Homily for 28th Sunday of Ordinary Time

Homily for the
28th Sunday of Ordinary Time

Oct. 13, 2019

Luke 17: 11-19
Christian Brothers, Iona College, New Rochelle, N.Y.
Our Lady of the Assumption, Bronx

“One of them … fell at the feet of Jesus and thanked him” (Luke 17: 15-16).

Jesus and the ten lepers (James Tissot)

In the reading from 2 Kings (5:14-17), Naaman the Syrian general tries to express his gratitude to the prophet Elisha because he’s been cleansed of leprosy.  In gratitude, however, Naaman adopts the God of Israel as his own God, to replace, for him and his household, the pagan gods of Syria.

In the ancient world, there was an understanding among many peoples, including the Hebrews initially, that gods were linked to a particular territory.  That’s why Naaman asks for some Israelite earth to take home—so that the God of Israel will recognize the place where he’s being invoked.  That sounds strange to us, but as it matured the Jewish religion was unique in that it recognized only one God of the entire earth, not many gods in many places, often doing battle with each other, as narrated by a lot of mythology and the epic poems of Homer and Vergil.  That monotheism is one reason why the Greeks and Romans found the Jews such a strange people.

The more fundamental point of today’s readings, tho, is the gratitude expressed by Naaman and the Samaritan leper whom Jesus healed.

Jesus seems disappointed that only one of the 10 cured lepers returns to thank him.  We’re not told what the time lapse is, e.g., did this one return immediately, even before carrying out Jesus’ instruction to go to the priests to have his cleanness certified so that he could return to the community of Israel?  We presume the other 9 did that, which is what Jesus told them to do.

Nevertheless, Jesus is disappointed that only one comes back to voice his appreciation to Jesus and to God the Father.

Is Jesus also disappointed that this one healed leper was a Samaritan, a foreigner whom Jews despised, while members of his own Jewish people are nowhere to be seen?  Actually, we’re not told anything about the other 9—nationality, gender, or age.  But since Jesus sends them to the Jewish priests, we may assume they’re Jewish.  As he does so often, St. Luke, in telling this story of a grateful Samaritan, is pointing toward the universality of Jesus’ message of salvation, offered not only to his own Jewish people but also to Samaritans and everyone else.

So this one Samaritan returns praising God for his healing and thanking Jesus, who acts as God’s messenger, the one who delivers healing.  The word in Luke’s Greek text for the ex-leper’s thanks is euchariston, a usual word for giving thanks.  It’s the same word the Gospels use when they tell us that Jesus “gave thanks” before he multiplied loaves and fish to feed the crowd that has been listening to his preaching.

Christians immediately relate to euchariston, for it’s the word we use for the ritual in which we carry out the command of Jesus to give thanks to God, bless bread and wine, and share it in his memory; in which we thank God the Father for redeeming us thru his Son’s life, death, resurrection, and ascension.  We gather on Sundays to celebrate the Eucharist, the sacrament of Christ’s body and blood, of his passion, death, and resurrection.  In the Eucharist we return to Jesus, glorifying God and giving thanks to Jesus for our salvation.  If we’re as grateful to our Lord Jesus for the gift of redemption as the Samaritan leper was for his healing, we can’t help but come to worship as part of the Christian faithful every week—and to pray that Christ’s salvation might be more widely known, believed, and lived in the lives of people everywhere.

At the end of the episode, Jesus tells the healed leper, “Stand up and go; your faith has saved you” (11:19).  Faith was what brought him and the others to Jesus in the 1st place.  Now Jesus dismisses him, in almost the same words in which we were traditionally dismissed from Mass:  “Ite, missa est”—go, you’re sent on your way.  The healed man isn’t told explicitly to go and spread Jesus’ message.  But we are, as the new formulas for our dismissal from Mass spell out, e.g., “Go and announce the Gospel of the Lord” or “Go in peace, glorifying the Lord by your lives.”  We are to “stand up and go,” living and giving witness to the faith that has saved us, the faith that has brought us together to give thanks to God at Mass, the faith that will save everyone who comes to know and believe in Jesus.