 |
| Healing of the Lepers James Tissort (1894) |
- Jeremiah 29:1, 4-7 and Psalm 66:1-12 •
- 2 Kings 5:1-3, 7-15c and Psalm 111 •
- 2 Timothy 2:8-15 •
- Luke 17:11-19
On first reading, the Gospel passage for
this week seems to be a relatively simple healing story, with a moral about
gratitude. Yet on closer reading the details are puzzling. Jesus instructs ten
lepers who appeal for his help to go and show themselves to the priest. They do
as he says and on the way find themselves cured. One returns to thank Jesus,
who asks where the other nine are, and then tells this one – a Samaritan --
that his faith has made him whole. But where did the nine go wrong? They did
just what Jesus told them to, and they too, the passage says, were made whole?
So why was one specially commended?
The answer is that, though a Samaritan, he
alone realized that the miracle revealed Jesus as standing in a unique
relationship to God. The wholeness that this perception brought him, was not
merely freedom from leprosy -- which the others gained as well -- but new,
saving and transforming spiritual insight.
This insight into who Jesus really was
lies at the heart of Paul’s conversion and his extraordinary mission to the
Gentile world. The substance, and power, of his preaching springs from the
sudden realization on the road to Damascus that Jesus was not the dead leader
of a renegade Jewish sect as he had thought, but the Risen Christ, who evermore
would be at work reconciling the worlds of Jew and Gentile, male and female,
slave and free to the God of Abraham and Isaac.
 |
| Naaman is cured from Leprosy 12th century enamel |
There are a number of places in his
letters where this message is stated with special eloquence. The Epistle for
this week is one of them. “Remember Jesus Christ, raised from the dead, a
descendant of David-- that is my gospel”. “To obtain the salvation that is in
Christ Jesus, with eternal glory, the saying is sure: If we have died with him,
we will also live with him; if we
endure, we will also reign with him”. The Old Testament reading – the story of
leprous Naaman, Commander of the Aramean armies --underlines both the
connection with the God of the Israelites, and the fact that it is not health,
but knowledge that is key. When Naaman’s
‘flesh was restored like the flesh of a young boy’, he, like that one leper,
‘returned to the man of God . . . and said, “Now I know that there is no God in all the earth
except in Israel.”
Jesus made no special demands of the leper
who returned, and gave him no special benefits. What marked him out from the
rest was his ability to recognize Jesus for who he was. It is a test that many
have failed.
No comments:
Post a Comment