Fourteenth Sunday after Trinity (September 5, 2021)

May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be alway acceptable in thy sight, O Lord, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

In today’s Gospel reading, Jesus enters a village where is confronted by 10 lepers who stand at a distance, crying, “Jesus, Master, have mercy on us.” In the ancient world, leprosy was not just a disease but was considered ritually unclean, and led one to be quarantined from their community, the original social distancing. Leviticus 13:46 explains, “[the person with leprosy] shall remain unclean as long as he has the disease; he is unclean; he shall dwell alone in a habitation outside the camp.” Now in a previous part of Luke, Jesus transversed this social boundary by touching a leper. In 5:12-16, “there came a man full of leprosy; and when he saw Jesus, he fell on his face and besought him, ‘Lord, if you will, you can make me clean.’ And he stretched out his hand, and touched him, saying, ‘I will; be clean.’ And immediately the leprosy left him.” But here, in this morning’s passage, the intimate connection through touch is missing. The lepers observe their social quarantine by standing “at a distance.” This does not necessarily imply coldness or spiritual distance, however. The same wording for “at a distance” is used in the parable of the Prodigal Son: the father saw his lost son while he was “at a distance” and then ran to him. But here, in this story, there isn’t some magical touch, like last week when Jesus spit on his hands and touched the mute and deaf man’s tongue and ears. There aren’t magic words. Jesus merely commands the group to go show themselves to the priests for the required ritual cleansing. The implication is that the healing had already been completed. So the 10 go to the priest and are cleansed.

After the ritual, only one of the group came back to Jesus. He threw himself down on his face and praised God. St. Luke here reveals an interesting detail about the one who returned: he was a Samaritan, not a Jew. This causes Jesus to wonder, “Were not ten cleansed? Where are the nine? Was no one found to return and give praise to God except this foreigner?” As God’s chosen people, the Jewish lepers should have understood the significance of their miraculous healing; yet, they either didn’t care enough to return to Jesus to offer thanks or were blinded by their own self-centeredness and bloated sense of self-importance. Those who didn’t return never overcame the distance between themselves and Jesus; only the one who bows down to praise God at Jesus’ feet accomplished that.

It is at the end of the reading that we get Jesus’ words of healing: “Rise and go your way; your faith has made you well.” Yet, the group had already been healed of leprosy and cleansed by the priest. So why does Jesus say this here at the end? I would argue because the reading is not really about physical healing but spiritual healing. There are many privileges a priest has: getting to baptize, and say the Mass are special. Hearing confessions can be hard but beautiful. But there’s something sacred about getting to sit with people who are sick and dying. In those moments, we certainly pray for the bodily healing of a person. Whether God decides to physically heal the sick person or not is ultimately above our pay grade, so we pray for something more: “Almighty everliving God, Maker of mankind, who dost correct those whom thou dost love, and chastise every one whom thou dost receive; We beseech thee to have mercy upon this thy servant visited with thine hand, and to grant that he may take his sickness patiently, and recover his bodily health, if it be thy gracious will; and that, whensoever his soul shall depart from the body, it may be without spot presented unto thee.” We read Hebrews 12:5, “MY son, despise not thou the chastening of the Lord, nor faint when thou art rebuked of him: for whom the Lord loveth he chasteneth, and scourgeth every son whom he receiveth.” The point is not that God punishes us with sickness for moral failings; when Jesus and his disciples passed by a blind man, the disciples asked him why the man was blind, because of his sin or his parent’s. Jesus’ reply was that “It was not that this man sinned, or his parents, but that the works of God might be made manifest in him.” Trials like sickness come not as punishment; rather, they form the forge in which the person who joins their sufferings to the suffering of Christ becomes refined and transfigured. And that was what happened in our reading this morning: the leprosy and the healing were not the end in and of itself; the men were physically healed, yes, but that healing was beneficial insofar as it opened their eyes to Christ as their Messiah. What good is the health of the body without the health of the soul? “Your faith has made you well” is a statement more about the condition of the man’s soul than his body.

This morning’s Collect allows us to understand the reading at an even deeper level. It features two requests: (1) we prayed for an increase in faith, hope, and charity, the three theological virtues; and (2) we asked for God to make us love what he commands. Both requests share a common purpose: that we may obtain what God has promised. The first request focuses on faith, hope, and love. Faith is that which makes us alive. According to the author of Hebrews, faith is “the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen” (11:1). Faith is a gift we receive at baptism and is increased in us through the sacraments and the devotional life. “Your faith has made you well.” Hope, while distinct from faith, is nevertheless related: it looks forward in reliance on God. And finally, love, which St. Paul tells us is the greatest theological virtue, is the sacrificial willingness to place an other above the self. The goal, according to the Collect, is for us to love have that increase in faith, hope, and love so that we might love what God command, evidence that we have been made well. The objects of our loves have impacts on us. To love what is disordered makes us disordered people. By loving God’s commands, however, we are loving what is Good and therefore being rightly ordered. This is why the Psalmist speaks of the blessing that comes on the man who “delights in the law of the Lord,” and who mediates on his law day and night. That man, the Psalmist says, is like a tree planted by streams of water that yields its fruit in its season and its left does not wither. So we ask God for an increase in the theological virtues and we ask for him to instill in us a love of what he commands. We desire these things to obtain what he has promised: namely, eternal life and union with God. But at the heart of the Collect is an understanding of our reliance on God’s mercy because without it, we would fail.

So the reading invites us to place ourselves in the place of the lepers. Through the Sacraments of the Church, we have continual encounters with Christ who heals us and cleanses us. He cleansed us in our Baptism in which we were washed by the Word. He cleanses us in Communion where “our sinful bodies are made clean by his body and our souls washed through his most Precious Blood.” In the Confessional, the benefits of our Baptism are reapplied to remit the actual sins we have committed. The lepers in the story come to Christ once, but we must return again and again to be healed precisely because we are so aware of the fragility of our nature.

So our task is to live in light of this recognition. This means a life of dependence, not emancipation, not independence. This dependence, when fully realized, becomes a life of thankful praise for what God has done and what he continues to do in us as we are continually conformed into his image. And this should breed in us a heightened sense of self-reflection in which we constantly assess ourselves, subjugating every part of who we are to our Lord. It’s all too easy to be one of the nine who presume on grace and ignore its ongoing implication for our lives. But if we truly want our souls to be healed, the Samaritan leper must become our model and template so that we may hear those words: “Your faith has made you well.”

In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.