In Nomine etc..
Today's Gospel is about gratitude, among other things, and it reminds me of a story about a man --- we’ll call him Al --- who went out to hunt in the woods of British Columbia, Canada, my native land. It had been a slow day and he hadn’t found any game to shoot. Suddenly, Al heard a noise behind him. He whirled around and saw two ferocious looking bears coming towards him. He quickly raised his rifle to his shoulder, took aim and pulled the trigger. Click. Nothing - the rifle misfired. He reloaded and fired again. Click… click… click. Again, nothing - the gun just wasn’t working. By this time, the bears were almost on top of him. In desperation, he threw down his rifle and ran. But the faster he ran, the closer the bears got. Finally Al came to the edge of a cliff.
As there was nowhere to go, he dropped to his knees and began to pray. “O Lord, I pray that you make these bears Christian bears.” As Al looked up, he was surprised to see the bears kneeling just a few feet away from him. And as he listened, he heard one bear pray; “For what we are about to receive, may the Good Lord make us truly thankful. Amen.”
There were ten lepers, one of whom was a Samaritan, whom Jesus healed. And so by inference the others were probably all Jews. The ten approached Jesus and presented him with their petition. They stood at a distance and called out in a loud voice, "Jesus, Master, have mercy on us!" And if Jesus followed what he did in other Gospel passages – I am sure his follow up question would have been: “What do you want me to do for you?” To which they would have replied “to be healed of our leprosy.” Interestingly, Jesus didn’t touch them as he did in other healings. He simply said: "Go, show yourselves to the priests."
This reminds us of the story of Naaman, the Syrian general who was healed on leprosy in chapter 5 of the Second Book of the Kings. Again, he was simply told by Elisha to do something simple – dip himself seven times in the Jordan river. I wonder whether there was any sign of Naaman’s healing when he came up out of the Jordan on the sixth time. Perhaps not – but after the seventh time he was healed.
In the same way I wonder when the ten were healed. Was it when they went to the Priests? Or was it when they decided to go to the Priests? In any case, their healing began when they obeyed Jesus. The Gospel says, “And as they went, they were made clean.” Decision and action are one in this story. They believed him and obeyed.
We note that Jesus is unorthodox in this story – and shows no favoritism. He doesn’t say: I’m only going to heal the nine Jews. He is open to everyone who approaches, including the Samaritan.
The Samaritan leper is doubly unclean. He is a leper and a Samaritan. In biblical times, leprosy was a terrible problem, and in some places may still be. The word referred to a variety of skin diseases but in this case it was likely the contagious disease that we call Hansen’s Disease. It starts with a white patch of skin that becomes numb, so much so that the victims cannot even feel a needle piercing the spot. The patch begins to spread all over the body and often manifests itself on the face, so the disease is impossible to hide. It then begins to form spongy tumors on the face and, at the same time, attacks the internal organs as well. Generally the condition was not in itself fatal. However, it weakened the body so much that most lepers died from other diseases they contracted because of their weakened condition. Lepers were referred to as “the walking dead,” and were kicked out of their homes and villages. They were forced to live in colonies with other lepers. They couldn’t work nor were they allowed to worship at the Temple.
In Jesus’ day, the Samaritans were enemies of the Jews. They had other customs and had married non-Jewish people, something God had expressly told the Jews not to do. They were considered “unclean”.
The story illustrates the importance of thanking God for his goodness. You would have thought that it would have been the nine Jews - God’s own people - that would have known to come back and give thanks to God. Yet it was the Samaritan who had enough spiritual insight, enough depth and presence of mind, to return to Jesus and thank him for the healing.
We live in a society that takes the good things we have for granted. It is easy in our health and prosperity and freedom and relative safety to forget that everything we have is a gift, to forget that we could easily be in the place of the lepers of old, without hope and without cure. In fact, if we look around the streets of our city, we see people, thousands of them, who are not unlike lepers. We pass by on the other side, we think that nothing can be done, and it doesn’t occur to us to ask God, ask Our Lord, to help, which means, practically speaking, to ask Jesus to heal our disease, our lack of awareness, of insight, so that we in turn can heal the problems we see before us, and give thanks to God for the opportunity He has put in front of us.
Note where Jesus is, in this story. He is on his way to Jerusalem, on his way to his Passion and death. He is between Samaria and Galilee, that is, in that liminal space between the land of the outsiders, passing through the land of the outcasts, on his way to the city of the orthodox, who will seek to destroy him. The nine who did not return to give thanks are hurrying to the city of the orthodox, thankful that they can return to their spiritual home, as they see it. The nine are no doubt grateful that they can return to the certainty of their orthodox home, and are eager to leave that place of exile and exclusion, of isolation and ambiguity.
And likewise the Samaritan thanks Jesus that he can return to his spiritual home, the land of the outsiders. Jesus doesn’t tell him to follow the other nine, who are on their way to show themselves to the priests at the Temple in the city of the orthodox. He says simply, “Get up and go on your way; your faith has made you well.” Jesus is saying that he is not choosing between the orthodoxy of Jerusalem and the supposed heresy of the Samaritans. Jesus accepts the ambiguity of the space between Samaria and Galilee, recognizes that that is where faith is strongest, where, in fact, it is essential. Jesus is the bridge, as it were, between heretic and orthodox, between insider and outsider, between the incurable and the healed.
And that is where we Christians are, often in a space between certainty and doubt, yearning, many of us, for the certainty of orthodoxy yet aware that only faith can carry us through the space where the outcasts are, aware that the reality of the outcasts requires us to be with them in their exile, to care for them, to share their status, to heal when we can, and to give thanks to God for all that he has done for them and for us. We are all with Jesus between Samaria and Galilee, with the outcasts, on our way to Jerusalem, to suffering, death, and resurrection, rejoicing on our way and giving thanks to God for all that he has done for us. (12.X.19 Adv)
In Nomine etc..
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