Sunday Meditation: The Compassion of the Great Healer

For the Twenty-Eighth Sunday in Ordinary Time in Year C, we get Jesus healing of the ten lepers.  Three years ago I pointed out important healing was in Christianity.  We see Jesus the healer in this passage.  But there is also Jesus the priest.  Part of the duties of an Old Testament priest was to determine what was ritually pure and what wasn’t.  Those with a skin disease were not ritually pure, and the priests had the authority to exclude anyone with a skin disease and then accept them back when cured.  And so, having heard of the miraculous powers of this Jesus of Nazareth, ten lepers appeal to Jesus to be cured.

 

Here is the Gospel passage.

 

As Jesus continued his journey to Jerusalem,

he traveled through Samaria and Galilee.

As he was entering a village, ten lepers met him.

They stood at a distance from him and raised their voices, saying,

"Jesus, Master! Have pity on us!"

And when he saw them, he said,

"Go show yourselves to the priests."

As they were going they were cleansed.

And one of them, realizing he had been healed,

returned, glorifying God in a loud voice;

and he fell at the feet of Jesus and thanked him.

He was a Samaritan.

Jesus said in reply,

"Ten were cleansed, were they not?

Where are the other nine?

Has none but this foreigner returned to give thanks to God?"

Then he said to him, "Stand up and go;

your faith has saved you."

~Lk 17:11-19

 

There are several twists in this passage.  The first is that the lepers know of Jesus as having the power to cure.  Second that the one who is grateful is a Samaritan.  I’ll save the third for below.

Let Fr. Geoffrey Plant explain the passage and how it connects to the First Reading.

I think it particularly important that the healing allowed the diseased to return to society.  The healing makes them whole in various ways.

The pastoral homily is from a Dominican Friar from the Western Province, Br. John Vianney Russell, O.P.  Br. John Vianny, and yes he is not even a priest yet, provides the third twist that blew my socks off.

Is that impressive!  The third twist is that the cured leper does go to the priest.  He returns to Jesus, the Great High Priest who can make anyone pure.

Now one last thing.  The pastor (Fr. Anthony Gonzales) at this morning’s Mass at my parish in his homily said all ten were healed but only one was saved.  Do you think that true? 

 

Sunday Meditation: "Go show yourselves to the priests."

 

Let’s return to John Michael Talbot with “Healer of My Soul” for the hymn.

 

 

That lovely melody heals as well.

 

 

Sunday Meditation: The Healing of the Ten Lepers

This week’s Gospel reading is fairly straight forward.

 

As Jesus continued his journey to Jerusalem,

he traveled through Samaria and Galilee.

As he was entering a village, ten lepers met him.

They stood at a distance from him and raised their voices, saying,

"Jesus, Master! Have pity on us!"

And when he saw them, he said,

"Go show yourselves to the priests."

As they were going they were cleansed.

And one of them, realizing he had been healed,

returned, glorifying God in a loud voice;

and he fell at the feet of Jesus and thanked him.

He was a Samaritan.

Jesus said in reply,

"Ten were cleansed, were they not?

Where are the other nine?

Has none but this foreigner returned to give thanks to God?"

Then he said to him, "Stand up and go;

your faith has saved you."

Lk 17:11-19

 

The typical homily on this passage is the emphasis on gratitude.  This video dramatization handles it quite well.

Yes, only one leper was grateful, and that is the point of the passage.  But as I’ve meditated on the passage, there’s another emphasis that resonates for me.  When Jesus approaches, the ten, keeping their distance, shout out, "Jesus, Master! Have pity on us!"  We don’t know how they knew Jesus was a healer.  We just see it.  And they ask for pity, for mercy.  And Jesus in His compassion responds.  He heals them.

Gratitude may be the thematic element of this little scene, but so is Jesus’ compassion and His healing.  I don’t think we make enough of the healing miracles in the Gospels.  They are abundant. 

The other day I went to my first Charismatic Healing Mass.  I’ll post on this later in the week, but it made me conscious of just how important healing is in the Gospels.  You may think of it as a metaphor for a spiritual healing.  At least that may be the intellectual thing to do.  But I don’t think all of the healings in the Gospels are meant to be thought of in that way.  Christ heals, literally. 

The ten lepers are healed, literally.

Notable Quote: The Duty to be Grateful

I have never heard of Forest McDonald.  Apparently he was a well know historian who died a few days ago on the 19^th.  From the New YorkTimes: 

Forrest McDonald, a presidential and constitutional scholar who challenged liberal shibboleths about early American history and lionized the founding fathers as uniquely intellectual, died on Tuesday in Tuscaloosa, Ala. He was 89.

And he was a conservative, which surprises me that I had not heard of him.  But I don’t read a lot of historians.  More from the obituary:

As a Pulitzer Prize finalist in history and a professor at the University of Alabama, Dr. McDonald declared himself an ideological conservative and an opponent of intrusive government. (“I’d move the winter capital to North Dakota and outlaw air-conditioning in the District of Columbia,” he once said.) But he refused to be pigeonholed either as a libertarian or, despite his Southern agrarian roots, as a Jeffersonian.

But what caught my eye was this quote from his memoir that was highlighted over at The Imaginative Conservative:

I can describe that attitude no better than by saying that one has a duty to be grateful and joyful in the very fact of one’s existence, and in the existence of one’s fellow human beings…. And given the existence of human beings, the probabilities against my own existence—or yours—are again as high as those against the existence of man. You can attribute this to God, or to big bangs, or to sheer blind luck; all I can do is shout hallelujah, I got here! My God, I got here! In the face of this colossal fact, I must exult in my gratitude, for everything else is trivial; no matter what the uncertainties, whether things are better or worse, whether I am hungry or well fed, whether I am sick or healthy, or cold or comfortable, or honored and respected or despised and kicked and beaten, even that I shall soon be leaving, all is trivial compared to the fact that I got here. I am a miracle, and so, dear reader, are you. Let us rejoice together.

-Forrest McDonald, Recovering the Past: A Historian’s Memoir

That truly is a memorable quote, and so true.  We should be grateful for every moment.