Tag Archives: unmercenary physicians

You Forgive=I Forgive=Cheat the Cheater

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The wonderworking physicians Panteleimon (left) with Cosmos and Damian (right) show the doctors offering their patients medicine on a spoon that looks very similar to a priest offering Holy Communion with a spoon (as in the Orthodox Church). The priest offers healing as a spiritual physician. Physicians offer healing–in Greek, the same word as “salvation”–and the miracles of physical healing-salvation in the Gospel are always about healing-salvation on an even more fundamental level in our lives.


Therefore, I beg you to confirm your love for him. For the reason I have written to you is to test you and to know whether you are obedient in everything. The person you forgive, I also forgive. For indeed, what I have forgiven–if I have anything to forgive–I have done for your sake in the presence of Christ, lest we be cheated by Satan; for we are not unaware of his schemes. (2 Cor. 2:8-11)

St. Paul is writing about someone who committed a very serious sin in public and whom the Corinthian parish excommunicated, at his request. (Perhaps it was the man sleeping with his father’s wife.) Now St. Paul is asking the parish to forgive the person. He says that he is testing their obedience, to see if they will forgive at his request as they excommunicated the person at his request. He also promises that if the parish forgives the person, he will also forgive the person. If anyone refuses to forgive, they are being cheated by Satan, the great adversary, whose schemes and plots against the People of God are well known.

The important thing, St. Paul says, is that the parish forgive the sinner. If the parish forgives, then the apostle also forgives. It is the forgiveness of the parish–the entire Church–that cheats Satan of his prey. Forgiveness is always a community event: to be forgiven by one is to be forgiven by all and to be forgiven by all is to be forgiven by one. Forgiveness is never solitary or isolated, done in a corner and unknown.

Confession of sin and forgiveness is always a community act. Although we each confess personally in private to the priest, the priest personifies both Christ and the Church–the Head and the Body together. The priest offers each sinner the forgiveness of both Christ and the Church–the Head and the Body together. If I receive this forgiveness, I cheat Satan of his prey (me); if the priest offers forgiveness on my behalf, we cheat Satan of his prey (the community of the faithful).

Our confession is not about how we sin by “breaking the rules.” Our confession is about telling the spiritual physician–the priest–our symptoms, how the disease of sin afflicts us. The physician doesn’t tell us what we need to do to pay off our punishment for breaking the rules; the priest offers us a prescription of spiritual medicine for how we can recover from the symptoms we have described.

If we ask for-accept-extend forgiveness, we have cheated Satan of his prey. At least for today. Satan deserves to be cheated of his prey because he only snatches his prey because he first cheated us, the human race, by lying and cheating Adam and Eve, our first parents. The cheater is cheated and the world is saved.

Saint Panteleimon and His Liquid Blood

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Relics of St. Panteleimon/Panteleon in a German church (municipality Vogtsburg im Kaiserstuhl, Baden-Württemberg), Niederrotweil,
St Pantaleon Church (built 1735–1741).

Saint Panteleimon (known by Pantaleon during his life, he changed his name shortly before his death, meaning “all-compassionate”), is counted in the West among the late-medieval Fourteen Holy Helpers and in the East as one of the Holy Unmercenary Healers. He was a physician and a martyr who was beheaded during the Great Persecution of AD 305. After the Black Death of the mid-14th century in Western Europe, as a patron saint of physicians and midwives, he came to be regarded as one of the fourteen guardian martyrs, the Fourteen Holy Helpers.

Eastern Christian icons of St. Panteleimon show him holding a small box of medicinal herbs which he can feed a patient with a spoon which he holds in his other hand. This makes him look like an Orthodox priest, about to give Holy Communion with a spoon, which underscores the connection between “health” and “salvation;” both words share a common linguistic root. Jesus’ miracles of healing in the Gospels are taken as paradigms of salvation: to be saved is to be spiritually healed and to be healed is to be saved.

When he was beheaded, his relics–including the spilled blood–were collected and preserved. A phial containing some of his blood was long preserved in the Italian city of Ravello. On the feast day of the saint (July 27), the blood is said to become fluid and to bubble.

He was also a popular saint in Venice, and he therefore gave his name to a character in the commedia dell’arte, Pantalone, a silly, wizened old man (Shakespeare’s “lean and slippered Pantaloon”) who was a caricature of Venetians. This character was portrayed as wearing trousers rather than knee breeches, and so became the origin of the name of a type of trouser called “pantaloons,” which was later shortened to “pants”.

You can read a fascinating article about St. Panteleimon and the liquid blood relic here; be sure to scroll down the page a little to find it. There is another blood relic of St. Panteleimon kept at a monastery in Madrid; you can see a television report about it here. You can also read another blog post about other saints with similar blood relics here.

A contemporary Russian icon of Saint Panteleimon, holding his spoon to administer medicine as a priest holds a spoon to share Holy Communion with the faithful.