Obedience and Gratitude: Homily for the Twenty-ninth Sunday after Pentecost & Twelfth Sunday of Luke in the Orthodox Church

 

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.