by CCW | 5 September 2021 08:00
Today’s Gospel is the quintessential thanksgiving Gospel. It is appointed for Thanksgiving Day as embracing both the idea of harvest thanksgiving and national thanksgiving, the idea of giving thanks for our rational and political freedoms, however much in disarray. The Gospel story is especially powerful and complements the paradoxes of the Epistle reading from Galatians which continues the theme of our living and walking in the Spirit, bidding us, on the one hand, to “bear ye one another’s burdens,” and, on the other hand, to bear our own burdens.
In bearing one another’s burdens we are bearing our own as well. How? Because we are social, spiritual and intellectual creatures in and through our life with one another. We don’t live in isolation from one another. To be human means our connection and life with each other. But how and in what way? These readings, like so many of the Scripture readings of the Trinity season, point us to the truth of our humanity as lived in a sacramental and social community. They speak to us about becoming and being whole.
Our text in the Prayer Book is from the King James Version which preserves Tyndale’s translation about being made whole. Wycliffe in his 14th century translation renders it as “thy faith hath made thee safe.” More modern English translations adopt the idea that “your faith hath made you well” and a few use the somewhat more literal phrase, “your faith has saved you” and one gives us “healed and saved.” In truth the Greek word which carries over into the Latin salvum conveys a range of meetings over the centuries about being rescued, being kept safe, being preserved, and getting home with the idea of being where you belong and thus who you truly are. But it is this sense of wholeness that warrants our careful attention.
The story seems at first to highlight the one who turned back. There were ten who were lepers. All ten were healed by Jesus who bids them “go and show yourselves unto the priests.” As Luke puts it, “as they went, they were cleansed.” All ten. One of them, though, in seeing “that he was healed, turned back, and with a loud voice, glorified God, and fell down on his face at [Jesus’] feet, giving him thanks.” Luke adds to this the observation that the one who turned back “was a Samaritan.”
It is a most moving spectacle. Jesus comments on his action in contrast with the other nine, that only one “returned to give glory to God,” and calls him “this stranger.” Is the story then about the radical individual who stands out and away from others in splendid isolation? Is being saved merely personal? Or is this stranger, this Samaritan, like the “certain Samaritan” in last Sunday’s Gospel, precisely the one who shows us the truth of our humanity in our corporate, social and spiritual lives?
Jesus uses the Samaritans, the outcasts within Israel, deliberately to challenge all and every form of tribal and group exclusivity and to show us what it means to be truly and fully and completely human. We are healed, yes. We are made safe, yes, but to be made whole is something more. It belongs to the radical idea of salvation which is not mere assertion, is not simply personal and private, and is not a static state of being. It is something alive, dynamic, and active in us or it is absolutely nothing. The personal is not the isolated and private individual separate and apart from the community. Religion is not simply a private matter which is how it is regarded in our times under the reigning ideology of liberalism which sees religion as primarily a personal matter and as such removes God from all forms of our corporate world. But as some have realised this is simply nihilism and leaves us completely exposed to the will to dominate either in ourselves or others. There is no wholeness; only exploitation, abuse and destruction whether by ourselves or by others.
What Jesus is saying by way of the stranger, the outsider, the so-called Samaritan, is that in returning and giving thanks we are made whole. The actions of this Samaritan stranger highlight the nature of our lives liturgically. The extravagance of his actions are like the extravagant actions asked of you in our liturgy, falling down, if not on your faces, then at least on your knees, glorifying God with a loud voice – I wish! – and at the heart of it, at the heart of our liturgy, “giving thanks.” We give thanks in and through the great thanksgiving of the Son to the Father in the bond of the Spirit. It is in that activity that we are being made whole. We are whole in Christ in turning back and giving thanks. This is the radical truth of our human freedom and dignity.
It is a reflective activity. It belongs to our recognition of our brokenness and woundedness, to our desire for healing, and to our openness to the truth of God in whom alone we find our being and our wholeness. We learn this through one another, it seems, through the example of the stranger who explicitly recognises God in Christ. His action is about the truth of our lives together as a community of praise and thanksgiving. Our lives are meant to be “sacrifice(s) of praise and thanksgiving” and that is never something solitary and alone but belongs to our communion with God and with one another. Only so can we be made whole.
Fr. David Curry
Trinity 14, 2021
September 5th – Labour Day Weekend
Source URL: https://christchurchwindsor.ca/2021/09/05/sermon-for-the-fourteenth-sunday-after-trinity-10/
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