Colossians 3:4-11; Luke 17:12-19
During the season of
Christmas, we celebrated the Nativity in the flesh of the Savior. Born as truly one of us, He is the New Adam Who
restores and fulfills us as living icons of God. During the season of Theophany, we celebrated
the revelation of His divinity as a Person of the Holy Trinity at His baptism,
where the voice of the Father identified Him as the Son and the Holy Spirit descended
upon Him in the form of a dove. Christ
has appeared in the waters of the Jordan, blessing the entire creation,
enabling all things to become radiant with the divine glory. When we put Him on like a garment in baptism,
we participate in the sanctification that He has brought to the world as we
regain the “robe of light” repudiated by our first parents.
We must never think of
our Lord’s birth or baptism, or of our own baptism, as somehow the end of the
story. Saint Paul wrote that, “when
Christ, Who is our life, appears, then you also will appear with him in glory.” As we confess in the Nicene Creed, there is a
future dimension of Christ’s appearance, for He “will come again with glory to
judge the living and the dead, Whose kingdom will have no end.” We “look for the resurrection of the dead and
the life of the world to come.” When
Christ returns in brilliant glory, the true state of our souls will be revealed. The Last Judgment will be the ultimate
epiphany or manifestation of whether we have embraced His healing and become
radiant with His gracious divine energies.
It will be impossible to hide or obscure on that day who we have become.
To
shine eternally with the light of Christ requires that we undertake the daily
struggle to purify and reorient the desires of our hearts toward fulfillment in
God and away from slavery to our passions.
The Colossians to whom Paul wrote were mostly Gentile converts who
needed to be reminded that they had repudiated corrupt pagan practices and put
on Christ in baptism. That is why Paul
told them to “Put to death therefore what is earthly in you: fornication,
impurity, passion, evil desire, and covetousness, which is idolatry.” It is contradictory to unite oneself to Christ
and then to refuse to conform our character to His. In order to have spiritual integrity, we must
continue to repudiate all that keeps us from becoming living epiphanies of our
Lord’s salvation. As Paul notes, “anger, wrath, malice, slander…foul talk” and lying
should have no place in our lives, for in baptism we have “put off the old
nature with its practices and have put on the new nature, which is being
renewed in knowledge after the image of its Creator.”
As those who
live in hope for the coming of the Kingdom, we must struggle every day of our
lives to enter more fully into Christ’s restoration and fulfillment of the
human person in the image and likeness of God.
There is no other way to appear with Him in glory, whether today or when
His Kingdom comes in its fullness. And
the merely human distinctions that we so often celebrate due to our passions
and insecurities have nothing to do with sharing in the life of our Lord, for as
Paul wrote, “Here there cannot be Greek and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised,
barbarian, Scythian, slave, free man, but Christ is all, and in all.”
Today’s gospel reading provides a shocking example
of this truth, for the Lord’s healing mercy extended even to a Samaritan with
leprosy. Among the ten lepers the Lord
healed, the only one who returned to thank Him was a hated Samaritan,
someone considered a foreigner and a heretic by the Jews. After the man fell down before Him in
gratitude, the Lord said, “Rise and go your way; your faith has made you
well.” Our Lord’s gracious interaction
with this man shows that His therapeutic ministry extended even to those
conventionally understood to be outsiders, sinners, and enemies. The Lord’s love for humanity transcends all political
and personal boundaries, and we must not pretend that His benevolence somehow
does not extend to those we consider our enemies for whatever reason. Doing so will reveal only how very far we are
from becoming living epiphanies of His salvation.
Remember that our
Savior praised the faith of a Roman centurion, who was an officer of the Roman
army that occupied Israel. By any
conventional standard, that man was His enemy.
(Lk 7:9) The people of Nazareth tried to throw Christ off a cliff when
He reminded them that God had at times blessed Gentiles through the ministry of
great Hebrew prophets and had not helped Jews.
(Lk 4:29) He shocked everyone by talking with St. Photini, the Samaritan
woman at the well, and then spending a few days in her village. (Jn 4:40) The list could go on, but the point
is obvious that our Lord’s love for broken, suffering humanity extends literally
to all who bear the divine image and likeness. He was born and baptized in order to bring all
people into the Holy Trinity’s eternal communion of love. It is only “the old nature” of corruption that
would keep us so enslaved to hatred, division, and vengeance that we would imagine
that those we consider our enemies are any less called to become brilliant
epiphanies of salvation than we are.
Perhaps the
Samaritan returned to give thanks because he had never expected to find healing
from the Jewish Messiah. He knew that,
in the eyes of the Jews, he was considered sinful and an outcast. Nonetheless, he obeyed the Lord’s command to
head toward the temple in Jerusalem to show himself to the priests. That must have been a very difficult
instruction for a Samaritan to obey, for the Samaritan temple was not in
Jerusalem, but on Mount Gerizim. The
Jewish temple was no place for a Samaritan; he surely would not have been
welcome there. Nonetheless, he set out
toward Jerusalem with the other lepers.
When he realized that he had been healed, he was the only one to return
to thank the Savior for this life-changing miracle.
This
man did not have the pride of someone who expected everything to go his way
because of his heritage or personal accomplishments. He could take nothing for
granted and was profoundly thankful for a blessing he had never expected. He was truly humble and thus had the
spiritual clarity to see that the only appropriate response to his healing was
to fall down before Christ in gratitude.
That is how he showed the faith that made him well.
We
can all follow his example by both obeying the Lord’s commandments and cultivating
a deep sense of gratitude. The Samaritan
did what Christ told him to do and, when he saw that he was healed, remembered
to thank Him. We must struggle to
repudiate the ways in which we fall short of our high calling to manifest His glory. When we find the strength to do so, even in
small and imperfect ways, we must not thank ourselves but the One Who heals us
by His grace. We must not pretend that
we have accomplished something by our own power, but must cultivate gratitude
as we continue the journey to share more fully in His life. The more
that we enter into the brilliant light of Christ, the more the darkness
within us will become apparent. Instead
of despairing or distracting ourselves by judging others, let us embrace the
struggle each day of our lives to find healing from our passions as we embrace more
fully our true identity in Christ, becoming evermore brilliant epiphanies of
His salvation. Let us prepare to “appear
with him in glory” through obedience and gratitude, for that is the only way to
follow the example of the Samaritan, whose faith made him well.
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