Twenty-Eighth Sunday in Ordinary Time

“… and he fell at the feet of Jesus and thanked him. He was a Samaritan.” Lk 17:16

One of the great mystics of the Church, Meister Eckhart, once wrote: “If the only prayer you ever pray is ‘Thank you,’ it’s enough.”

Luke, the writer of this powerful Gospel passage, evidently believed the same.

Today he presents us with a story that has many dimensions.

First, it involves a terrible skin disease that was incurable in those times. As a consequence, people suffering from it were completely cut off from their families, their community, their employment, their religious worship. They were literally destined to live outside their city gates, homeless, and left to become beggars.  

But Luke doesn’t just stop there. As is often the case in his gospel, the least likely person becomes the greatest example of faith: a woman, a child, a tax collector – all such people counted for nothing in their society at the time.

Here it is a Samaritan, a foreigner – people despised by the Jews and not allowed to worship in their Temple.

A Samaritan leper – someone who is doubly marginalized – is yet in the list of those in Luke’s gospel who become the greatest example of faith. His story tells us again that we never know who will be a vehicle of God’s grace in our life. Grace is always a surprise.   

Today’s story also involves not just one, but two healings.

The first healing is obvious … ten people were healed of the curse of leprosy. The second takes us to a level more than skin deep. Notice that the focus of the story is not so much on the healing that Jesus did, but on the response of those who were healed.

All ten had the faith to obey Jesus and start on their way to the priests of the Temple. But only one saw what Jesus had done meant not only that his own life would improve and that he would now be able to return to his family and to his community and to his work. Instead, the Samaritan was the only one who recognized that something much more, something much deeper was happening here.

What he saw was that, in the healing work of Jesus Christ, the love of God was both present and powerful. What he saw was that God’s gracious mercy reached beyond boundaries of clean and unclean, healthy and unhealthy, even Jew and Samaritan.

Only one of the ten who were healed grasped that he had been made well on a much deeper level than he could ever have imagined.  

And so he “fell at the feet of Jesus and thanked him.”

Luke urges us to do the same.

He’s pointing out to us the primacy of gratitude in our lives.

We’ve all been healed from something. It may not be as severe a challenge as leprosy, but perhaps it felt that way at times. Maybe it had to do with a divorce or a bout of cancer or the realization of a child struggling with addiction or battles with depression or violence or any number of other intense hurts that needed healing.

Whatever it has been in our life, usually we have learned something treasurable about ourselves and about others. Pain is a great teacher. We don’t look at it that way while we’re experiencing it, but afterwards we can often find a lesson learned, a wisdom gained. As a result, that suffering often makes us into stronger people, more compassionate people, more forgiving people, more insightful people.

And more grateful.

I recently read a story about a family that did missionary work in West Africa where they lived for several weeks in a rural village in the country of Togo. Even though this family could not speak the native language, they reported that “Thank you” was easily understood. They said that “Regularly when we’d express our thanks for food offered, shelter provided, or the hospitality our African neighbors were so generous to provide, the response we’d get was, ‘Thanks be to God!’ Or, to put it in the vernacular, ‘Don’t thank me, God is the reason for this!’ Their faith in God was so strong, and though they had very little by U.S. standards, they knew that all they had was a gift from God.”

The Samaritan who fell to his knees in today’s Gospel also understood that. Everything is gift. Everything is grace.

Our response of faith is gratitude – gratitude for our life, our families, our friends, our children, and even our heartaches and our sins. All of them can teach us.

And, with faith, all of them can, like the Samaritan in today’s gospel, cause us to fall “at the feet of Jesus” and thank him.

That’s why Meister Eckhart could say:

“If the only prayer you ever pray is ‘Thank you,’ it’s enough.”

Ted Wolgamot, Psy.D.

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9/12/16