28th Sunday 2019
2 Kings 5:14-17; 2Tim 2:8-13; Luke 17:11-19
If “faith” was the key word last week, I would suggest that, this week, there are two words: “gratitude” and, less obviously, “inclusivity”.
Let’s take the case of Naaman first. He is grateful for his cure: grateful to Elisha, the human agent of that cure, but grateful also to God, the author of it: hence his request for a quantity of the soil of Israel to take back with him to Syria. The people of those days believed that they should worship the gods of the land in which they were. Naaman takes the soil of Israel in order that, when he stands on it, back in Syria, he will technically be in Israel, and so entitled to worship the God of Israel who, he has come to believe, is the one true God.
Moving from Naaman to ourselves, we are faced with the question: am I a grateful person? Am I grateful to those around me, and am I grateful to God? This goes deeper than the surface question: do I remember to say “thank you”? That is an important question, and we need always to remember our thanks to God, as well as to the people who help us; but there is a more fundamental issue: is gratitude built into my psyche, into my very being?
There is always a danger of our being negative people, of seeing the difficulties and never the opportunities; of recognising the pain, but never the blessing. There is a deeply rooted human tendency, especially, I suspect, in the western world, to grumble, and grumbling is very destructive, destructive of harmony and well-being, destructive of ourselves. Grumbling is the way we create hell for ourselves, because ultimately we become incapable of recognising our blessings, of seeing goodness in anything.
This doesn’t mean that we should become Pollyannas, relentlessly cheerful, refusing to face difficulties. That attitude can be as destructive as its opposite. If you want an illustration of that, read GK Chesterton’s Fr. Brown story “The three tools of death”. What is demanded of us is that we have a pre-disposition to recognise goodness, and to rejoice in it: to be aware that, whatever we suffer, we are blessed in so many ways, and to have an inbuilt tendency to thank God, the author of our blessings, and to thank people who minister those blessings to us.
So much for gratitude—what about inclusivity? Notice that it is a foreigner, a Syrian, who is cured, someone who is not a member of the chosen people. Our Lord was to point this out to the people of His own day, reminding them that “there were many lepers in Israel, but none of these was cured, except the Syrian, Naaman.” This infuriated the people so much that they tried to kill Him, because their own attitude was narrow, exclusive, blinkered.
We see something similar happening in our own day, when the Pope is striving to broaden people’s horizons, to encourage us to recognise the breadth of God’s mercy, and he is coming under relentless attack, particularly in publications emanating from North America which are constantly sowing seeds of disunity. As Abbot Cuthbert pointed out recently, this is the work of the devil. These publications, sincere though they may, are literally diabolical, in the fullest sense of that word.
That same inclusivity on God’s part is found in today’s Gospel episode, in which Jews are cured along with a non-Jew, a Samaritan, a heretic. It is ironic that it should be this outsider who shows gratitude both to Jesus and to the Father.
What is the reason for the apparent lack of gratitude on the part of the chosen people who, incidentally, have been at one with the Samaritan in their suffering? Sadly, it is actually their religious attitude which causes the problem. They have to receive clearance from the priest before they can be re-admitted to the community, and they are so focused on this that they neglect the call to gratitude. We see the same problem in the parable of the Good Samaritan, where the priest and the Levite are so concerned not to incur ritual defilement that they ignore the wounded man.
Religious observance is of vital importance, but it must be an expression of our inner attitudes, and must never be allowed to hinder the practice of virtue. Gratitude to others, and especially to God, must be part of this inner attitude, a God whose mercy is inclusive: if that is not present, to be expressed in our religious observance, then the latter will be empty—nevertheless, we must never forget the importance of that observance.
