Jeremiah 29:1, 4-7; Psalm 66:1-11; 2 Timothy 2:8-15; Luke 17:11-19
The Rev. Drew Brislin
I have shared with many of you that I lost my mother to pancreatic cancer. This time of the year always stirs the heart and the memories as the anniversary of her death approaches in late November. Many of you have experienced this same loss of loved ones and so you too understand these emotions. We are reminded that disease and death are indiscriminatory. They don’t observe geographic, political, or religious boundaries. In the wake of our loss, we want to ask ‘Why?’ What did our loved ones do to deserve this? What did we do or not do? We want to be healed or we want our loved ones to be healed or restored to our preconceptions of good health. Our human capacity to understand healing though is all too often inadequate to understand what exactly it is that God is doing in the world.
In our Gospel lesson this morning we hear the story in Luke of Jesus’ encounter with ten lepers or probably more appropriate to say ten individuals with a skin disease. As this would have been an ancient indicator of spiritual impurity these persons would have been cast out of the communities to the margins. Luke tells us that Jesus is traveling from Galilee to Judea. There seems to be some question about the author of Luke’s geographic knowledge as he tells this story and sets it in a region between Samaria and Galilee. Subsequently, researchers will often interpret this as the author making a point that sickness and disease do not honor geographic or political boundaries. As Jesus and his followers are entering a village, he is approached by ten lepers who come seeking healing and Jesus obliges them by simply telling them to go and show themselves to the priests. We do not know exactly when they were healed or when they realized they had been made clean except that it happened on the way. As Jesus is prone to do, he seeks out the person who is considered the other, the least deserving maybe, the last one we would expect to reveal God’s love. After the ten are healed, one recognizes his restoration to good health and returns to, as we read, prostrate himself in front of Jesus and give thanks. This one who returns to show is gratitude is Samaritan and someone who would have been considered an enemy and outsider among those following Jesus. Jesus asks about the other nine and why they did not return and then tells the Samaritan that his faith has healed him, which is curious as we are informed that all ten were healed. What does Jesus mean in this second proclamation of healing to the Samaritan?
The Samaritan it seems in this lesson, gets who Jesus is or at least acknowledges him and as a result is transformed and not just restored to good health. It is earlier in Luke in chapter ten that Jesus instructs us to love God with all our heart and to love our neighbor as ourselves. He then tells the story of the Good Samaritan to help illustrate to those gathered who your neighbor is and how to recognize them. This morning Jesus seeks to instruct us about how to “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind’ through a Samaritan yet again. When Jesus tells the Samaritan that he is healed the second time, some researchers think this has salvific implications. That in recognizing what Jesus did and the gift God bestowed upon him the Samaritan has been restored to relationship with God and Jesus in his show of gratitude and offering thanks. The Samaritan is not just healed but is delivered.
For us as Episcopalians this practice of thanksgiving runs central to our theology as it is the focus of our liturgy. The word eucharist which identifies our service of worship comes from the Greek word that literally means thanksgiving. We call our eucharistic prayers the service of The Great Thanksgiving. We bring forth our gifts in the form of bread and wine and we give thanks for all that God has done for us and he returns them to us in the real presence of our Lord and Saviour’s Body and Blood. The first words of those prayers are called the sursum corda which is Latin for Lift up your hearts and concludes with the call and response: Let us give thanks to the Lord our God. It is right to give him thanks and praise. This theology of thanksgiving runs core to our identity as Christians in the Episcopal tradition. In our participation in this service and the taking of communion or receiving of blessing we are brought into the company of saints and reunited with our loved ones.
Because of these gifts and the assurances of the blessings that God seeks to place on us, we do not need to ask ‘why?’ The church father St. Augustine says that “As Christians, we are an Easter people and Alleluia is our song.” We proclaim this belief in our baptism, we practice it in communion and live it in our death. I miss my mother and my father and my grandparents and all those who were so instrumental in my formation as a child and as I grew up. There are times throughout the year where that longing for those relationships becomes especially emotional. Our Samaritan friend reminds us of this morning in our Gospel lesson of all that we have to be thankful for in this life. I too am reminded each Sunday in the eucharist and in the giving of thanks that Heaven, that the Kingdom of God is all around us and that those loved ones who have gone before us have only grown into their fuller selves. That death is not the result of sickness and brokenness but is healing. Not so much healing in the sense of restoration but the kind of healing that brings God’s salvation. The kind of healing the Samaritan received in his giving of thanks to our Lord.