In her excellent book on The Church of England’s Compline (Night Prayer), Tish Harrison Warren writes of the phrase, “Tend the sick”:
“The origin of the verb ‘to tend’ and the adjective ‘tender’ have the same Old French root, which means literally ‘to stretch’.
We are appealing to the tenderness of God — that the Creator of the universe would stretch to reach us even amid our blood.
…. When we’re sick, we feel the waste of life in our aching bodies, the waste of the passing hours, the wasting away of our strength.
Left on our own, that is all it would be: waste.
But God lets nothing go to waste. We smell bad. We look terrible. Our very bodies have given out on us. We need tending. And we have nothing to prove, nothing to measure up to, no performance necessary. We can allow God to tend to us.
…. But when we pray for the sick we also remember the glory for which we are made. We recall that our health is a gift. It will not be constant. Any wellness we have will eventually give way.
But we receive our bodies, day by day, with gratitude.
In them, we taste the fall, that things are broken and not yet made new. The reaper pulls us over for a warning.
But our bodies will be made eternal. They will rise from the dust in fleshy solidity, their glory permanently undiminished.
So we also taste the promise of heaven in the goodness of our bodies.
In this meantime, our flesh and blood is suspended between our defeat and our rescue, between fall and resurrection…. and in this tension and suspense, we learn to groan to God in our fragility, to lift trembling hands to God when we have no words, to meet God in our sinuses and skin.
We learn to pray to the God who tends us.”
