Rev. Myron Erickson + Luke 17:11-19 + Lectionary 28 C
As a young boy in elementary school, the days between Christmas Day and the return to classes after New Year was a most wonderful time of year. That week to ten days meant the freedom from school with the much less frenzied pace my family adopted once the hub bub of cleaning house and wrapping gifts and hosting Christmas dinners and repeated church services was complete.
However, every year there was one task which hung over this cherished time for me. My Mom would say “Have you written your thank you notes for Christmas presents to your out-of-town aunts and uncles yet?” At the beginning of the annual request cycle, she would say something helpful like “I can get them in the mail today when I go to the Post Office.” Gradually, as days passed and I failed to produce the documents her tone would take on more directness, more urgency. “Those notes need to be written before you go back to school, or else you will never get them done.” Finally, every year my resistance to writing two simple notes to relatives would lead to this: “How do you expect them to ever send you another gift if you don’t express your appreciation for the gifts they already sent? Aren’t you the least bit thankful?”
Jesus is confronted by ten lepers while traveling on the border between Galilee and the foreign territory of Samaria. It is interesting to note, while not central to our story, that biblical leprosy was not the specific viral disease known today as Hansen’s Disease. In the Bible, anyone labelled a leper was ca person considered unclean either due to visible disease, perhaps smallpox or hives or terrible psoriasis, or for having committed a ritually impure act. A person who handled pork, for example, would have been considered like a leper without being marked, pork being forbidden under every circumstance. Even if a person displayed no visible signs of disease, he would have been required to cleansed as deemed appropriate by one of the priests for approval prior to reentering society. Until then, social distancing was required.
Without overdramatizing the parallel between receiving of Christmas gifts with being healed from a terrible and socially isolating condition called leprosy, it is not a great leap for me to hear my mom’s voice in the question asked by Jesus in our text:
“Were not ten made clean? Where are the other none?”
“How about a little something, you know, for the effort?”
He seems to overlook the appreciation that was expressed by the one who did return, the one identified as a foreigner. It is almost as if his thanks count for nothing simply because he, likely a Samaritan, was not from the tribe of Israel, the chosen and faithful children of Abraham.
Rightly so, this passage from Luke revolves around the subject of gratitude. Gratitude is good, we can all agree. But I am positive we can all also come to consensus to say, “Sometimes gratitude is really, really hard.” While we might know we should feel thankful in certain situations, the feeling might be missing. Or the situation in which gratitude is called for is lived against a complex background that is distracting, or even the opposite.
Let’s think about the experience from the point of view of this outsider. He was, in fact, socially separated and kept apart for two reasons: his leprosy, and the fact that he was a Samaritan, part of the lost tribes of Israel who had come to be regarded as beyond the chose people.
Think about it. While he is no longer a leper, he is still a Samaritan. He was so overwhelmed by gratitude for the miracle Jesus brought upon him that he came back and approached Jesus once again, no longer keeping distance but throwing himself at Jesus’s feet in thanksgiving. Jesus tells him to get up and enjoy his health, because his faith has made him well. But the life he goes back to is still as a person regarded as second or even third class.
I’d like to tell you a story which I witnessed several years ago as a hospital chaplain. A disclaimer before I start—don’t hear this as an example of how we should react or behave if we were ever in a similar situation. Just listen in the context of our thinking about gratitude.
This happened when I was called to accompany an elderly woman to a bedside where her husband of sixty years had just passed away. He had been a surgical patient who seemed to be recovering nicely, well enough that she had left to go home and get some rest for herself. While gone one afternoon, he deteriorated suddenly, and died despite the interventions of the medical team.
Because his death that day had been unexpected, as a chaplain I was not sure what to expect in terms of a grief response once she saw her husband. Would the suddenness of loss overcome her? Would the fact she was not with him when he passed intensify her response? Would she be inconsolable because after sixty years together, she had not said one more goodbye he could hear?
When we got to the room where he lay, she of course cried. I made sure she had tissue and stood with the nurse who had cared for him across the bed silently for a few minutes while she wept quietly. Then she looked at us and unfolded for our hearing the story of their life together. They were born and grew up in a country that was at the time an enemy of our country. They were lucky enough to find safety by immigrating to the United States when they had opportunity. They faced challenges together, overcoming prejudice, and trying to understand the language and culture of a country that was not their place of birth, but over the decades they built a life and raised a family, feeling settled and content.
After she explained this to me, speaking across the bed, she was silent for a few more moments. And then she took her husband’s hand and said to him, “Thank you for sharing your life with me, and all we lived through.” Then a pause. And then, “Thank you for making my life so much more beautiful.”
Such profound gratitude amid such deep grief. And improbable. I was fighting back tears, as was the nurse who had also been in the room for support. And this is not the sort of thing I ever expect to hear from a grieving widow, and I don’t tell this story here to create a standard of emotional positivity, that this is a way we should feel.
I remember this woman because of the way she could feel inside of the tension between grief and gratitude. These emotions existed side by side within her heart, not competing, but each speaking to the other. Being sad for saying goodbye to something wonderful and possessing such good memories as a bright light shining against the darkness of death.
Jesus told the Samaritan that it was his faith that made him well. Why is that significant? Because we might be tempted to think it was his expression of gratitude. But as far as we are told, the other nine lepers remained healed whether they were grateful or not. The gift of healing was free and absolute. By understanding the gift as something that does not hinge on thankfulness, we elevate thankfulness to its proper place—a response spontaneously generated any time that we genuinely perceive, take to heart, how wonderful healing and grace are in the first place. What a relief.
The leper’s faith spurred him to run to Jesus and cry out “Have mercy!”, because he believed that healing, freely given, just might be a possibility on that day. As persons who have received redemption through faith, also freely and absolutely given, we live with the same tension. Our faith, not our gratitude, saves us. Our sins are forgiven, and yet our daily lives take place in a deeply sinful world, so which we frequently contribute.
We put way too much pressure on ourselves if we expect moments of gratitude, from the small to the genuinely redemptive, to make every problem in our lives improve and vanish. They don’t. But we make just as serious a mistake if we don’t stop to appreciate these redemptive moments when they do come along.
My aunts and uncles continued to send me gifts, thank you note or not. The ten lepers were all healed, even though only one personally came back in gratitude to Jesus. Acceptance, love, healing, and redemption are ours for keeps, once bestowed upon us.
Our faith reminds us that the moments of grace we experience now are a reminder given us to not lose sight of the big story, as God unfolds redemption on a Creation-level scale.
Let’s learn to live inside this same tension. If we have expected our redemption, received through faith, to transform our lives and situations to Christmas day every day, we are naïve. But if we allow the ongoing presence of sin and trouble to obscure the undeniable reality of redemption, we are blinded by cynicism. The bright light illuminates and overcomes all darkness. We can be free, spontaneous, unpredictable, improbable, and content in gratitude, not because it is a requirement, but because it reflects the confidence we possess when we cry out “Have mercy!”