Healing and thanksgiving

The texts today in the Roman Catholic Lectionary challenge us to get beyond our preconceptions and our preferences.  The psalmist proclaims the mighty hand and holy arm of God which delivers steadfast love and faithfulness to Israel so that the entire world will know the victory of the Lord. This victory is present in ways of healing and consolation which are opportunities for thanksgiving and invitations to go deeper into ourselves to our need for humility and openness to accept like Naaman in the episode from the Second Book of Kings that position and privilege can blind us from the truth that we are lepers who have been brought inside. The testimony of Paul to Timothy points to imprisonment and rejection as the experience of Paul through which he is brought to know that Roman citizenship and brilliant oratory, things for which he may express legitimate thanksgiving, are parts of his experience which bring him to the truth of his status as one outside the social order who is invited by Jesus to call others to life in their truth. Faithfulness to the Truth of our condition and calling strengthens our experience of Divine Providence. Father Larry Gilick SJ contemplates the difference between the nine lepers cured by Jesus who continue to Jerusalem and the one who returns to give thanks. This Gospel from Luke places healing and return to the status of “clean” in the context of Jesus instruction to the Pharisees, and the Christian community, to see, as Father Larry puts it “the calling all of humanity away from the leprosy of self-righteous pharisaic posturing”. Our healing is the visible surface which we may acknowledge and continue on “our way” to Jerusalem like the nine. Jesus also offers the freedom from “our way” which is experienced by the outsider, the Samaritan, who as he is shown the Truth of his transformation gives deep thanksgiving for the invitation to come inside knowing the humility which comes from his acknowledgement of his history of being “unclean”.