Homily for Sunday Ordinary 28 C

The lone Samaritan has a dilemma: to which temple should he report? Jesus surely means the Jerusalem Temple, but as a Samaritan he recognizes Mount Gerizim as the true place to worship God, and his priests are, of course, the Samaritan priests at Gerizim.

I have Mass on Sunday, October 12 at St. Isidore @ 7:30/9:30 am. 

The 7:30 am Mass is live-streamedhttps://stisidore.church/video_post/ 

frjoedailey@gmail.com

Transcript

A reading from the Holy Gospel According to Luke. 

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." 

The Gospel of the Lord. 

 Jesus is on his way to Jerusalem. He is journeying between Galilee and Samaria. Most Jews would walk miles out of their way to avoid going through Samaria. Today, there is a 30-foot cement wall between Israel and parts of the West Bank that are the traditional Samaritan lands. But Jesus is a border walker. He doesn't pay attention to the walls that are meant to keep us separate. Illness does not stop at political borders. Healing need not stop at the borders either. 

When Jesus came to Nazareth, where he had been reared, he quoted from the prophet Isaiah in his first sermon, "The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind to let the oppressed go free." The hometown crowd was thrilled until Jesus pointed out that there were many lepers in Israel in the time of the prophet Elisha, and none of them was cleansed except Naaman, the Syrian. Jesus seems to imply that God's salvation extends to outsiders and cannot be assumed by insiders. An idea his hometown listeners understandably interpret as an insult. 

In his new Apostolic Exhortation, Delixi Te, Pope Leo says, "The signs that accompany Jesus’ preaching are manifestations of the love and compassion with which God looks upon the sick, the poor and sinners who, because of their condition, were marginalized by society and even people of faith. The Church, if she wants to be Christ’s Church, must be a Church that makes room for the little onesand walks poor with the poor, a place where the poor have a privileged place.

There are ten lepers, but the Greek text makes it clear that there were ten men. Their humanity is not swallowed up by their disease. 

We visited Auschwitz last Sunday. Lorenzo Peronne was a chief mason who was transferred to work at the Auschwitz concentration camp. As a civilian worker, Peronne was given better food and lodging than the prisoners. In Auschwitz, Primo Levi, the Italian Jew, was given a share of bread every day by Lorenzo. Levi wrote, "I believe it was really due to Lorenzo that I am alive today, and not so much for his material aid, as for his having constantly reminded me by his presence, by his natural and plain manner of being good, that there still exists a world outside our own, something for which it was worth surviving. Thanks to Lorenzo, I managed not to forget that I myself was a man." 

God doesn't draw lines that separate us into good and bad. The nature of God is to heal us and draw us into community. Jesus sends the lepers to the priests who will determine according to the law of Moses whether they have been healed of leprosy. The lone Samaritan has a dilemma. To which temple should he report? Jesus surely means the Jerusalem temple, but as a Samaritan, he recognizes Mount Gerizim as the true place to worship God, and his priests are, of course, the Samaritan priests at Gerizim. Since both Gerizim and Jerusalem are south of Galilee, the Samaritan can begin heading south with the gang of ten.

On the way, the ten are cleansed from their disease. The Samaritan, alone among the ten, gets an insight. Neither Jerusalem nor Gerizim is the sacred place to meet the mediation of God's presence. That sacred space is now the person of Jesus, and so he comes back to Jesus, praising God in a loud voice. Luke uses the same words for the shepherds who found the child in the manger in Bethlehem and then returned, glorifying and praising God for all they had seen and heard. 

The Samaritan falls at the feet of Jesus, thanking him. There is more to that word "thanking" than meets our English-speaking ears. Luke writes eucharistio, a word that is used in the Greek Bible only for thanks and praise given God. 

Last Sunday, the disciples said to Jesus, "Increase our faith." The Samaritan shows us what faith looks like. He approaches the prophet, which he could not do before as one stigmatized by leprosy, and falls at his feet. He acts as one who is healed. He crosses boundaries, because the boundaries were not created by God but by humans, and God's prophet has cleansed and healed him in a way that no human could. 

Barbara Brown Taylor agrees that the other nine were fulfilling expectations and doing their duty by obeying the law. Ten behaved like good lepers, good Jews, Taylor writes. Only one, a double loser, behaved like a man in love. "I know how to be obedient," she writes, "but I do not know how to be in love." 

Sometimes it takes someone else, unexpected, to open our eyes to blessings and wonders in our lives. A person on the margins, on the outside, may have a better vantage point to look inside and see the heart of the matter. Like the Samaritan, each one of us has found his or her way here because of the ways God's grace has found us and healed us, despite all the ways in which we have mutually excluded and stigmatized each other. Let us do Eucharist. Let us give thanks and praise to God.