Fr. Roger J. Landry

Conversations with Consequences Podcast

Homily for the Twenty-Eighth Sunday of Ordinary Time, C, Vigil

October 8, 2022

 

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

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/10.8.22_Landry_ConCon_1.mp3

 

The following text guided the homily: 

* This is Fr. Roger Landry and it’s a joy for me to be with you as we enter into the consequential conversation the Risen Lord Jesus wants to have with each of us this Sunday, when we will not only witness the Lord’s power to heal people of the dreadful disease of leprosy, but the larger point of how we’re supposed to respond when the Lord gives us an incredible gift like that.

* Ten lepers approached Jesus. He would cure all ten of a disease that had been eating away their flesh and bones, that had made them stink worse than skunks, that had made them outcasts and forced them to stay at least 50 feet away from any non-leper and to cry out “unclean!, unclean!,” anytime someone was approaching. It cut them off from their family members. It 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 insistent, even courageous, cry for mercy, Jesus healed them all and sent them to the priests, which was the means set up in the Mosaic Law to verify that the disease had stopped growing and they were no longer contagious. The text of St. Luke indicates that as they were heading to the priest, they were completely cured: they no longer had their leprous sores, and their bodies had been made whole again. After recognizing that the miracle for which they had prayed and longed 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 who had given them this gift. Jesus poignantly asked, “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 thank him, but so that he might give them an even greater gift than their stupendous physical cure. He wanted to give them all what he gave the 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!”

* This is a key point: Jesus came into the world not fundamentally to heal our bodies but to restore 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 a form of 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 other nine didn’t and Jesus made note of it, saying, “Has none but this foreigner returned to give thanks to God?” The other nine lepers were presumably Jews and Jesus was implying that it was shocking that only the Samaritan returned 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 for he is good, for his mercy endures forever. 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.

* I’ve always thought that the nine who didn’t return likely looked a...