Fr. Roger J. Landry

Conversations with Consequences Podcast

Homily for the 28th Sunday in Ordinary Time (C), Vigil

October 12, 2019

 

To listen to an audio recording of this short Sunday homily, please click below: 

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/10.11.19_Landry_Con_Con_1.mp3

 

The following text guided the homily: 

* This is Fr. Roger Landry and it’s a joy to have a chance to ponder with you the consequential conversation Jesus wants to have with us this Sunday.

* In the Gospel, Jesus will heal ten lepers of the dreadful disease of leprosy, but he had a far greater miracle in mind. Just as when Elisha heals Naaman the Syrian in the first reading, he received a greater gift: the recognition that there is no God in all the earth except the Lord and that he would no longer offer sacrifices or worship to false gods, but only to the true Lord.

* The Lord wanted to work a similar two-part miracle in the Gospel. All ten lepers were cured of a disease that had been eating away their flesh and bones, that had made them stink, that had made them the worst of outcasts and forced them to stay at least 50 feet away from any non-leper. It had compelled them at all times to yell out “unclean!, unclean!,” anytime someone was approaching. It had cut them off from their family members. It had also cut them off from the communal worship of God as they could never go to the Synagogue on Saturday or to the Temple on the major holy days. But at their cry for mercy, Jesus healed them all and sent them to the priests to verify that the disease had stopped growing and they were no longer contagious. As they were on their way, they were completely cured.

* After recognizing that the miracle for which they had prayed and long for had been granted, we would have expected that all of them would have been rejoicing almost as if they had been raised from the dead. But only one of the ten returned to thank the Lord Jesus who had given them this gift. Jesus poignantly asks, “Ten were cleansed, were they not? Where are the other nine?”

* Jesus wished them all to return not because he had worked the miracle with impure motives to get them to give him a thank you note, but so that he might grant them something even greater than a stupendous physical cure. He wanted to give them all what he gave one Samaritan who returned: the grace of salvation by faith. After the healed man fell down at his feet to thank him with all his heart, Jesus told him, “Stand up and go. Your faith has saved you!” Jesus came into the world not fundamentally to heal our bodies but to heal our souls. He came not to remedy our ills but to redeem our lives. In order to receive these greater gifts, however, we need gratefully to be in relationship with God. While all ten men were cured of the physical leprosy, nine retained leprosy of the soul, an ingratitude that took for granted the greatest gift they had received in life until then. Only the grateful leper would receive the gift of salvation because only he had a heart that was opened to receive it. The fact that he was a Samaritan prompted Jesus to ask, “Has none but this foreigner returned to give thanks to God?.” The other nine lepers were presumably Jews. Jesus was shocked because the Jews had been trained by God for centuries in the prayers of the Psalms and in the incredible events of salvation history to give thanks to the Lord. If anyone should have learned how to say thanks to God, it should have been the Jews. But many of them took God’s generosity, God’s goodness, for granted.

* The other nine likely looked at their disease with anger toward God, as if they had somehow sadistically chosen for unjust punishment such that when they wer...