In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.
In our fallenness and our distractedness, somehow we human beings are so very obsessed with details and small things. We are very interested in paying attention to minisculi : little, tiny things. We want to know how to do things exactly right. Another big thing we get into trouble with is that we almost always try to take shortcuts. (Historically, this is our way : there is no evidence that we have ever changed. In the history of the human race we have learned nothing.)
Human beings have a tendency to try to take a shortcut into the Kingdom of Heaven. People ask questions such as these : “How could we have some sort of fire insurance (so to speak), so that we could get into the Kingdom of Heaven ?” “What are the sorts of things we have to do that would satisfy the Lord so that we would get into the Kingdom of Heaven ?” Human literature is full of such things. It is not as though I have not heard such things in confessions over all these years : confessions are roughly the same. Human beings are always doing the same thing : “What do I have to do ?” “What will satisfy God ?” We are always looking for these little, concrete sorts of insurance.
However, these concrete sorts of insurance things do not work at all. There is no system of good deeds or ten thousands of prostrations every day maybe (if one likes to do such physical things) or other things like that. No method of tinkering like that will get any one of us into the Kingdom of Heaven. We have to recall what are the fundamentals of our Faith if we hope to get into the Kingdom of Heaven. What does all this mean ?
There is no human being that is good, as such. Even our Saviour Himself says in the Gospel : “‘No one is good, but One, that is, God’” (Matthew 19:17). Therefore, if we go around thinking that we are good, we are already “out to lunch”. There is no-one good, except God. Where is our hope, then ? In fact, our hope is in the Lord. How does God reveal Himself to us ? He reveals Himself to us as love. He has always said to us that that is Who He is. In the Epistles of the Apostle John, it is said explicitly : “God is love” (1 John 4:8, 16). From Old Testament times, the Lord has been saying to us that the relationship between us and Him has to be a relationship of love.
If we want to live, then we have to live in love. Thus, the summary of the Ten Commandments in the Old Testament is : “You shall love the Lord your God from your whole heart, from your whole soul, and from your whole power” (5 Moses [Deuteronomy] 6:5). If we love God like this, then our life will be in accordance with the Ten Commandments. We will not have any other gods, except the one, true God. We will respect our parents ; we will honour the Sabbath Day ; we will not kill, and we will not steal, and so forth. Those are simply characteristics of a person who lives in a relationship of love with God. Because of this loving relationship, God gives us the ability to live a life in such a way that we fulfil those ten characteristics. They are not mere suggestions. They are ten clear characteristics of what the life of a person is like who loves God.
The Lord, the Saviour, is the Word of God who spoke everything into being, and He still does speak everything into being. When He put flesh on His love and became a human being, He Himself showed us how this love works in human relationships. He was supported by His Mother. She was born a human being, as other human beings. However, unlike other human beings, she remained completely obedient to the Lord throughout her life. She is the only person who has lived this truly perfect example of how a lover of God should behave. That is why she is called the image of the Church, the example of the Church. She is our example of how to live.
When we see our Saviour in the Gospel, He is showing us how a lover of God should be living. There is a concrete example of this in today’s Gospel reading in the healing of the ten men who had leprosy. Leprosy is a horrible disease. It is a disgusting disease in which one is like the living-dead and rotting while still alive. After a long time the fingers and toes start to fall off. If anyone lives long enough, then the nose and the ears probably fall off. It is a sort of a flesh-eating disease, one could say. Actually, that was the case right up until about 100 years ago. If we had leprosy (people still get it, but now they have treatments), we would have lived in some sort of leper colony, off by our lonesome. There used to be such a colony in Hawaii. There was a famous Catholic saint who had a leper colony there, and was looking after them. Not that long ago, the situation was just the same as it had been in the lives of the ten lepers that we are hearing about today.
Our Lord, in His love, healed the ten lepers. He restored them to complete health. Perhaps we are not all given the Grace of God to go about healing people, physically speaking. Even if it were the case, it is not we who are healing these people. It is the Lord who is doing all the healing. It is true that people, through prayer, are healed of all sorts of horrible diseases. I heard just last week of one bishop who was anointing one of his parishioners at an unction service last year. She was a very forward sort of person, and she had an inoperable cancer on her chest somewhere. She went to the bishop at the time of the anointing. He started to anoint her forehead. Then she said : “Not there !” She opened her shirt, and said : “There – anoint it there”. He anointed her, and immediately the cancer disappeared, just like that. This woman was one of those irascible people with a very strong personality. She was not the bishop’s favourite person, because she was so outspoken. However, somehow she knew that it was the time of the Lord’s love. There are similar examples of women in the New Testament (such as the woman with the hemorrhage). They knew and they approached the Lord, and said : “Now. Now. Now”. This woman did that. She came ; the bishop anointed ; the Lord gave. That is the whole point : it is not because the bishop did something, since he did not even like her. The Lord gave. It was a sacramental moment and the Lord gave. The Lord does touch people in all sorts of situations under different sorts of circumstances. He loves us. He touches our lives.
In the context of this loving relationship that we all have with each other, the Lord expects you and me to be agents of this love. Therefore, if someone is sick amongst us, then we should be asking the Lord to do something. He will do something. He really will. I have seen people healed when other people pray. I have seen it happen many times, and not only in isolated, occasional circumstances. I have seen it happening very much. Nevertheless, the Lord does not always give us what we ask for in exactly the way we have requested it. Sometimes He answers immediately ; sometimes He answers later ; sometimes He answers in a visible way ; sometimes He answers in an invisible way, so that we need a correct understanding in order to perceive it. He always acts. He always acts in love.
Perhaps you know about the intercession list that we are trying to circulate in the diocese every year. There are people who are praying daily for clergy and people in the diocese. Because people are praying, things are happening in the diocese for the good that would not likely otherwise happen. I can see where it comes from – people are praying. They love the Lord. They love each other, and they pray to the Lord for each other.
The weakness of these nine lepers is the same weakness that “dogs” us all : instant forgetfulness and instant ingratitude. Ten of the lepers went off healed and only one came back and said thank-you. The one who came back and said thank-you, if we pay attention, was a Samaritan. For the Jewish people, a Samaritan was a veritable outcast. We Canadians like to think that there are no modern-day comparisons for such a person. We tend to tell ourselves that we are all so easy-going and tolerant about everything that there is no-one who is an outcast like that in Canadian mentality. However, we live in denial about the plight of Aboriginals in our country. Further, it has steadily been becoming more and more politically incorrect to be a Christian. Internationally, it is politically incorrect to be an Orthodox Christian. For the Jewish people of that time, Samaritans were considered to be some sort of foreigners, even though, technically, they believed in the same God and they were mostly the same people. They had not co-operated with the centralisation of temple worship in Jerusalem a long, long time before, and they insisted on keeping their own temples in Samaria. They were considered outcasts, as our Saviour said, and foreign. It was worse than that, because they were treated like dogs. One was considered to be defiled if one had anything to do with a Samaritan.
Yet, at the same time let us notice in the Gospel that Samaritans are referred to by our Lord as examples, such as the Good Samaritan. Unlike the priests who walked by the man lying there as good as dead, a Samaritan came and looked after this Jewish man. His brethren should have been looking after him, but they were afraid, and did not want to get involved. (Modern Canadians would say : “Do not get involved – just walk by”.) This Samaritan, who was a lover of God, came and showed them the right way. He picked up the man, and saw to his recovery at his own expense. The Samaritan today is the one who comes and says thank-you.
When the Lord is talking about the Samaritans, He is talking about you and me, too. In the Jewish perspective, we are not Jewish by race : we are Gentiles according to Jewish reckoning. That means we are not physical descendants of Abraham. At the same time, the Church is the new Israel, so we are the spiritual children of Abraham. We do not get off the hook about anything that is required of Israel. We, in our own way, by extension, are still the chosen people. We have to keep all these things in mind.
The Apostle, in his words to the Colossians today is saying to us that this relationship between us and the Lord has to be chiefly love. He said : “Put on love, which is the bond of perfection. And let the peace of God rule in your hearts, to which also you were called in one body; and be thankful”. The Christian way, in the context of this love, is to give thanks at all times. That is why, in pious Ukrainian and other Slavic customs, we are always hearing people say : “Glory to God” for everything that happens that is good. The product of this love is to do good things, just as the Good Samaritan did. It is not simply lip service. We have to put into concrete form the expressions of this love. A truly serious Orthodox Christian, who is being thanked directly for doing something good, will say : “Glory to God” or “To the glory of God”, and will not accept the thanks directly. This is because we know that on our own, by ourselves, we do not have the strength to do what is good. We know that it is the Lord, who lives in us, that gives us the strength to be good and to do good. It is He that is Goodness. Everything is referred to Him. We can tell that pious Ukrainian history is formed by the Gospel because of the way the people traditionally have spoken, just as we can see it in Romania, Greece, Russia, and other places.
In Canada, when I was young (before we were so badly de-Christianised), it was actually a custom to be something like that. There were natural expressions that people used a long time ago in Canada to give glory to God for good things that were happening. Our Orthodox responsibility in this country is to bring back in fulness, and in the right way, this giving of thanks to God. We can only do that by simply doing it ourselves, living it ourselves. If something good is happening, we must not be too afraid, too shy to say : “Thanks be to God”. When I grew up, “Thank God” was only an expression. It was me, giving thanks, myself (and not telling others to give thanks, as some might think). We can see how our mentality has all changed. Now I have to say : “Thanks be to God”; “Glory be to God”. May we all understand that what matters is that we
Here, in the Divine Liturgy, we are doing this. We are giving thanks the way we are supposed to be doing. This Divine Liturgy is participating in the Divine Liturgy that happens perpetually in Heaven, where there is constant glorification of God, and thanksgiving to God for everything. He is Life to us. We give thanks, already touching the Kingdom of Heaven. We give thanks to the Lord for His love for us, and in giving thanks we glorify Him : the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, now, and ever, and unto the ages of ages.