Fr Jack SJ MD: Make Us Clean: Homily for 28th Sunday Ordinary Time

2 Kgs 5:14-17

Ps 98 1-4

2 Tm 2:8-13

Lk 17:11-19

The first reading and the Gospel both turn on the disease of leprosy as it was understood in the Ancient Near East.

It is crucial to remember that when leprosy is mentioned in any biblical readings it does not mean the chronic disfiguring infectious disease known today as Hansen’s disease. While the mycobacterium that causes Hansen’s disease may have been in the population during Jesus’ time, it was not at the time of the first reading six centuries before Jesus' birth. In the Ancient Near East walls, clothing, and other inanimate objects as well as humans could be diagnosed with leprosy. The word leprosy derives from the Greek root LEPI that means scales of a fish. Thus, something such as psoriasis, with its characteristic scaling lesion, could have been called leprosy, along with many other diseases that are neither related nor infectious.

Infectious is the key word. Theories of contagion and infection were millennia in the future. Fear of leprosy was fear of contagion. It was the fear of disease transmission. Several millennia before antibiotics were discovered leprosy and other contagious diseases such as TB were a threat to the ongoing life of the community. A few years ago irrational fear of contagion destroyed the fabric of life in the U.S. through harsh and unnecessary regulations from which some people, such as students who were kept out of class, will never recover. Delusional fear of contagion forced old people to die alone and unvisited, deprived of the sacrament of the sick and viaticum when they needed it most.

People in the Ancient Near East understood the relationship life and disease differently than we do today. We understand living and disease as an unbroken line that is interrupted only by death. In the Ancient Near East disease was understood as a “mild form of death.” The radical interruption, was not between life and death but between health and illness at a time when any illness, any fever, was a credible threat to life.

Lepers were thought to be losing life’s vital force from the lesions on their bodies.

They were seen as the living dead, already in sheol, the abode of the dead. Adding to the stigma was that, like other illnesses or disabilities in the Ancient Near East, leprosy was understood punishment for sin. It was visible evidence that the afflicted was a sinner.

The lepers who approached Jesus were desperate. They were excluded from society. In His compassion for their suffering, isolation from society, and their self-alienation. Jesus healed them of the visible cause of their suffering. He removed the "leprosy" that visibly marked them as sinners. Jesus returned them to society and gave them back to themselves. He did and continues to do the same for us.

Jesus took the burden of our sin upon himself. Through his obedience to the will of the Father, he freed us from sin and death through his passion, death, resurrection, and ascension. In the sacrament of confession he offers us the opportunity to be made clean again and again, from the internal disfiguration of “leprosy;” and thus He returns us to right relationship with God and with ourselves.

The readings and the Gospel highlight the interdependence of gift and thanksgiving.

Naaman’s story in the first reading began with verse fourteen, when he descended into the Jordan seven times and emerged healed of his lesions. We didn't hear the important verses that immediately precede these. In those verses Naaman was told by Elisha's messenger, not the Prophet Elisha himself, to bathe in the water of the Jordan seven times. Then we read,

"But Naaman was angered and walked away. He said, 'I thought he would surely invoke the Lord his God by name and wave his hand toward the spot” curing it.

Naaman raged until a servant asked, "if the prophet told you to do something difficult, would you not do it?" The servant pointed out that the prophet had suggested something easy. Logic triumphed over fury. Naaman's gratitude was total, immediate, and sincere.

The gospel adds a twist to healing. Only one of the ten lepers returned to express his gratitude when he realized that he had been healed. The response of the other nine is an important point. It highlights the unfortunate disconnection between faith, gift, and thanksgiving that characterizes people at least some of the time. The ten lepers had faith in Jesus. Otherwise, they would not have set out to present themselves to the priests. But only a Samaritan returned to give thanks. Faith cannot exist and grow without thanksgiving. Faith is nurtured with prayer, meditation upon scripture and most especially the Eucharist.

Prayer is not just for petition in times of trouble. Prayer is for thanksgiving. It is conversation between us and God that expresses our gratitude for what God has done, for what He is doing, and for what He will do for us, even if we don't understand it at the moment. The psalm explains it all.

First, the psalmist instructs us in the way of faith when he sings:

"All the ends of the earth have seen

the salvation by our God."

And then he instructs us how to express our gratitude:

"Sing joyfully to the Lord, all you lands,

Break into song; sing praise."

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Ya' gotta love New England in the autumn. Not just the brilliantly colored vistas of read, gold, and orange leaves in the landscape but the smaller moments that are mostly unnoticed. Took these at St. Joseph Abbey, the Trappist monastery in Spencer, about an hour and change northwest of Boston.