A Homily for the Thirteenth Sunday after Pentecost

+ Jesu, præceptor, miserere nostri! the ten lepers cried from afar, not daring to come any closer: “Jesus, Master, have mercy on us!” And Our Lord did indeed take mercy on them. In perhaps what is one of the simplest miracles of healing that Our Lord worked during His time on this earth, all ten lepers were healed as they went to the priests to show themselves in order to be set free from the social stigmatization that their disease involved.
 
Our Lord’s generous mercy is as instructive as it is encouraging. He did not question the ten lepers in order to ascertain whether or not they were worthy of His mercy, or whether, apart from suffering leprosy, they laboured under any other impediment, moral or otherwise. There may well have been thieves and murderers and adulterers and blasphemers amongst them. Indeed, their leprosy may even have been viewed as just punishment for their past lives of sin. But Our Lord does not enquire. Certainly, as God, He knows these lepers better than they know themselves. But He does not humiliate them by minutely scrutinising their past lives and by parsimoniously proffering His mercy piecemeal only to those whom He judges worthy of it.
 
No: Our Lord Jesus Christ responds with complete generosity, granting His mercy in abundance when sick, weak and even possibly bad men request it. Not even their motives are scrutinised. For as St Luke reports earlier in his Gospel, “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick.”  Our Lord did “not come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance.” (Lk 5:31-32)
 
Here, of course, we are moving from the simple healing of a physical disease that can cripple the body but not kill the soul, to the removal of the cancer of sin which most certainly kills the life of God within us and can lead to eternal damnation. But as we see so often in the healing ministry of Our Lord, the two are not necessarily distinct: the healing of the body provides the opportunity for the soul also to be cleansed.
 
It is a fact that normally each of us is given the health and strength necessary to address our various spiritual leprosies, to go and manifest our spiritual maladies to the priests, as the Church, to whom Our Lord entrusted the power to forgive sins (cf. Jn. 20:23), requires, so that we too might be cleansed by the mercy of Our Lord in the Sacrament of Confession. Certainly, as a wise Mother, the Church in her wisdom and Tradition insists that this be an integral confession of our sins in sincerity and with a firm purpose of amendment—anything less would be a mockery of Almighty God, a sacrilege.
 
Our Lord’s gratuitous mercy and healing await us if we will but honestly try. He will do the rest. He will make up for what is lacking in us. In fact, He already has, through His loving self-sacrifice on the Cross! As weak, injured and insufficient as we are, He awaits us in the confessional ready to cleanse us of our lesions and to restore us to spiritual health.
 
After their healing, the ten lepers seem to have been busy getting on with their newly restored lives. So much so that only one, and he not a Jew (who ought to have known better) came back to Our Lord, Who retorted: “Were not ten cleansed? Where are the nine? Was no one found to return and give praise to God except this foreigner?”
 
When reading this we often think that the nine who failed to return were ungrateful. But let us read the Gospel more carefully. Our Lord does not lament the lack of gratitude, which is of itself certainly a natural and good human sentiment to express. Rather, He decries the fact that the nine did not come back to “give praise to God.” Here we have echoes of the first commandment of the Decalogue and of the first of the two great commandments of Our Lord (cf. Mt 22:36-40) which instruct us first and foremost to love and worship God, even before we care for others (for the latter must flow from the former if it is to be anything more than hollow activism).
 
Thus, the healing that we ‘foreigners’ receive at the hands of Our Lord as penitents in the confessional, just as for the lepers in the gospel, necessarily requires that we respond first and foremost with the praise of Almighty God, with the true worship that is His due, first and foremost. A good and integral confession that is not followed up by fidelity to daily prayer and participation in the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass every Sunday and other day of obligation is questionable in its sincerity. Our Lord does not offer his healing grace so that we can rest comfortably in our beds on Sunday mornings feeling smug! No. He restores us to spiritual health so that we might worship Him and that in so doing we may be transformed into his witnesses in the world, be that in the cloister where sinners seeking the conversion of their lives are rightly consumed with the work of the praise of God, or be that in any other vocation where our every act should bespeak our gratitude for His mercy and healing.
 
As we approach the fount of His mercy in the Sacrifice of the Cross we now offer, let us ask for both the faith necessary ourselves to cry out Jesu, præceptor, miserere nostri! and for the resolution ever to praise Him for the mercy we receive. +