Physician, Heal Thyself

When the Savior was in his hometown of Nazareth on the Sabbath, He opened the words of Isaiah and quoted to the people, “He hath anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor; he hath sent me to heal the broken-hearted, to preach deliverance to the captives, and the recovering of the sight to the blind.”  When He then told the people, “This day is this scripture fulfilled in your ears,” implying that He was this person who would heal people both physically and spiritually, they were astonished and responded, “Is not this Joseph’s son?” (Luke 4:18-22).  I believe they were essentially saying, “This is just Joseph’s boy that grew up in our town and we know him—how could he do these things?”  Verse 23 then contains the Savior’s response, “Ye will surely say unto me this proverb, Physician, heal thyself.”  I’ve been thinking about this short statement; what did He mean by “Physician, heal thyself”?   I believe He was suggesting that the people would think Him incapable of performing the kind of miraculous healings mentioned by Isaiah because He had his own problems and was in need of some kind of healing Himself.  Perhaps He had physical ailments that the people would have known about because He grew up there in Nazareth—I don’t think we should believe that He was spared from physical illness while on the earth since He came to suffer in mortality.  Perhaps the statement “Physician, heal thyself’ simply suggested the lack of faith in a common boy who had grown up among them and who the people thought could never amount to something important.  This makes sense in the context of His next statement, “No prophet is accepted in his own country” (Luke 4:24).  Either way, we know that Christ did not need to “heal Himself”.  He had no faults spiritually and any physical ailments He may have had would in no way hinder Him from fulfilling the prophecy of Isaiah.  But perhaps there is a lesson for the rest of us who want to help others but who do have spiritual problems of our own.  If we want to be a “physician” to others, should we not seek first to “heal ourselves”?  This reminds me of the Savior’s counsel in Matt 7:5 when we are told, “First cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother’s eye.”  If we really want to help and heal and serve others in the way that the Savior did, we must continually ask ourselves what “beam” we have in our own eyes and in what way we need to heal ourselves first.