Canter Bridge

It is a good thing to find oneself in the care of a gifted physician. It is an oddly redemptive experience to know him also as one’s assailant.

This is the logic that is brought to bear by the Old Testament prophet Hosea, who finds promise in urging Israel to return to its convenantal Punisher in order to avail itself of his medicinal prowess:

Come, let us return to the LORD;
for it is he who has torn, and he will heal us;
he has struck down, and he will bind us up.

Hosea is both realistic about the penultimate nature of suffering and the urgency of undergoing one’s pain at remedial rather than destructive hands. One ought to choose one’s enemies, so to speak. Some of them are capable of more than just tearing at one’s flesh. Occasionally, one discovers that the Assailor is in fact a friend.

Such rhetoric does not end with Hosea. The prophet Isaiah becomes an articulate exponent of the ‘healing wound’. Because in the book of Isaiah YHWH’s redemptive purpose spreads out beyond Israel to the nations at large like an ink spot on a napkin, Israel is not alone in the privilege of knowing a healing wounder:

The LORD will strike Egypt, striking and healing; they will return to the LORD, and he will listen to their supplications and heal them.

Yet Israel remains at the center of traumatic salvation:

Moreover the light of the moon will be like the light of the sun, and the light of the sun will be sevenfold, like the light of seven days, on the day when the LORD binds up the injuries of his people, and heals the wounds inflicted by his blow.

So, famously, does Isaiah’s enigmatic ‘servant of the Lord’:

But he was wounded for our transgressions,
crushed for our iniquities;
upon him was the punishment that made us whole,
and by his bruises we are healed.

One wonders from smack in the center of a culture that will stand on its head to avoid pain, what we might be missing.