Christ Church

“One of them turned back, … giving him thanks. And he was a Samaritan.”

Thanksgiving belongs to our sanctification; in short, to “the increase of faith, hope and charity” or love in us, as the Collect prays. As such it is about our living and walking in the Spirit which, as Paul emphasizes in Galatians, is about “bearing one another’s burdens” as well as “bearing our own burdens.” Thanksgiving frees us to God and to one another in God.

The Gospel story for today illustrates the radical nature of thanksgiving as an integral and critical part of our life in the Spirit. There were ten lepers all of whom sought healing from Jesus. All ten were healed, restored to the human community from which they had been exiled and shut out, spurned because of their contagion. Only one returned to give thanks.

Our redemption is accomplished once and for all in Christ’s sacrifice and passion; hence all ten were healed. It is whole and complete in Christ. But our sanctification, itself an integral part of human redemption, is a continuing work in progress. It is about growing into who we are in Christ while in via ad patriam, in pilgrimage to God. Our sanctification is not complete and inherent in us. But to be whole is about that constant work of thanksgiving which turns entirely upon our participation in Christ’s sacrifice through “this our sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving”; in short, our constant attention to Christ wanting him to “make us love that which thou dost command” in order “that we may obtain that which thou dost promise.” What he promises is illustrated in the remarkable exchange between Jesus and the one who turned back.

“And he was a Samaritan,” Luke tells us, at the same time as being named by Jesus as “this stranger.” Once again we have a Gospel story which illustrates the qualities of our life in Christ by way of the example of a Samaritan. Last week we had the parable of the Good Samaritan, the great illustration of the Christian ethic of compassion. In the Evening Offices for this week, we had as well the story of Jesus at the well of Samaria; his encounter with the Samaritan woman in John’s Gospel.

It is not that Jesus agrees with the Samaritan ideology about where the Law was given and about the extent of the Law. He emphatically doesn’t. The point is not the affirmation of one group simply over and against another group. The point is what is learned in and through the particularities of circumstance and situation, culture and language, family and society about what belongs to the universality and spiritual truth of our humanity. “You worship what you do not know,” Jesus says to the woman at the well, “we worship what we know, for salvation is from the Jews.” This would seem to commit us to thinking that the Jews have the unique and exclusive hold on truth. That is not what Jesus is saying. That “salvation is from the Jews” means that it comes through them, through the particularities of cultures which are by definition different from each other and can’t be collapsed into one another. Jesus immediately goes on to say that “the hour is coming and now is, when the true worshippers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for such the Father seeks to worship him. God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship him in spirit and truth.”

The response of the Samaritan woman is most instructive and reveals her faith and knowledge. “I know,” she says “that the Messiah is coming (he who is called Christ); when he comes, he will show us all things.” To this Jesus makes one of the clearest statements of his essential identity. “I who speak to you am he.”

She has a hold of something profoundly true which transcends the binaries of Jew and Samaritan and as such shows the true dialectic of the spirit which does not negate the binaries of human experience and reason in the particularities but rather through them lifts us to something greater and more complete; to a grasp of the whole without which the parts fall into opposition and conflict. In this case, quite apart from her being a Samaritan, she is also more than her situation of having had five husbands and being now with one who is not her husband, as Jesus knows and says. This does not negate or deny her story – whatever that is.

There are a number of different possibilities, one of which is the practice of Levirate marriage, the Jewish custom or law that the widow should marry her dead husband’s brother. This practice was part of an exchange between Jesus and the scribes who set before him an hypothetical situation in which a woman supposedly had had to marry, first, one brother of her husband, and then another brother and another and another as each died, indeed seven brothers. The sophistic question which was put to Jesus is “in heaven whose wife is she since she was wife of all seven?” Jesus explicitly makes the point that in heaven there is neither giving nor taking in marriage. In other words, our situations and circumstances are not the ultimate determinants of our being and identity. Who we are in Christ is greater, more universal. Family and culture are important but not all defining, not everything. Who we are in Christ is something more, and everything.

This is the point in Genesis about our being made in the image of God, on the one hand, and being defined as beings in the world as either male and female, on the other hand. Our being in the image of God is the greater principle but it doesn’t negate or deny the reality of being male and female. Just so in Christ, as Paul makes wonderfully clear, “there is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female; for ye are all one in Christ” (Gal. 3. 28). Our identity in Christ is ontologically prior but without negating the given forms of our created being. If we ask why not, the answer, it seems to me, is to avoid two problems: first, idolatry, collapsing and reducing God to the things of our world of whatever agenda whether gender, social, economic, political, cultural or ideological, and, second, to honour the givenness of being which belongs to ourselves as creatures. Creation, as Augustine shows, concerns a philosophical concern captured in three questions: an sit – whether something is or exists, quod sit – what it is, and quale sit – what kind of thing it is. Such questions are basic to thought itself as grounded in the thinking of God.

This brings us back to the wonder of thanksgiving. It is a free act which belongs to the truth and dignity of our humanity as made in the image of God. The free act of thanksgiving – and it is by definition a free act which cannot be forced – unites us and draws us into the transforming and sanctifying love of God in us. The freest thing that we can do is to give thanks to God, pure and simple, not just for what we have received and not just for the givenness of our being but for God himself. “Blessed be God that he is God only and divinely like himself” was a personal prayer of John Donne. It makes clear that God should not and cannot be reduced to us and our desires. He is always more and greater.

Thanksgiving is, literally, eucharist. This story has shaped an intriguing aspect of our reformed liturgy. For after receiving communion, we don’t simply get up and go, taking and leaving, as it were, having had the biscuit and exeunt, out of here. No. Rather like the Samaritan in the story, we return to our pews for the additional prayer of thanksgiving for what we have received as belonging to our spiritual vocation and hope and then for the Gloria, itself a great paean of praise to the Trinity.

It is not too much to say that the life of the Trinity, the indwelling love of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, is altogether and simply about their mutual thanksgiving, an acknowledgement of their co-inherent life which is the ground of all life, including our own. Such is our life in thanksgiving for God above all else, the God of spirit and truth, of life and glory.

And all this is something which we can learn from the stranger, the Samaritan, the one who “turned back giving him thanks, and he was a Samaritan.”

Fr. David Curry
Trinity 14, 2023