Br. Josép Martinez-Cubero
Pentecost 18C - Sunday, October 13, 2019
2 Kings 5:1-3, 7-15c
2 Timothy 2:8-15
Luke 17:11-19
Click here for an audio version of the sermon.
Yesterday at dinner, some of you were asking me what I did before I entered the monastery. I said I ran a children’s theatre in NYC. It was a theatre I founded in 1999 and the mission was to teach children and adolescents, through the art of theatre, values such as self-discipline, teamwork, commitment, cooperation, and leadership. We produced great and impressive productions. When you teach youth about self-discipline and hard work, you don’t have to concentrate so much on talent. Great productions will happen! And I have to confess I was not an easy teacher. Teenagers were used to hearing me say somewhat controversial things like: “No whining aloud, please. It is very unattractive.” Or “A little dose of ‘get over it’ with a good measure of gratitude will take you a long way.”Needless to say that when I found out I was preaching on the Gospel story about the ten lepers, I was delighted. I thought: “Oh how lovely, a gospel lesson about gratitude. I can say a few things about that!” Well, since God has a sense of humor, this Gospel lesson has pushed my every righteous indignation button.
On the surface, it is a Gospel lesson about thankfulness, and yes, there is that. On his journey to Jerusalem, Jesus comes upon ten lepers. He heals them and tells them to go show themselves to the priests. One returns to express his gratitude to Jesus and experiences salvation. So being truly thankful blesses, and restores us. The leper’s enormous show of gratitude and Jesus’ response to it teach us that we are to recognize life as a divine gift, and to find our salvation at the feet of the Giver.
But before I go on let me get those things that bothered me out of the way. “Jesus asked, ‘Were not ten made clean? But the other nine, where are they?’” What?? As someone who is all about following instructions I can picture myself in this scene saying: “What do you mean where are they?? You just told them to go and show themselves to the priests. They are following your instructions, thank you very much!” And then he continues, and this is the statement I found quite annoying: “Was none of them found to return and give praise to God except this foreigner?" Who says that, especially while traveling through a border region that was surely full of these foreigners?!
Perhaps having Jesus ask such a preposterous question is Luke’s way of getting our attention. I can tell you he got mine! You see, in order to get to Jerusalem, Jesus has to cross the region between Galilee and Samaria -- the borderland that marks the boundary between the land where he was raised and the land he was raised never to go. It is the borderland that marks “us” and “them”.
By the first century, the hatred between Jews and Samaritans was old and entrenched. They disagreed on how to honor God, how to interpret the scriptures and where to worship. They did not socialize, mistrusted each other and expected the worse of each other. That’s why the story of the Good Samaritan must have been such a shocker in its time. What, a good Samaritan?? My neighbor is a Samaritan??
So this story is about more than gratitude. It is about the gratitude of a foreigner who receives welcome. It is about exclusion and inclusion. It is a story about the reign of God- about who is invited, who belongs, and who thrives in the realm where God dwells. As Latin American children decay in cages at our border and experience a sense of being less than human and total isolation; as thousands of LGBTQ adolescents live on the streets in NYC and LA and experience utter and complete non-belonging; as racial and religious minorities are in constant fear of being attacked in their own worship spaces, neighborhoods and schools, what does this Gospel lesson have to say about belonging and about our ongoing responsibility to the stranger, the alien, the other?
The lepers in this story also live in the shadows. In ancient Israel, leprosy was a dreaded disease considered the picture of sin. It rendered a person ceremonially defiled. Once healed, the person still had to go to the priest and carry out an extensive ritual of cleansing before being accepted back into the religious community and worship. While the physical disease was horrible, the terrible social consequences in ancient Israel only added to the misery. The Mosaic Law prescribed that lepers be cut off from society, including their family. They had to wear torn clothing, have their head uncovered and their hair disheveled, cover their lips and shout “Unclean! Unclean!” wherever they went, to warn others to keep their distance.
Jesus tells the ten lepers to go and show themselves to the priests without any evidence of having been healed. In this, their situation was similar to that of Naaman the Syrian, whom, by the way, is a foreigner, and whom Elisha told to go and bathe in the River Jordan. There would be no point in such action unless they were cleansed of their leprosy, and yet at this point they were not cleansed. They had to act with obedient faith. And that is one of the important messages of this Gospel story. Faith means we trust God. And most often God is calling us to move before we can indulge in what seems to have become the American privileged obsession of endlessly analyzing what are my best options and what am I going to get from this. Faith reminds us that our ego is not God.
Those lepers are cured because of their faith. And when Jesus heals their leprosy he doesn’t merely cure their bodies; he restores their identities. They can now return to all that makes us fully human: family, community, companionship, and intimacy. They can feel again, embrace and be embraced, worship in community. They can reclaim all that leprosy stole from them. So the response of the tenth leper to Jesus is an expression of gratitude for healing, yes. But it’s also the expression of a deeper belonging because that tenth leper is a Samaritan, a “double other” marginalized by both illness and being a foreigner.
This is the only time that phrase is used in the New Testament, but it is everywhere in the Old Testament. Foreigners are always showing up in the Hebrew Scriptures stories at key moments to challenge our thinking about the lines between “us” and “them” and where exactly we are supposed to cross those lines. Naaman the Syrian, Ruth the Moabite, Hagar, Jethro, Rahab, all of them had been “this foreigner” and have challenged our ideas of who gets included when we talk about the people of God.
The foreigner is a Samaritan and what, through his otherness, is he able to see that his companions do not? Ten lepers are healed. But only the foreigner whose kind of gratitude is able to see God’s inclusive welcome, receives salvation. Only the foreigner whose kind of gratitude takes nothing for granted and notices how rare and singular grace is when it comes to the borderlands and says, “come on in; yes, you,” is made whole.
If we find gratitude difficult, maybe we need to examine the places in our lives where we feel most comfortable, most confident, most complacent, most privileged. Maybe we, too, could use a trip to the borderlands of our heart, and step into the places where we are the outsiders, alone and afraid. Maybe we need to sit honestly with our most profound hungers. Maybe we need to recognize once again how desperately we need Jesus to welcome our vulnerable souls and say: “Your faith has made you well. Yes, your way, whatever faith and whatever path led you to meet God. Come on in. You, the one I just called foreigner.”
¡Que así sea en el nombre del Padre, del Hijo y del Espíritu Santo! ~Amen+
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