The Gospel we have just heard this morning, the healing of the ten lepers, is not one of the most well-known and it’s a passage that can also be a little difficult for us to understand: We don’t know much about the disease of leprosy and we are not very familiar with the customs of 1st century Jews. Yet one thing is quite obvious for us from the beginning, and it is that this passage is about thankfulness. It is actually one of the passages of the Gospel that are also read at church on Thanksgiving Day. Jesus heals ten lepers, sending them to the Temple, and what happens then is that one of the lepers, a foreigner from the region of Samaria, when he realizes on the way that he has been healed, turns around and come to bow down before Jesus to give him thanks, and Jesus shows him as an example. For us, Christians, we know that thankfulness is really something important, for example every Sunday we celebrate the “Eucharist”, which literally means in Greek “To say thanks” (That’s why we also call this prayer: the great Thanksgiving, BCP p.367). The thing is, although we know that thankfulness is important, we are not also sure what it means for us exactly, and sometimes we have even quite strange ideas about it.
So why do I say that we sometimes have strange ideas about what thankfulness is about? Well, actually something happened to me this past week that caused me to think. I was talking with a friend who had a baby a few months ago, she is her second child, the elder one has just started kindergarten. My friend was telling that she herself was just back to work also, and so I told her that she was probably quite busy. And right away she answered me: Yes, I am very busy, but I am very thankful to have them. And at this point something strange happened in my mind, I told myself: It sounds like this is quite exhausting. I immediately interpreted the fact that she said she was “busy but grateful” as a way of saying that things were a bit difficult. When I think about it, I am not sure this is indeed what she meant, I know a lot of young mothers don’t dare to complain because they know that they are some women who cannot have children and are not so lucky, but maybe it was not that. What I know for sure though is that in my mind I put together those two ideas: When we need to be thankful, it’s probably because things aren’t that simple. For example, when someone dies, we are told as Christians that we need to be “thankful for their lives”, and at a time of extreme sadness, it’s really not an easy thing to ask. But I believe that a lot of other Christians share this way of seeing things. We tell ourselves we need to be thankful because what happens to us, the good and the bad, is God’s will, because things could be worse, because others don’t have what we have, because we are sinners and we don’t deserve what we have and so on…For me, I know this was the way I was raised. When I didn’t want to eat my vegetables, my grandmother always told me: You should be thankful to have something to eat, think about all the children in Africa who aren’t so lucky. And of course, my grandmother was right in what she was saying, but for the little girl I was it wasn’t really helpful.
And so for all those reasons, I am quite curious about this passage of the Gospel today, to try to unpack what it really has to say about thankfulness, because actually when I read this passage I don’t see anything that sustains those ready made and guilt-ridden ideas we develop about thankfulness – actually it is quite the opposite. So let’s have a look at it!
1- First of all, we see that here we have ten lepers. Leprosy, as you may know, is a very serious disease that affect the whole of the human body and its organs. Today, we have ways of treating it that we didn’t have at Jesus’s time but what made it worse in Antiquity is that people believed that the disease was much more contagious than it actually is. So to protect themselves, people would put lepers on the margins of society, they actually had to live completely apart from healthy people and not let anyone approach them. In spite of all of this, we see in our passage that Jesus is ready to help the lepers right away. He understands their despair and their suffering, and we see that all over Luke’s Gospel. Jesus always helped people who asked him to. He never asked them “What are you complaining about?”, he never said: “It could be worse”, he never implied that it was God’s will for people to suffer or that they must have done something wrong to bring this on themselves. Of course in our passage, those lepers were obviously in a very difficult situation, but we need to remember that whatever the situation, Jesus always strove to bring healing, joy and peace. It is good news for us to realize that Jesus wants to help us whatever our situation. He does not turn his back on people telling them that they should be contented with their lot. In the same way, we should realize that it is in fact not a very Christian thing to do to guilt people by asking them to be thankful when they are sad, sick, or in troubles. It’s okay not to be okay!
2 – That’s a second thing I notice about Jesus: He does not force people to be thankful. He does not expect people to bow down before him before helping them, as long as people are sincere, as long as they don’t ask signs just to test him, Jesus helps everyone freely. We see in this passage how discretely the healing is done. Jesus only requires of the ten lepers that they would go and show themselves to the priests, which was actually the thing people who were sick with leprosy were expected to do when they thought they had recovered from the disease (that didn’t happen often!): The priests had to examine their skin, like a doctor would do today, and then they would sign a certificate confirming that they were “clean” and the people could go back to their families, their lives and worship. We see that Jesus does not make a big fuss to try to impress people, the healing occur when the lepers are already far from him. Jesus seeks people’s well-being, he does not heal for his own benefit, so that people would think well of him or feel indebted. In the same way, when Jesus helps us today, he is never going to hold us accountable for his help. And I think this is also a good example for our relationships with each other: We have to learn to give freely, without expecting something in return, without hoping that people would think well of us. We need to help people even if they’re never going to be aware of what we did for them and never say thank. And on the other way around, we may also need to learn to receive, even when we know we won’t be able to give back. How the lepers could give back to Jesus what he did for them?
3 – And yet, in spite of all we have said, Jesus still show the man who says thank as an example for all of us. So how van we understand that? Well, it is quite interesting to realize that what Jesus laments is not so much that the nine don’t say thanks, it is rather that they don’t praise God. Actually, if we really read attentively what Luke wrote, we will see that Jesus does not speak at all about the nine not giving thanks. What’s shocking him is that they are unable to see God’s goodness towards them. This Gospel is not about what being polite, it’s about what faith looks like. Jesus told the tenth leper that “His faith has made him well”. To have faith is to be able to perceive God’s goodness and to receive it in spite of our personal trials and in the midst of all the suffering we can witness in the world. To “have faith”does not necessary means to be healed physically or even mentally, it’s about knowing that God loves us and that we matter to God, even when sick, a stranger, rejected by others. Faith is about knowing that God wants us to receive life and looking to have a living relationship with God. The nine lepers only carry on their religious duty, but the tenth “praise God with a loud voice” and “prostrate himself at Jesus’s feet” says Luke. Of course, we can express our joy or thankfulness differently, but what I notice is that this man express himself very spontaneously, with all his heart. This may be difficult for us. We often have this relationship with Jesus where, like the lepers at the beginning of the text, “[we] approach [him] keeping [our] distance”. Maybe because we feel impure, but maybe also because we don’t want to make it too complicated. I think this is the reason why the nine stay on their way to the Temple, it’s easier to continue to practice religion as they know it without rocking the boat. And yet, I think that Jesus really want to bring a radical change in the way people relate to God, that they may know joy and intimacy and a deep sense of being loved, and I would like to finish on that.
One thing we generally don’t know about leprosy is that it was sort of a disease of “indifference”. Far from being painful, when sick with leprosy you become numb, the disease attack the nerves, and people end up hurting themselves in all sorts of ways because they can’t feel a thing. According to Luke, Jesus heals ten people of this disastrous physical condition, but only one is healed of the similar spiritual condition. Indifference, this is the death of faith, we can find it in nihilism, when people don’t think that anything makes sense, but we can also find it when we are too comfortable with our beliefs, when we become numb in our religious duties. Keeping our faith alive by putting all our heart in it, maybe this is what thankfulness is really about.