Mass readings for the 28th Sunday in Ordinary Time:
2 Kings 5.14-17 Psalm 98.1-4 2 Timothy 2.8-13 Luke 17.11-19
It certainly would be hard to miss the theme of thanksgiving in our gospel reading today: a contrast of gratitude and apparent ingratitude. Perhaps we might say, a limping kind of thankfulness.
We have ten lepers healed, and only one comes and thanks Jesus, offers our Lord what is due to him; what happened to the other nine?
And, of course, it is pointed out to us that the one healed man who acknowledged his debt of thanks was a Samaritan, one of those mongrel heretics so loathed by so many Jews at the time of Jesus’ ministry in the Holy Land.
To clarify something immediately: it was not the fact that the other nine were Jews that accounts for their ingratitude; that deficiency arises from their humanity, and from a culture that, frankly, stunted many people’s religious imaginations, that left the matter of God’s healing, or his cursing, a mysterious case of divine arbitrariness that likely left a lot of people shrugging at the injustices and sufferings of the world.
A lot of people continue to shrug today. They shrug at their good fortune, they shrug at their bad luck. Life for them just seems to happen.
What we perhaps need to do to make sense of this story from Jesus’ ministry is not to focus so much on the nine who seem ungrateful, and turn to that tenth man.
We want to look at him because he almost heads off with the other nine after Jesus instructs them to follow the law and to see a priest. Now that direction from our Lord would have made perfect sense to these ten lepers, a priest was needed to verify that, indeed, they were healed; he could attest to the community that these ten could be readmitted to society. He gives them a “clean bill of health” so to speak.
And I know that for some that might seem odd, as for us it would be more sensible to go and see a physician, a family doctor. However, in ancient times, the practice of medicine was still a rather uncertain art – there were diseases beyond the folk cures of the home, or the potions of midwives. The professional medical person was still a rarity and rather expensive for any but the wealthiest. So, for most of humanity, serious disease was addressed as much, if not moreso, with prayer and other religious acts as it was with any medicinal treatment. You made an offering to the appropriate god, you wore a talisman, you went to a sacred spring and drank its water, so on and so forth… and maybe you got better.
Anyway, off the ten go but then there is this one who turns back from among the others. He runs back to Jesus, and he does so “loudly praising God.” He is making something of a spectacle of himself.
Something has happened to him, “the penny has dropped” and he recognizes his life is changed in a fundamental way, it has more profoundly changed than simply with respect to his health – God has come into his life. Frankly, he doesn’t appear to care if a priest sees him or not. And Jesus, for his part, does not tell him again of the requirement of the law to go show himself to a priest, but instead says to him, “… go on your way; your faith has made you well.”
And that phrase, “your faith has made you well” can be translated differently from what we have in this version that I proclaimed. Jesus’ words can validly be translated as “your faith has saved you.”
And now, I hope we all have a sense of what this tenth man has realized: God has come into his life, and made him well; but in doing so, this man knows there is a God, and by God’s grace he is cured, by God’s grace he lives, by God’s grace he has hope. If God can enter his life to cure his leprosy and restore him to society, then God can still do great things for him. More importantly, he has an experience wherein he has reached God through this man Jesus; he’s found the one that makes that connection to the almighty possible; here is the bridge between this fallen world, this valley of tears, this place that lies under the shadow of death, to that realm of light and hope, of life and joy.
I don’t want to draw too strong a comparison between 1st century Jews and Samaritans as being like our current situation within Western Christianity of having Catholics and Protestants, but it may be of some use for us today.
Our evangelical brothers and sisters, while they may not comprehend the graces that come of a sacramental life and fail to appreciate the Catholic perspective on these things, they nonetheless are very excited by grace itself – that intrusion of God into this world we experience from time to time, and indeed, call “grace.”
I can tell stories of protestants coming into a Catholic church where I’ve been serving, of telling me of how they were inexplicably drawn to the place, and were now discerning that it wasn’t the music, or the liturgy, or the ceremony, but rather it was the Eucharist, the Blessed Sacrament of the Altar, housed in the tabernacle that was the source of their fascination; of how they were made, well what is the word? Giddy? by the sense that within the tabernacle was the very source of grace itself: Christ.
This is all to say, I see many a Catholic who does not get that excited about grace, and cannot perceive that it is given freely in the sacraments. Now I don’t want to return to my complaint about Confirmation, but I see in it something analogous to our ten lepers. So many call out to the Church for this, but upon receiving it, go their way, show their confirmation certificate to grandparents, godparents, then put it away. How few return to Jesus, come to him in the sacrament of the Eucharist, sit in his presence in adoration in the Church, out of recognition that something has come into their lives worth getting excited about, and worth giving thanks for: grace.
Many of us, myself included, have the habit of saying, “there but for the grace of God go I.” I mean it when I say it. Grace opened my eyes and made me first fear God, then to listen to God’s word, his wisdom, to accept his love, and his offer of salvation. And it started with my own desire for healing, for relief from a burden of sin, guilt, sense of failure. I’ve spoken of this before, and how when grace entered into my life and made me aware of God’s forgiveness, his mercy, I felt so relieved, so restored to myself, but also to my family, to my community. And like that tenth leper, I had thought then to carry on my life from where I had left off before my descent into depression, angst, guilt and so on, but then realized, “no, I need to thank the person who made this possible.” And so, I got back to church, and came to understand that if I wanted to stay healthy in mind and spirit, I was going to need a steady supply of grace, and a sense of gratitude that would allow it to keep flowing into my life.
And so, we have this exchange: thanksgiving for grace that opens us up to further graces that prompts further thanksgiving. I know this weekend we celebrate a secular Thanksgiving, but I’m sure many of you know that every Mass offered in this church is a thanksgiving. Eucharist itself means “thanksgiving” – it is the good gift of praise and thanks that we owe to God that is transformed by the Holy Spirit into Christ’s self-offering from which saving grace flows into our lives… if we accept it.
So, this Thanksgiving, it is a good and salutary thing for us to sit around the table, admiring the turkey and the side dishes, joining our hands in offering the thanks of grace at meals, and perhaps to then do what some do at such gatherings, go around the table and each offer something they are thankful for. But I certainly hope and pray that the gratitude of the gathering goes beyond such discrete items as being thankful for family, for children and grandchildren, for a successful business year, or academic year, for the good health one has enjoyed, for the overcoming of illness one has suffered, to a larger appreciation of God in our lives, a source of strength and hope in our times of trial, a literal inspiration of the Holy Spirit who guides us into God’s ways, and prompts us to live in grace and by grace unto eternal life.
Amen.