Is Any Sick Among You?

This is asked at bedsides, not in debates, and it is asked by people who have already prayed. James gives an instruction that could not be plainer, and the same New Testament records an apostle asking three times and being told no. Both are Scripture. A page that quotes one and hides the other is no use to anyone standing in a hospital corridor.

1. The instruction, and it is not vague

James 5:13-16

Is any among you afflicted? let him pray. Is any merry? let him sing psalms. Is any sick among you? let him call for the elders of the church; and let them pray over him, anointing him with oil in the name of the Lord: And the prayer of faith shall save the sick, and the Lord shall raise him up; and if he have committed sins, they shall be forgiven him. Confess your faults one to another, and pray one for another, that ye may be healed.

Four things are commanded and none of them is optional. Call for the elders, which puts the first move on the sick person. Pray over him, which is the church's job and not his alone. Anoint with oil. And confess, which James attaches to healing in the next breath without explaining why.

Notice what is absent. No healer is named. No gift is required of the elders. Nobody is told to work up faith, and the sick man is not told to have any: it is "the prayer of faith," offered by the people called in. Whatever else this passage is, it is not an instruction to the ill to believe harder.

2. The oil, read three ways

As medicine. Albert Barnes takes it as the ordinary treatment of the day, and produces the evidence:

Oil, or unguents of various kinds, were much used among the ancients, both in health and in sickness. The oil which was commonly employed was olive oil… The custom of anointing the sick with oil still prevails in the East, for it is believed to have medicinal or healing properties.

Albert Barnes, on James 5:14

On that reading James is telling a church to pray and to use the best remedy it has, which is a striking thing to find in a verse people quote against medicine.

As a sacrament. Chrysostom reads the passage for what it says about the elders, and takes the forgiveness clause seriously:

For not only at the time of regeneration, but afterwards also, they have authority to forgive sins. "Is any sick among you?" it is said, "let him call for the elders of the Church and let them pray over him, anointing him with oil in the name of the Lord."

St John Chrysostom, On the Priesthood

This is the passage the Western church built the anointing of the sick on, and the Eastern church its holy unction. Whatever one makes of the developments, the text does put oil, elders and forgiveness in one sentence, and a purely medical reading has to account for the forgiveness.

As a sign of a gift then in use. Calvin takes it as belonging to a period, and his sentence is worth the whole section for a different reason.

3. Calvin says the quiet part

As the gift of healing as yet continued, he directs the sick to have recourse to that remedy. It is, indeed, certain that they were not all healed; but the Lord granted this favor as often and as far as he knew it was expedient.

John Calvin, on James 5:14

It is, indeed, certain that they were not all healed. That is Calvin, reading the very verse that promises the prayer of faith will save the sick, and stating plainly that in the apostolic church itself the results were not uniform. Whatever "shall save the sick" means, it did not mean everyone, in the generation that had the gift, with the apostles alive.

Calvin also holds that the gift belonged to that era, which this site does not settle; Did the Gifts Stop? works that question out. But his observation stands whichever way that goes, and it is the honest starting point for everything below.

4. The four texts that decide it

The New Testament does not leave us to guess how this worked in practice. It shows us, four times, and every one of them involves Paul, a man who healed others.

Paul asks three times and is refused. "There was given to me a thorn in the flesh… For this thing I besought the Lord thrice, that it might depart from me. And he said unto me, My grace is sufficient for thee: for my strength is made perfect in weakness" (2 Corinthians 12:7-9). Three times, by an apostle, and the answer is no with a reason attached.

Paul leaves a companion sick. "Trophimus have I left at Miletum sick" (2 Timothy 4:20). One clause, no explanation, no embarrassment. The man through whom God worked extraordinary miracles left a friend behind ill.

Paul prescribes a remedy. "Drink no longer water, but use a little wine for thy stomach's sake and thine often infirmities" (1 Timothy 5:23). To his closest colleague, with chronic complaints, the apostle's counsel is dietary.

And a healing that was close-run. Of Epaphroditus: "he was sick nigh unto death: but God had mercy on him; and not on him only, but on me also, lest I should have sorrow upon sorrow" (Philippians 2:27). God had mercy, and Paul says openly what the alternative would have cost him. That is a man who nearly lost a friend, writing it down.

5. What that rules out, in both directions

It rules out the guarantee. Nobody can hold that faith secures healing while Trophimus is in the text. And it removes the cruelty that follows from the guarantee, which is the reason this page exists: if healing were promised to faith, then every unhealed person is a failed believer, and there is no way to say that kindly because it is not a kind idea. Paul was not short of faith. He was told no.

And it rules out the shrug. James is a command, in the imperative, addressed to churches, and nobody has ever been able to point to the verse that ends it. "Is any sick among you? let him call for the elders." A church that never anoints and never gathers to pray over the ill is not being sober; it is skipping a page. Whatever one concludes about miraculous gifts, this instruction is given to elders, not to specialists.

And the confession clause is not decoration. "Confess your faults one to another, and pray one for another, that ye may be healed" (James 5:16). James ties healing to honesty between people, which is a harder instruction than anointing and is usually the one dropped.

6. Oil and wine: the means, and the word "but"

Scripture almost never treats God's healing and a physician's means as rivals, and it puts them in the same sentence again and again. Isaiah, a prophet, writes a prescription: "Let them take a lump of figs, and lay it for a plaister upon the boil, and he shall recover" (Isaiah 38:21), and Hezekiah's fifteen years are the fig poultice and the prayer together. Jesus, who healed with a word elsewhere, "spat on the ground, and made clay of the spittle, and he anointed the eyes of the blind man with the clay, And said unto him, Go, wash in the pool of Siloam" (John 9:6-7). Naaman was sent to a muddy river seven times and nearly missed his healing because the means was beneath him: "Are not Abana and Pharpar, rivers of Damascus, better than all the waters of Israel?" (2 Kings 5:12). The Samaritan "bound up his wounds, pouring in oil and wine" (Luke 10:34), the first aid of the day, and Jesus told it as the picture of love. Jesus called Himself a physician, "They that be whole need not a physician, but they that are sick" (Matthew 9:12), and Jeremiah asks "Is there no balm in Gilead; is there no physician there?" (Jeremiah 8:22) as if the answer were obviously that there should be. And Paul, who told Timothy to take wine, travelled for years with "Luke, the beloved physician" (Colossians 4:14), and at the end, from prison, "Only Luke is with me" (2 Timothy 4:11). Scripture never says "Paul's doctor" in so many words; a physician who stayed through shipwreck and two imprisonments when everyone else had gone was surely doctoring him, and the church has read it that way from the beginning.

The book the early church read alongside Scripture says the whole thing in one chapter: "Honour the physician for the need thou hast of him: for the most High hath created him… The most High hath created medicines out of the earth, and a wise man will not abhor them… My son, in thy sickness neglect not thyself, but pray to the Lord, and he shall heal thee" (Sirach 38:1-9). Created the physician; created the medicines; pray. A doctor doing his work well is a servant at a post, one of the "good works, which God hath before ordained that we should walk in them" (Ephesians 2:10), whether or not he knows whose post it is.

There is exactly one rebuke in the Bible for going to physicians, and the whole of it turns on one word: "Asa in the thirty and ninth year of his reign was diseased in his feet, until his disease was exceeding great: yet in his disease he sought not to the LORD, but to the physicians" (2 Chronicles 16:12). But. Not "and." Gill, who has no quarrel with doctors, draws the line where the text draws it:

Implored the blessing of God on their prescriptions. That is the practice, and it is the same one said over a meal: "every creature of God is good, and nothing to be refused, if it be received with thanksgiving: For it is sanctified by the word of God and prayer" (1 Timothy 4:4-5). Many of us once refused medicine on the ground that God would heal if He wanted to, and the text under that is real; the answer to it is that He usually wants to through something, a river, a fig, clay, a salt in a spring, a physician, and that refusing the means can be a way of telling Him which miracle He is allowed to do. The fault the Bible names is not the medicine. It is the "but."

Where this lands

Do what James says. Call the elders, let them pray, use the oil, confess what needs confessing, and use the medicine God has provided, because Paul told Timothy to. Then leave the outcome where Scripture leaves it.

What is promised is not a result. It is that the prayer is heard, that the Lord raises up, and that sins are forgiven, and the same book that promises it shows an apostle refused, a friend left sick, a colleague on a remedy and another man saved by inches. Elijah is the example James reaches for, and James is careful to say he was "a man subject to like passions as we are" (James 5:17). Not a different kind of person. The same kind, praying.

And the answer God gave Paul is still an answer. "My grace is sufficient for thee" is not a consolation prize handed to someone whose faith failed. It is what the Lord said, to the man who wrote half the New Testament, about a thing that never went away.

Related: Did the Gifts Stop?, Suffering, Prayer, Providence, Holy Things. Barnes, Chrysostom and Calvin quoted verbatim from the public-domain editions in our library. Scripture from the King James Version, linked to BibleHub. This page gives no medical advice and takes no position on any treatment; it is about what the text says.