Today’s Gospel story has often been a favourite of Sunday
School teachers and parents too. After all, it is a simple story about saying
thank you, isn’t it? And saying thank you is a basic social skill which we all
want to drum into our children as early as possible. If you are a parent, and
you are any good at it, you sit your children down straight after Christmas to
write those thank you notes to people who’ve given them presents. Alas, I never
quite was that parent – it was always an uphill struggle. But we all know that it’s important to say
thank you, and it’s good to be thanked. I’ve been very grateful and touched by
all your kind messages of thanks and appreciation over the last week or so, to
mark my 25th anniversary of ordination, and the sizeable gift of
garden tokens, which I shall enjoy spending very much! Thank you for those.
Saying thank you matters. That’s why this story has so often
been used to ram that home to children, and adults too. Look these ten men with
leprosy. They are all healed, but only one comes back to say thank you! How
rude!
The problem is, though, that the story isn’t really about
rudeness and politeness. We trivialise it if we make it just a moral tale about
good and bad manners. Jesus doesn’t
focus on the thanks of the Samaritan who comes back – in fact, he
doesn’t even mention it. He says , “Was
none of them – the other nine - found to
return and give praise to God.”
That’s the point, that they don’t seem to have recognised where their
healing came from, or given a moment’s thought to what that might mean for them
in the long term. They are quite content with a healing that is, literally,
skin deep.
The thing about saying thank you is that it can just
be a formula, something we feel we have to do if we want to look polite and
well brought up regardless of how we really feel about the gift we’ve been
given. We can write the most beautiful thank you letters without them meaning
anything at all, for gifts which we don’t really want or need – we’ve probably
all done so from time to time. All the proprieties will have been observed, but
not a word of it is really meant, and that gift doesn’t make any real, lasting
difference to us.
Genuine gratitude is far more than a simple thank you, however
posh the stationary it is written on, and it’s this genuine gratitude which
Jesus recognises in this Samaritan who has turned back. Genuine gratitude
recognises not just the gift, but the love of the giver who gave it. Genuine
gratitude is something which leads us into a deeper relationship with someone,
because we see that they’ve given something of themselves in their gift.
Genuine gratitude isn’t a momentary thing, something to be ticked off a
checklist – thank you letter written – tick!; it changes us in the long term.
It’s a recognition that a bond has been formed, that our lives have been
reoriented, set off in new directions, influenced permanently for the good by
someone else’s generosity to us.
That’s what this Samaritan leper is expressing when he
“turns back and praises God.” He doesn’t just go back to his old life, as the
other nine do. Something has shifted permanently in him. He has learned
something that will change him forever. He has recognised in Jesus the
wellspring of life, a place to which he can return, a place to which he must
return, again and again.
The Gospel tells us, very carefully, that these lepers are
living in the region “between” Galilee and Samaria, in the buffer zone, the
nomansland, between these two states which normally didn’t get along. They had
to live there. They’d been banished from their towns and villages because they
were viewed as unclean. When they are healed, nine of them can’t wait to get
back to their old lives. Showing themselves to the priests is the way they can
be formally declared clean again and readmitted to their communities. That’s
all they want. Only this Samaritan – a foreigner to Jesus – realises that there
is something far better on offer than just a return to the way things were
before he got this disease. And it comes, not from this tribe or that tribe,
this religious system or that religious system, but from this man, Jesus, who
embodies a God who is bigger than any clan or tribe, for whom there is no no-man’s-land,
nowhere that is beyond the pale. That’s why he comes back and throws himself at Jesus feet and praises God.
Jesus tells him to “go on his way”, a new way into a new life, made whole not
just in body, but in spirit too.
Genuine gratitude for a genuine, love-filled, gift can
transform our relationships with one another. We know what it feels like when
we find it. The same is true of our relationship with God, who gives us the
best gift of all; himself. That’s why, week by week, we come together to
celebrate this service - the Eucharist . The word eucharist comes from the
Greek word for thanksgiving, so the Eucharistic prayer, that prayer I pray asking
God to bless the bread and wine of Communion, is a thanksgiving prayer. There
are eight different prayers I could choose from. I put two in each of the
service books we use at different seasons of the year and then choose which
ever seems most appropriate as I come to it, but they are all the same in
essence. They give thanks to God as Creator, Redeemer and Sustainer. They all
say, in different ways, “this stuff we
have, of which bread and wine are a reminder, all of it comes from you. Without
you, God, we have nothing. With you, we have everything - heaven and earth and
all that is in it!” In the Eucharist we are invited, like this Samaritan
leper, to turn back to God, to acknowledge our need of him and put ourselves in
his hands once again. And when we do that, we find that, in the shape of a
small wafer, he has actually put himself into our hands. That realisation, if we take it seriously, can reorient
us, transform us, just as it did the
Samaritan leper.
But if it is so great, why did those other nine lepers not
do as this Samaritan did? A new life sounds like a good thing, doesn’t it, but
they didn’t seem to want it? Perhaps there’s a clue in our Old Testament
reading, the story of Naaman, the Aramean military commander, who also had
leprosy. What we find in his story is that receiving gifts, can be complicated
and threatening, especially such an
important gift, transformative gift as healing. It means, for a start,
admitting our need of that gift, and that can feel humiliating.
When Elisha sends a message to Naaman, telling him to bathe
in the River Jordan, he is infuriated and offended. Elisha hasn’t even come out
in person to greet him, and the River Jordan? Pah! There are far better rivers
back home…
Philip and I went to the River Jordan earlier this year, and
I can see Naaman’s point. It would have been bigger in his time – water
extraction upstream has diminished it now – but it was never very wide, and it
is one of the muddiest rivers I have ever seen. You’re dirtier when you come
out than you were when you go in. It was bad enough that this big-shot, battle-hardened
soldier had been laid low by leprosy, but the treatment must have sounded even
more humiliating than the disease to him. He wanted something magical,
esoteric, a cure that was grand enough to match his status. All he was offered
was a remotely delivered prescription for a quick dip in a muddy stream. Naaman
wasn’t used to being needy, powerless. He was usually the strong one, in
command of others. This must have seemed like a particularly cruel practical
joke, deliberate mockery. It is only the intervention of his servants which
persuades him that, having come this far, he might as well give it a try.
But when he does, and is healed, his response is the same as
that of the Samaritan leper who comes back to Jesus. He recognises that this
God, of this place – strange though it seems – is the source of the life and
healing he needs. If we read on, we discover that when he goes home, he takes
some of the soil of Israel to stand on so that he can pray to Israel’s God, a
symbol that would remind him that this unlikely place, this muddy river
bank was where he found what he had needed all along. “Now I know that there is no God in all the earth except in Israel,” he
says
I started by saying that the Gospel story isn’t a story
about saying thank you, not in any simplistic sense anyway. It isn’t there to
remind us of the need for ritual politeness. But it, and the story of Naaman,
do have something to say to us about genuine gratitude, the recognition of the
grace of God. Grace is God’s unmerited, unearned gift of himself to us. Grace comes
to us not because we have deserved it but because we need it, often turning up
in unexpected people and places, in foreign territory, out beyond the pale.
The Samaritan leper finds grace in a Jewish carpenter from
Nazareth, who goes into no-man’s-land where only the rejected and despised make
their home. Naaman finds grace in the
strange instructions of a scruffy foreign prophet, and in the muddy water of an
unprepossessing river. He struggles to accept it, but when he does, his life is
transformed. Both of them are made whole in spirit as well as in body, set on a
new course, by the gracious gift of God. Their stories are reminders that we
can be too, that day by day, we are offered God’s gift of grace, his help for
our need, if we can find the courage to accept it. And for that, we can be
truly thankful.
Amen
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