Fr. Roger J. Landry
St. Agnes Church, New York, NY
Thirteenth Sunday after Pentecost, Extraordinary Form
August 30, 2020
Gal 3:16-22, Lk 17:11-19
To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below:
The following text guided the homily:
- To have leprosy in the ancient world was about the worst thing that could happen to someone. Not only would Hansen’s disease eat away your flesh and bones, not only would it make you stink worse than skunks, but it would lead to your total banishment from society. As outcasts they would have to stay at least 50 feet away from any non-leper forced to cry out “unclean!, unclean!,” anytime someone was approaching. Leprosy cut you off from their family members. It also cut you off from the communal worship of God because you could never return to the Synagogue on Saturday or to the Temple on the major holy days. When Jesus approached, the lepers with voices trained from yelling out “Unclean!,” stood at a distance from Jesus, raised their voice, and screamed something else: “Jesus, Master! Have pity on us!” And Jesus did have mercy. He told them, “Go, show yourselves to the priests,” because priests were the only ones under the Mosaic law who were able, intelligently, to pronounce a leper healed and return him or her to society. Even to say this, however, was to imply that he had cured them, but he actually didn’t pronounce them cured or let them see the effects. It took an act of faith on their part to start journeying to find a priest simply on Jesus’ word. But that’s what they did.
- As they were journeying, however, they became aware they were cured. St. Luke tells us one of them, a Samaritan, turned around. Before he would show himself to the priests — who may not have not wanted to deal with him because of the historic animosity between Jews and Samaritans — he wanted to thank the One who had given him a miracle. Glorifying God, he came to Jesus, fell at his feet, and thanked him. Jesus’ words are very powerful. He didn’t immediately reply, “You’re welcome.” He didn’t stress that he was the incarnate love of God in the world and that he had done this for him out of love. Rather, he asked aloud, “Ten were cleansed, were they not? Where are the other nine?” He knew he had cured all ten of leprosy, but only one was showing gratitude. Jesus then pointed out that the man who returned was a Samaritan, saying, “Has none but this foreigner returned to give thanks to God?,” and implying, “Where are the Jews?” The Jews were accustomed to pray, “Give thanks to the Lord who is good, whose love endures forever!” (Ps 107:1; Ps 118:1); to chant, “With my whole being I sing endless praise to you. O Lord, my God, forever will I give you thanks” (Ps 30:13); to declare, “We thank you, God, we give thanks; we call upon your name, declare your wonderful deeds” (Ps 75:2). No Jew returned. And the reason why it mattered so much to Jesus was not because he was a jealous insecure egomaniac who wanted people to appreciate his generosity and enter into his debt. No, he wanted to give them all a far greater gift than curing them of their leprosy! He wanted to give them the fulfillment of the promise St. Paul describes in today’s passage from the letter to the Galatians.
- This is the 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 whole life. 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 and that closed them off from an even greater one. Only the grateful leper would receive the gift of salvation because only he had a heart that was opened to receive it, only he had the sense that the Giver was even greater than the healing he had bestowed. 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 share 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. And as St. Paul says to Galatians today, God the Father’s will was that “through faith in Jesus Christ, the promise might be given” to everyone who believes. In order to receive that gift, however, we have to be in grateful relation with the Giver.
- That’s why it’s so important for us as Christians to focus on gratitude. We have been blessed with gifts of faith through Jesus far greater than the Jews of Jesus’ day had 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? Couldn’t Jesus say, “Where are the other nine?” with regard to the gift of our Baptism, since so few of us really thank him for this most important day in our life, no matter how long we live. Couldn’t Jesus query, “Where are the other nine?” with regard to Sunday Mass, since so many Catholics don’t come on Sunday when we must, and so many more don’t come during the week, when we could but choose not to. Couldn’t he ask, “Where are the other nine?” with regard to the Sacrament of his Mercy that restores us to the way to salvation, because so many of never or seldom come, even to confess our ingratitude. Couldn’t Jesus wonder, “Where are the other nine?” about Sacred Scripture, which bathes us in the cleansing, saving power of his word, because so few of us ever take up the Bible to read it and hear God’s voice. Couldn’t Jesus say, “Where are the other nine?” with regard to the many neighbors he sends us in need, like the homeless outside the door of the Church, so that we can more easily put into practice his command to love our neighbor as he has loved us. Rather than overflowing with appropriate gratitude, many of us and our fellow Catholics would be eligible for honorary doctoral degrees in complaining. We often behave as spiritually spoiled brats rather than grateful, trusting, loving children. 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 can grumble about a slight toothache rather than express our gratitude that our eyes, ears, nose and every joint of our body is without pain. Some of us might even complain about the menu at the Last Supper. That’s why it’s essential for us to learn and live the lesson of today’s Gospel and how Jesus expects and requires our gratitude in order that we might be able to receive all he desires to give.
- At Mass, one of the most important dialogues in human life occurs. The priest says, “Let us give thanks to the Lord our God” (Gratias agamus Domino Deo Nostro). Everyone responds, “It is right and just” (Dignum et iustum est). And then the priest replies with a prayer 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 ICU, on days when we’re attending weddings and those we’re attending the 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 Godalways 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 — even out of leprosy — he seeks to draw spiritual good, for, as St. Paul reminds us, “everything works out for the good for those who love God” (Rom 8:28).
- This does not mean that there are not a lot of things to be rightly upset about. The deaths and disruptions flowing from the coronavirus. The terrible violence on our streets. The racial injustice so many of our brothers and sisters must endure. The poor performance of so many of those in public office to the crises of the day. The failure of so many in the Church. Personal set backs in terms of work or school or important extra-curriculars. Wounds from relationships. Misunderstandings, harassment, discrimination and even persecution of religious believer. The suffering and death of loved ones. To say that we should give thanks always and everywhere does not deny any of these realities. But it is a summons to something far greater. It’s a call to look beyond what rightly troubles us and to focus on the much bigger picture: That God is with us. That we’re alive. That we’re Christian. That we and so many we love are basically healthy. That we’re not living in Venezuela, or Ethiopia, or Somalia, or China, but rather in a country in which we still have freedom and access to basic material necessities and far more, not to mention a place in which we can attend Mass in the Ordinary and Extraordinary Forms, get to confession, live in faith and even die with the Sacraments. We could spend the rest of the day enumerating these blessings, and we need to focus on them way more than on our troubles, in order to become truly Christian and give thanks to God always and everywhere.
- Let’s get practical. How can we learn to be truly men and women, boys and girls, whose faith and lives are marked by constitutive, overflowing gratitude to God as well to others? Many think that some people are just born naturally bubbly and grateful and that others are born with bad digestion such that they’re regularly complaining. Others claim certain cultures are more expressively grateful — like we find in the Philippines or southern Nigeria — and others are more stern and moaning, as if gratitude depends on ultimately on our passport. No all of us are called to gratitude. I’d like to focus on three things the Lord wants to help us to learn to do, in order of increasing difficulty.
- The first thing is regularly to pray in thanksgiving to God. The Catechism teaches us that there are various “forms” of prayer. Beyond praise, contrition, intercession for others, and petition for our own needs, the Catechism describes prayer of thanksgiving, when we turn to God expressing our gratitude for everything he has done for us, everything he has given us. Since we pray as we live and live as we pray, if we’re going to become grateful people, we need regularly to being thanking God in our prayer. I often encourage those who come to see me struggling with problems of complaining, or envy, or bitterness to spend ten minutes a day in prayer of Thanksgiving to God. Sometimes they’ve asked me, “But what will I say for ten minutes a day?,” and I encourage them, “Just start with your right hand and you’ll find 25 things for which to thank God that you ordinarily take for granted,” you have all five of your nails, all of your carpals and metacarpals work, all of your ligaments work, you have coordination such that you can eat, drive, type, shake hands, and do so much more, that you don’t have arthritis or at least don’t have it as badly as you might, that you don’t have leprosy or other skin diseases, and so many other things that can listed. Today in a special way I’d encourage everyone here to take ten minutes today and list out so many blessings that God has given and thank God for each and every one of them. The more we do this, the more we open ourselves to recognizing and receiving so much more.
- The second practice is more challenging: It’s to get over our spiritual consumerism, our constantly giving in to the temptation to obsess about what we don’t have rather than to thank God for what we do. Many of us relate to God not with resentment rather than gratitude. Some of us have a sense of divine entitlement in which we believe that God “owes” us every good thing he’s given to anyone else. We’re never satisfied. We approach God with the attitude, “What have you done for me lately?” Even if everything is going “fine” we can complain that it’s not going better. Even though we have what we need, we’re possessed by a desire for something newer, faster, bigger. We covet and get upset over the blessings of others rather than rejoice with them for those gifts and rejoice over the blessings we ourselves have. I call it spiritual consumerism because we are trained by our culture, by all our advertisements, that we’re never going to be happy unless we get the latest smart phone, or self-driving Tesla, or clothing, or wonder drug. We’re never going to be happy unless we not only have what the Jones have, but have something better. There’s a different way. It’s to be grateful for what God has given us. It’s to recognize that God regularly provides all we really need — food, clothing, housing — and all the rest is really never as important as we think it is. It’s to start desiring the things that really matter — God’s kingdom, God’s glory, God’s name to be hallowed, God’s will to be done — rather than building up for ourselves an earthly kingdom that we can never take with us when we go. It’s to grasp that our definitive happiness will never be found in money, in happiness, in sports teams, even in other people, but only in God.
- The third practice is the hardest of all: it’s to learn how to thank God even for the things that the world considers curses, to handle setbacks with gratitude, to love the Cross. Most of us moan about the Crosses we have. We may tolerate them with as an evil, but we’re never grateful for them. The reason for this is, frankly, we give too much of our heart to the things of this world, to our health, to our this-worldly contentment, to everyone liking us, even to our life here on earth. To become people capable of thanking God always and everywhere, we need to recognize that God is “always and everywhere” blessing us, sometimes even with hardship and the Cross. Like with the leper, God might allow us to contract a terrible disease in order for us finally to go to confession to the chaplain in the hospital, or finally to bring us to reconciliation with a friends, or get our fallen away family members back to pray through praying for us, or even because he wants to bring us through that purification straight to heaven. Similarly, God may let us lose a job or not get one, or fail a test, to help us to grasp that we have been taking so many of his gifts for granted and enter to a deeper relationship with him. We need to learn to thank him for everything, for he seeks to use all things, adverse and propitious, to sculpt us more and more into the image of his Son. Blessed Solanus Casey, who worked in the lower East Side, in Harlem, Brooklyn and Yonkers, used to always counsel, “Thank God ahead of time!” When we learn to thank God for the Crosses and the difficulties, and for all of the good he wants to bring from them, then it will be possible for us to thank him in all circumstances.
- The great vocational technical school God has established to train us in perpetual thanksgiving is the Mass. It’s highly significant that when the first Christians described what they were doing when they got together to “do this in memory” of the Lord, they didn’t called it the “Celebration of the body and blood of the Lord Jesus,” even though that, of course, would have been true. They didn’t call it “The Feast of the Lord’s Supper” or “The Banquet of the Lamb,” even though both would have been pluperfectly appropriate. They called it the Eucaristein, from the Greek word for thanksgiving. The Mass was a Thanksgiving feast during the times of growth and peace as well as during times of persecution. Their fundamental approach to the Mass was that it was the greatest way possible for them to thank God for the gift of life, for so many blessings of family and friends, for the gift of the Christian faith and the new life and family they had received in baptism, and for the gift of salvation. The early Christians recognized quite clearly that what they were doing as entering into Jesus’ own thanksgiving, always and everywhere, to the Father. It’s always stopped me in my tracks that right before Jesus said the words of consecration on the night he would be betrayed not just by Judas but the other proud and cowardly apostles, on the vigil of his crucifixion, he took bread and, as we’ll hear anew today, “gave thanks.” Then, before he took the chalice, from which he would have them drink of the Precious Blood that would pour from his hands, feet and side on the morrow, he once more gave thanks (item Tibi gratias agens). Hegave thanks, because it is right always and everywhere, our duty and our salvation, to do so. He gave thanks because his whole life was a thankgiving to the Father. He gave thanks because he knew that the Father would bring the greatest good out of the greatest evil of all time. 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 grateful relationship with the Father. The early Christians, in entering Jesus’ prayer of Thanksgiving, brought their own. They know the Lord has done far more for us than he ever did for the ten lepers. Here at Mass he gives us more than what he gave to the one grateful leper when he said, “Your faith has saved you!” He gives us himself, who is Salvation-in-the-flesh. No matter what hardships we’re enduring, no matter what losses we’re suffered, God comes into our world, to accompany us, to strengthen us, to heal us, to help us. He comes down here each day to save us. And so we say, “Thanks be to God!” Deo gratias! It is truly right, our duty and our salvation, always and everywhere to give God thanks and praise! And we ask God for the grace to increase in us a spirit of thanksgiving so that we may receive a deepening of his gift of salvation and come to that eternal Thanksgiving feast where with all the saints we may have the privilege of thanking him forever!
The readings for today’s Mass were:
A reading from the Letter of St. Paul to the Galatians
Now the promises were made to Abraham and to his descendant. It does not say, “And to descendants,” as referring to many, but as referring to one, “And to your descendant,” who is Christ. This is what I mean: the law, which came four hundred and thirty years afterward, does not annul a covenant previously ratified by God, so as to cancel the promise. For if the inheritance comes from the law, it is no longer from a promise; but God bestowed it on Abraham through a promise. Why, then, the law? It was added for transgressions, until the descendant came to whom the promise had been made; it was promulgated by angels at the hand of a mediator. Now there is no mediator when only one party is involved, and God is one. Is the law then opposed to the promises? Of course not! For if a law had been given that could bring life, then righteousness would in reality come from the law. But scripture confined all things under the power of sin, that through faith in Jesus Christ the promise might be given to those who believe.
The Continuation of the Holy Gospel according to St. 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 voice, 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.”
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