the story of how Gerecke had served as a U.S. Army chaplain at the end of World War II and was asked to minister to the most despised sinners on the planet. Chaplain Gerecke along with a Roman Catholic priest named Father Richard O’Connor were both assigned to meet the spiritual needs of the 21 Nazi officials, Hitler’s inner circle, charged with crimes against humanity at the infamous Nuremberg Trials, which took place between 1945 and 1946.
When Chaplain Gerecke received his orders to report to Nuremberg, his boss told him that it was the most unpopular assignment around and that he didn’t have to go. Gerecke was after all by Army standards an old man by then. He was 52 years old. He hadn’t seen his wife Alma in two years and he could have gotten out of the assignment. Besides, he had been stationed in Germany near the recently liberated Nazi concentration camp at Dachau. He had visited the camp personally 10, maybe 12 times. He saw the barbed wire, the barracks, the crematorium, when the evidence for mass murder was still fresh. Standing in Dachau a friend heard him saying over and over again, “How could they do something like this?”
Gerecke almost took his boss’s advice to decline the orders and let someone else do the job. How could he minister to the leaders of a movement that had caused the death of 11 million civilians? How could he see them as anything other than faceless monsters with the blackest of souls? But after several days of intense prayer, Gerecke had come to see the situation in a different light. “Slowly,” he said, “the men at Nuremberg became to me just lost souls whom I was being asked to help.”
It’s not the calling of a medical doctor to assign blame and punishment but rather to heal and to help. It’s not the healthy who need a doctor but the sick. So Chaplain Gerecke went to do what may have been the most unpopular job on the planet, a job for which he would later be condemned by some who were convinced of their own moral superiority. He went and during that year at Nuremberg, Gerecke would follow his own advice, advice he had once given to would-be missionaries back in the States, “Show them Jesus.” he said simply, “Show them Jesus.” We have Jesus to thank for this saying, “It’s not the healthy who need a doctor but the sick.”
Jesus said it while visiting a small town in ancient Israel. For many of the Jewish people who had heard Him say it, who’d been with Him that day and who had seen what He had done, they knew that He was the doctor that they needed. Their needs were more than just physical but others, a group called the Pharisees, were suspicious and skeptical of Jesus. They were satisfied with their own moral superiority.
Jesus’ biographer, Luke, recounts these events in two scenes. The first scene reveals a controversy over Jesus’ qualifications. The second scene reveals a controversy over His choice of friends. Luke tells us that it happened on one of those days as Jesus was teaching. Pharisees and teachers of the law were sitting there who had come from every village in Galilee and from Judea and from Jerusalem. The power of the Lord was with Jesus to heal and look, some men were bringing on a mat, a man who was paralyzed. They were seeking to bring him in and set him before Jesus. But when they found no way to bring him in because of the crowd, they went up on the roof and lowered him with his mat through the roof tiles, in the middle of the crowd, right in front of Jesus. When Jesus saw their faith, He said, “Man, your sins are forgiven you.”
Now, the scribes and the Pharisees began saying to themselves, “Who is this who speaks blasphemies? Who is able to forgive sins but God alone?” Jesus knowing what they were thinking said to them, “Why are you thinking these things in your hearts? Which is easier, to say, ‘Your sins are forgiven you,’ or to say, ‘Get up and walk’? But so that you may know that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins,” He said to the paralyzed man, “I say to you, rise, take up your mat and go home.” Immediately, he got up in front of them, picked up what he had been lying on and went home glorifying God. Amazement seized them all and they glorified God and were filled with fear saying, “We have seen extraordinary things today.”
After this, Jesus went out and He saw a tax collector named Levi sitting at the tax booth and He said to him, “Follow Me.” Levi got up, left everything, and followed Him. Then Levi held a great banquet at his house for Jesus and there was a large crowd of tax collectors and others reclining at the table with them. The Pharisees and their scribes began grumbling at His disciples saying, “Why do You eat with tax collectors and sinners?” Jesus answered them, “It is not the healthy who need a doctor but the sick. I have not come to call the righteous but sinners to repentance.” They said to Him, “The disciples of John fast frequently and offer prayers as do the disciples of the Pharisees, but Your disciples go on eating and drinking.”
He said to them, “Can you make the wedding guests fast while the bridegroom is with them? The days will come when the bridegroom is taken from them and then they will fast in those days.” He told them this parable, “No one tears a patch from a new garment and sews it onto an old one. If he does, he will have torn the new garment and the patch from the new will not match the old. No one pours new wine into old wineskins. If he does, the new wine will burst the skins. The wine will spill out and the skins will be ruined, but new wine must be poured into fresh wineskins. But no one after drinking the old wine desires new wine because he says, ‘The old is good enough.'”
The two Army chaplains assigned to the Nuremberg Trials, the Lutheran and the Catholic, had a good working relationship. Years later, Pastor Gerecke said that Father O’Connor was delightful, jolly, and fine to get along with. Of the 21 Nazi high officials on trial, six claimed membership in the Roman Catholic Church. The other 15 had been baptized and confirmed in the Lutheran church; although, all of them by membership and devotion to the Nazi party had in fact rejected their childhood faith consciously or unconsciously. But Father O’Connor and Pastor Gerecke each believed himself to be a sinner saved by Jesus and that Jesus their Shepherd had sent them after these 21 lost sheep.
Though Father O’Connor would say in jest to Pastor Gerecke, “At least we Catholics are responsible for only six of these criminals. You Lutherans have 15 chalked up against you.” It was grim humor but meant as a joke. Although, the comment carries some truth about how we are inclined to see ourselves as morally superior to these men and for good reason. In the words of the judges at Nuremberg, these men had, “Actively participated in crimes on a scale larger and more shocking than the world has ever had the misfortune to know.”
It was true. On a plane of merely human relations, these men were worse. Worse like how a greedy industry filling a river with toxic waste is worse than the guy who litters it with the wrapper from his hamburger. But we should also say that the Nazis at Nuremberg were worse in the way that a person exposed to cancer-causing chemicals is worse off than one exposed to the common cold. Acknowledging that these men were corrupted by exposure to a spiritual toxicity, it doesn’t mean that we excuse their guilt, but it does help us remember that they were children once like you and me.
If you and I want to avoid exposure to what corrupted them, we should ask ourselves some diagnostic questions, “Do I believe that I am immune to evil? Or will I admit that I still need a doctor? Will I go to this doctor, or will I refuse him, because he offers not only healing but a place at the table for people like them?” Will you go to Jesus? Or is the old wine of your moral superiority good enough? If you have walked with Jesus for a while, you know the relief that comes when you surrender your moral superiority, when you stop looking down on other people, and sit down at the table with them as a forgiven sinner no better than the next guy.
But even then, you may not be able to shake the suspicion, the skepticism. It’s hard to understand how Jesus can offer forgiveness and healing and friendship to people like them. Eleven of the Nazi agents at Nuremberg were sentenced to death. Seven of them before they were justly executed, through the ministry of Father O’Connor and Pastor Gerecke, seven of them confessed to their sins and turned back to Jesus for forgiveness. I don’t understand how Jesus can do it. I don’t understand through His life and His death, through His resurrection and promised return, I don’t understand how He can heal that sickness, how He can absorb the toxicity of those sins, of all sins.
I don’t understand it but I’m grateful for it, especially as I see that sickness in me. This gratefulness to Jesus is something that I ask God for more of, especially when I see how He animated the life of Henry Gerecke. People could see that there was something different about him. Halfway through the Nuremberg Trial a rumor started that Chaplain Gerecke who hadn’t seen his wife in St. Louis for three years, how he would be allowed to return home early and how he’d be replaced by another chaplain. When the prisoners heard it, they drafted a letter to Gerecke’s wife, Alma, asking her to allow her husband to stay till the trial’s end.
They explained to her, “Our dear Chaplain Gerecke, thoroughly good man that he is, we simply have come to love him. Therefore, please leave him with us.” All 21 of the accused men signed the letter, the Lutherans, and the Catholics. Alma sent a letter back telling her husband to stay. “They need you.” she wrote. Not all of the Nazis at Nuremberg came to love Jesus, nor I suppose did all 800 of those convicts who passed their prison chaplain’s casket the night before he was buried. But one thing is for sure. Through Henry Gerecke, Jesus showed that He is still a friend of sinners, no less than when He prayed forgiveness for the ones who crucified Him.
What did Pastor Gerecke say of his extraordinary ministry, a ministry for which he was so severely criticized? He said, “For all my own blunderings and failures with them, I ask forgiveness. I ask forgiveness,” he said. See, he was just another sick person who needs Jesus, and if that’s you, I invite you to pray with me. Lord Jesus, have mercy on me, a sinner and heal me and all the world because You can and You will and You live and You reign with the Father and the Holy Spirit, One God, now and forever. Amen.
Reflections for January 30, 2022
Title: It’s Not the Healthy
Mark Eischer: You’re listening to The Lutheran Hour. For FREE online resources, archived audio, our mobile app, and more, go to lutheranhour.org. Once again, here’s our Speaker, Dr. Michael Zeigler.
Mike Zeigler: Thank you, Mark. I’m speaking with Dr. Jeff Kloha. Dr. Kloha helps lead the Museum of the Bible in Washington, D.C. And that museum’s mission is simply to engage all people with the Bible, helping them understand the narrative it tells, it’s impact, and its history. Thanks for joining us again, Jeff.
Jeff Kloha: Thanks for having me here. It’s a real delight.
Mike Zeigler: Jeff, we say that the Bible is a book. That’s true, but it’s maybe better described as a library of books. Could you tell us about what this book as an artifact in history—those earliest copies of these ancient biographies of Jesus—what do they look like, how are they constructed and distributed in the early days of the church?
Jeff Kloha: The word “Bible” derives from the Latin word for books. But our experience of the Bible as a single volume, printed, stamped, always in the same order, that’s a pretty recent phenomenon, really. When say, the Gospel of Luke was originally written by Luke for Theophilus, as he says in Luke 1:1-4, it would’ve been written as a single document, probably on a scroll because that’s how ancient literature was produced in the Greek and Latin language. And one intriguing possibility is that Theophilus, the original receiver of the Gospel of Luke, might not actually have been able to read himself. Only about 10, 8, maybe 15 percent of the population of the Roman Empire could read.
For the vast majority of people who would’ve encountered the Gospel according to Luke, they probably would’ve heard it. They would’ve heard it out loud, and it would’ve been read off a scroll, and almost certainly in a group setting, with lots of people around for conversation. And that’s how they received new information. That’s how they heard news; that’s how they heard drama and stories.
Mike Zeigler: When do you start to have these books being brought together, and what other books was Luke commonly with in these early manuscripts that we have?
Jeff Kloha: It becomes pretty clear that by the middle of the second century, that is about 150 A.D., maybe a little bit before, these four Gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John are being used together, talked about in the same way. They all have uniform titles—all called the “Gospel According to Luke,” the “Gospel According to John,” those are all very consistent right from the very beginning.
And they’re talked about as “the four Gospels,” which were the phrases handed down to us already in the middle of the second century. And that same phrase as being used by people in modern-day France, in modern-day Egypt, in modern-day Asia Minor. So all throughout the Roman Empire, they’re all talking about these four Gospels as the ones that we have received. Now John’s Gospel, as far as we could tell, was probably written about the end of the first century. So about the year 100, and then by the year 150, just 50 years later, you’ve got these four books collected together. So really in that remarkably short time span, somehow the church coalesces around these four books. And again, it doesn’t seem that they voted on it. What most likely happened is, Luke wrote his Gospel and somebody made a copy of it and took it over to Rome or took it to North Africa or somewhere and they made a copy, and they talked about Jesus. People came to faith. And so it made sense that they kept making copies and they kept sharing it. And these four became the ones that we still use 1,900 years later. By the beginning of the second century, we start to see collections the four Gospels in actual what we would call books, what we would recognize as books today. So pages bound together, the fancy word that scholars use is a codex. That’s the technical word for it. They’re using a book, a codex, instead of scrolls. Right.
Mike Zeigler: You hear in pop culture sometimes about how the church voted in 300-something A.D. Tell us about how that came about.
Jeff Kloha: And again, if you saw, say, The DaVinci Code, or these sort of popular descriptions or phrases, like there are 70 gospels out there or something like this, and somebody voted to make this happen. When the Council of Nicaea was held, a very important church council in 325 A.D., when they wanted to resolve exactly how to describe the divinity of Jesus, they used already-existing books. They’re using Matthew, Mark, Luke, John. They’re not voting on which books; they’re using them as they had for the previous 200 years. So it’s just a complete, I’d say misinformation that they “voted” on which books to put into the biblical canon. There’s just no record of that whatsoever.
It just seems to have happened really organically, that the writings just sort of worked, and people continued to use and copy them and continued to pass them down. Now, there were other “gospels” in the sense that there were writings that had Jesus as a character in them. But these were all written after, in some cases, a couple hundred years after this process was concluded. So you might have heard of the Gospel of Judas or the Gospel of Mary. The Gospel of Judas is actually a anti-Christian gospel. It kind of takes Jesus and subverts His whole story and mocks the Christian faith. So, of course, that wouldn’t have been copied by Christians or considered canonical because it’s an anti-Christian writing. Right. So, it’s like The Onion website, where it’s—
Mike Zeigler: A parody.
Jeff Kloha: A parody, exactly
Mike Zeigler: So you have four accounts or biographies of Jesus that form the foundation of what we call the New Testament, and they all four kind of tell the same story. The fact that this is happening, that there’s these four books that get circulated about a marginal Jewish Man from ancient Israel, kind of backwater, bumpkin town of Nazareth. It just is remarkable that this account would become so uniquely influential around the world now, 20 centuries later. Can you just comment on that?
Jeff Kloha: Yeah. I think you put it very well because I think we missed just how insignificant Judea was in the first century, in the Roman Empire—how anybody living at that time would even be known. He was a threat to nobody. And He died a really anonymous death, except that He rose from the dead, and then people started—
Mike Zeigler: That’s something.
Jeff Kloha: And people started talking about it. So the fact that this story got out there and was so compelling is really a remarkable, historical feat in a way. I mean, we should know nothing about this guy and yet His message went around the world. And despite persecutions, despite being mocked for believing crazy things like a guy rising from the dead, this faith continue to grow and spread. And within a couple hundred years becomes the religion of the entire Roman Empire. It’s a remarkable story.
Mike Zeigler: Well, thank you. Thank you for listening with us and stay with us to hear more of this remarkable story in the weeks ahead. And thank you for joining us, Dr. Kloha.
Jeff Kloha: Thank you.
Music Selections for this program:
“A Mighty Fortress” arranged by Chris Bergmann. Used by permission.
“Son of God, Eternal Savior” From The Concordia Organist (© 2009 Concordia Publishing House)