Link to Audio File for Matins & Ante-Communion for Trinity 14, 2020
“One … turned back, giving him thanks; and he was a Samaritan”
Living in the Spirit means walking in the Spirit, Paul says in Galatians. It is an interesting distinction. Living means more than merely existing, it seems. Walking suggests something intentional, something more about our lives, something more that moves in us without which we are not fully alive. That is what is shown in the Gospel. Walking in the Spirit is about the Spirit of God moving in us, living in us.
This Gospel story follows wonderfully upon last Sunday’s reading.. Once again it has to do with Samaritans, the outsiders within Judaism which Jesus often uses to criticize Israel in her failings about the Law. Last Sunday, as we saw, the so-called Good Samaritan is Jesus Christ. He unites the love of God and the love of neighbour, the divine and the human. The love of Christ living and moving in us is the unity of divine and human alive in us. What appears as a double motion: on the one hand, human; on the other hand, divine, is the same motion viewed from different standpoints. It is the same thing here: it is all the one turning back and all God in him. Such is the dialectic of human and divine which defines the Christian religion.
Today’s Gospel is the classic story of thanksgiving. This Gospel is appointed for Thanksgiving Day, at least in terms of national thanksgiving. In our more primitive and yet profoundly natural realities, thanksgiving is associated with the harvest, Harvest Thanksgiving. Thanksgiving in its larger sensibilities combines the natural and the spiritual, the political and the practical. Holding together the sense of the political with the sense of the natural belongs to the deeper understanding of thanksgiving, a moving from the natural to the political as embraced within the spiritual, we might say.
Voltaire, in his great classic of the Enlightenment, Candide, considers a utopia, a fictional place, an ideal society, in which the only religion is that of thanksgiving. The inhabitants of El Dorado give thanks to God who provides for them all that they need. Simple. And, in a way, profound. But it falls far short of the much more radical doctrine of thanksgiving which Luke presents to us here, and which in Luke’s telling occasions a kind of wonder in Jesus himself.
We tend to misread this story, using it as a way of beating up on the ingrates, the unthankful of our day. Only one returned. ‘Where are the other nine?’, we read. All true, and all part of the story but, I fear, at the expense of its deeper meaning. What moves in the one who was a Samaritan is nothing less than the truth of the unity of God and man in Jesus Christ just as we saw last week with the parable of the Good Samaritan. Jesus does not condemn or criticize the nine whom he had sent away, after all, so much as commend the one who turned back.
His turning back is once totally him and totally God. What does that mean? We are most truly ourselves when God’s love moves in us. That is the radical meaning of the story of Jesus which culminates in his thanksgiving to the Father on the Cross which catapults the concept of thanksgiving beyond simple provision to the more radical idea of renewal and restoration through repentance. Repentance is about returning, a turning back. Exactly what we see in the one whom Luke tells us was a Samaritan. The paradox is that in his turning back and giving thanks, this Samaritan, an outsider within Israel, demonstrates the radical truth of Israel as defined by God and by virtue of the Spirit of God living and moving in human lives. It is precisely this radical action that does not simply heal but more importantly makes us whole. Our wholeness is found in God and God in us. Salvation is about our being made whole. Such is the much more radical nature of thanksgiving. It unites us in Christ, in the unity of the divine and human which he is.
And it is our freedom, a positive freedom, a freedom towards the Good. Thanksgiving is not merely habits acquired through obedience and custom. In its truth it belongs to the human spirit in its freedom. Jesus highlights this point in noting that the one who returned was a stranger, the proverbial other who teaches us what it means to be together. Perhaps no story in the Gospels counters the divisive tendencies of the culture of identity politics which separate us from one another in endless opposition and enmity, in hatred and resentment. Here we learn from the other about what belongs to the radical truth of our humanity. Thanksgiving is our turning to God through God’s turning to us. In that double motion we are whole and most truly ourselves. Such is the grace of thanksgiving, literally eucharist. And as Jesus says, thanksgiving means giving glory to God.
In a way, the story encapsulates wonderfully the whole movement of our liturgy which would bid us be like the Samaritan stranger through whom we learn the truth of our humanity in turning back to God, glorifying God “with a loud voice,” falling down on our face at his feet, giving him thanks. Such are the motions of the liturgy, the motions of our walking in the Spirit, alive to the motions of divine grace at work in us. And how does our liturgy end? Thanks to Cranmer’s biblical insight, it ends with the Gloria in Excelsis, with our giving glory to God in the highest. Such is the dynamic of salvation which we learn through the stranger, the other who is with us.
“One … turned back, giving him thanks; and he was a Samaritan”
Fr. David Curry
Trinity 14, 2020