Giving God Thanks Together with Saint John Henry Newman, 28th Sunday (C), October 13, 2019

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Church of the Holy Family, Manhattan
Twenty-Eighth Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year C
October 13, 2019
2 Kings 5:14-17, Ps 98, 2 Tim2:8-13, Lk 17:11-19

To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below: 

The following text guided today’s homily: 

The horror — and ultimate blessing — of leprosy

Today’s first reading and Gospel are not simply about the Lord’s power to heal people of the dreadful disease of leprosy, but the larger point of how we’re supposed to respond when the Lord does give us an incredible gift like that. Naaman was cured of leprosy, but the Lord had a greater blessing in mind, one that he received only after he came back to thank the prophet through whom God had given the cure: he came to realize there is no God in all the earth except the Lord and that he would no longer offer sacrifices or worship to false gods, but only to the true Lord.

A similar two-part miracle happened in the Gospel in the scene of the healing of the ten lepers. All ten were cured of a disease that had been eating away their flesh and bones, that had made them stink worse than skunks, that had made them outcasts and forced them to stay at least 50 feet away from any non-leper forced to cry out “unclean!, unclean!,” anytime someone was approaching. It cut them off from their family members. It also cut them off from the communal worship of God as they could never return to the Synagogue on Saturday or to the Temple on the major holy days. But at their insistent, even courageous, cry for mercy, Jesus healed them all and sent them to the priests, which was the means set up in the Mosaic Law for their cure to be verified by affirming that the disease had stopped growing and they were no longer contagious. The text of St. Luke indicates that as they were heading to the priest, they were completely cured: they no longer had their leprous sores, and their bodies had been made whole again. After recognizing that the miracle for which they had prayed and long for had been granted, we would have expected that all of them would have been rejoicing almost as if they had been raised from the dead. But only one of the ten returned to thank the Lord Jesus who had given them this gift. Jesus poignantly asks, “Ten were cleansed, were they not? Where are the other nine?”

Jesus wished them all to return not because he had worked the miracle with impure motives to get them to thank him, but so that he might give them an even greater gift than their stupendous physical cure. He wanted to give them all what he gave the Samaritan who returned: the grace of salvation by faith. After the healed man fell down at his feet to thank him with all his heart, Jesus told him, “Stand up and go. Your faith has saved you!”

This is a key point: Jesus came into the world not fundamentally to heal our bodies but to restore our souls. He came not to remedy our ills but to redeem our lives. In order to receive these greater gifts, however, we need gratefully to be in relationship with God. While all ten men were cured of the physical leprosy, nine retained leprosy of the soul, an ingratitude that took for granted the greatest gift they had received in life until then. Only the grateful leper would receive the gift of salvation because only he had a heart that was opened to receive it. The other nine didn’t and Jesus made note of it, saying, “Has none but this foreigner returned to give thanks to God?”

The other nine lepers were presumably Jesus’ beloved fellow Jews. Jesus was implying that it was shocking that only the Samaritan returned because Jews had been trained by God for centuries in the prayers of the Psalms and in the incredible events of salvation history to give thanks to the Lord for he is good, for his mercy endures forever. If anyone should have learned how to say thanks to God, it should have been the Jews. But many of them took God’s generosity, God’s goodness, for granted.

The other nine likely looked at their disease with anger toward God, as if he had somehow sadistically chosen for unjust punishment such that when they were cured they looked at it the way people might view getting released from an unkind kidnapper: they would be grateful for the liberation but they likely wouldn’t send a thank-you note to the one who had held them in captivity.

But the Samarian, even though his body had been disintegrating, his soul hadn’t been destroyed by leprosy of bitterness, complaining, cursing, or ingratitude. His fundamental relationship with God was still there. He likely thanked God for all the little things he received from his hands, like the generosity of people who would provide food, or give a kind word of compassion. And when he received the big grace of his cure, he did what he probably always did, and immediately sought to thank the Giver. And he likely grew to thank God even for his years of leprosy, because if he hadn’t been a leper, he may never have encountered Jesus the way he did and never would have received the gift of salvation by faith.

Thanking the Lord always and everywhere

It’s important for us as Christians to focus on gratitude. We have been blessed with gifts of faith through Jesus far greater than the Jews ever received, but do we readily thank God for his gifts and, through that gratitude, often ourselves even more profoundly to a life-changing relationship with the Divine Giver? Or do we behave like the nine other lepers? Many Catholics would be eligible for honorary doctoral degrees in complaining, rather than known by all our friends and family for our gratitude. Some of us would complain about the menu at the Last Supper. For us, the glass is never full, the beach is too sunny, the water is too wet. When we’re asked about how we’re doing, we complain about a slight toothache rather than express our gratitude that our eyes, ears, mouth, nose and every joint of our body is without pain. We grumble about what we don’t have, rather than rejoice with appreciation at what we do. That’s why today’s readings are so important.

At every Mass, one of the most important dialogues in human life occurs at Mass. The priest says, “Let us give thanks to the Lord our God.” Everyone responds, “It is right and just.” And then the priest replies with a saying of great theological depth: “It is truly right and just, our duty and our salvation, always and everywhere to give you thanks, Lord, Holy Father, almighty and ever-living God.” It’s right, it’s just, it’s fitting, it’s appropriate for us to give God thanks, “always and everywhere.” It’s right, just, fitting and appropriate for us to do so on sunny days and rainy days, on days we feel like a million bucks and days we’re in the hospital, on days when we’re attending weddings and those we’re attending funerals of loved ones, on days when we get promotions and bonuses at work and days we get pink slips, on days when we win and on days that we lose. It’s right and just to thank God always and everywhere. It’s our duty to thank God because he has directly willed or permitted everything that has happened to us, both what the world considers good and what the world considers bad, because even out of the bad — like leprosy in Naaman or the Samaritan — he seeks to draw spiritual good, for “everything works out for the good for those who love God” (Rom 8:28).

Gratitude for the Sacrament that Heals Us of Spiritual Leprosy

It is particularly important for us to recognize and thank the Lord for the gift of his mercy, for the way he seeks to heal us of a leprosy of the soul far uglier and more injurious than any leprosy of the flesh. Pope Francis, in his homily this morning in St. Peter’s Square, said, “Like those lepers, we too need healing, each one of us. … The Lord sets our hearts free and heals them if only we ask him, only if we say to him: ‘Lord, I believe you can heal me.’ The lepers are the first people, in this Gospel, who called on the name of Jesus. Later, a blind man and a crucified thief would do so: all of them needy people calling on the name of Jesus, which means: ‘God saves.’” When we cry out to him, “Jesus, Master! Have pity on us!,” he turns to us and says, “Go show yourselves to the priests!,” to the priests he himself sent out on Easter Sunday evening with the power to forgive and retain sins in his name, to the priests who by transmitting Jesus’ reconciliation allow us to participate in his resurrection. Sometimes Catholics may not like the means by which Jesus seeks to heal us. They may prefer to try to confess their sins to God alone without any minister, to keep their shame just between them and God with no intermediary, including an intermediary who because of the Sacramental Seal would allow himself to be tortured and martyred rather than reveal the littlest detail of what he heard. But just as Jesus had the ten lepers take a journey of faith and go show themselves to the priests before they experienced healing, so he does with us. We need to trust Jesus enough to trust in the means he established for our healing.

In today’s first reading, we have only the end of the scene of Naaman’s healing, but the beginning is so important for us to learn, because it can be applied easily to our approach to Confession and so many other aspects of our faith. When this power Army commander had gone with his dreadful disease to the prophet Elisha in the hope he might be healed, Elisha tested his faith. He didn’t even come to greet him. He simply sent a note saying, “Go and wash seven times in the Jordan, and your flesh will heal, and you will be clean.” Naaman immediately responded with anger, saying, “I thought that he would surely come out and stand there to invoke the Lord his God, and would move his hand over the spot, and thus cure the leprosy. Are not the rivers of Damascus, the Abana and the Pharpar, better than all the waters of Israel? Could I not wash in them and be cleansed?” And in his indignation he began to leave. His servants, however, came up to reason with him. “If the prophet had told you to do something extraordinary, would you not have done it?,” they asked. “All the more now, since he said to you, ‘Wash and be clean,’ should you do as he said.” And so Naaman went down and plunged into the Jordan seven times at the word of Elisha and, as we see in today’s excerpt, his flesh became again like the flesh of a little child, and he was totally cleansed. This shows us that God seeks to heal us in ways that help us to grow in faith as he cures us. And the means by which he established to forgive us our sins is one such means. It’s simple enough. We don’t have to hike up Mt. Everest barefoot, we just have to do what the Lord himself commanded, and when we do, that’s when he heals. And the ease and the availability of that gift should fill us with enormous joy, the joy that Jesus describes heaven has whenever one repentant sinner is healed.

Earlier this morning in St. Peter’s Square, Pope Francis canonized Saint John Henry Newman, the great 19th Century British convert from Anglicanism to Catholicism, Oxford don, prodigious author, poet and musician, letter writer, friend, priest, Oratorian, university founder, Cardinal, passionate lover of the truth and, we pray, future doctor of the Church. He used this scene of the Gospel and the healing of Naaman precisely to teach us about the Sacrament of Confession and try to persuade us to come to receive it. “Such is the power of the Sacrament of Penance,” he said, “that, be your load of guilt heavier or be it lighter, it removes it, whatever it is. It is as easy to Him to wash out the many sins as the few. Do you recollect in the Old Testament the history of the cure of Naaman the Syrian, by the prophet Eliseus? He had that dreadful, incurable disease called the leprosy, which was a white crust upon the skin, making the whole person hideous, and typifying the hideousness of sin. The prophet bade him bathe in the river Jordan, and the disease disappeared; ‘his flesh,’ says the inspired writer, was ‘restored to him as the flesh of a little child.’ Here, then, we have a representation not only of what sin is, but of what God’s grace is. It can undo the past, it can realize the hopeless. No sinner, ever so odious, but may become a Saint.” It is a Sacrament he loved to receive. It is a Sacrament he loved to celebrate as a priest. He said, “If there is a heavenly idea in the Catholic Church, looking at it simply as an idea, surely, next after the Blessed Sacrament, Confession is such.” But it’s more than an idea. It’s a reality, if only we cry out, if only we come to receive it, if only we are grateful for the gift and use it!

The School of Thanksgiving

Every Mass we’re called to grow in this spirit of thanksgiving, because the Eucharist is Jesus’ own prayer of Thanksgiving to the Father. The Greek word from which we derive the word “Eucharist” means “thanksgiving.” Saint John Henry wrote in some homiletic notes that “gratitude is a kind of love.” In the Eucharist we express our love for God who himself loved us so much that he gave his life so that we might have it to the full.

It’s always stopped me in my tracks that right before Jesus said the words of consecration on the night he would be betrayed, on the vigil of his crucifixion, he took bread and, as we’ll hear anew today, “gave thanks.” He gave thanks, because it is right always and everywhere, our duty and our salvation, to do so. He gave thanks because he was constantly thanking the Father. He gave thanks because he knew that the Father would bring the greatest good out of the greatest evil of all time, which would happen to him after the Mass was done. He gave thanks because it would be through his passion, death and resurrection, that Jesus would institute the means by which we would be able to enter into his own relationship with the Father.

The Mass is the school in which we participate in Jesus’ own thanksgiving, the thanksgiving the Church makes continuously from the rising of the sun to its setting. The Lord has done far more for us than he ever did for the ten lepers. Here at Mass he gives us in a concrete way even more than what he gave to the one grateful leper when he said, “Your faith has saved you!” This is where he gives himself to us as salvation-in-the-flesh.

No matter what hardships we’re enduring, what problems we’re facing, no matter what illnesses we’re bearing, God comes into our world, to accompany us, to strengthen us, to heal us, to help us. He comes down here to save us. And so we say the only worthy thing we can to such incredible generosity: “Thanks be to God!” Deo gratias!

It is truly right, our duty and our salvation, always and everywhere to give God this thanks and praise! Amen!

The readings for today’s Mass were: