Twenty-eighth Sunday in Ordinary Time: Healing the Marginalized

Lectionary Readings:

• 2 Kings 5:14-17. Namaam is cured of leprosy through the word of God through Elisha. Elisha refuses any gifts and Namaan declares himself a faithful servant of the God of Israel.
• 2 Timothy 2:8-13. Paul is in chains but the Word of God can never be in chains. If we die in Him we shall live with Him.
• Luke 17:11-19 Jesus heals the ten lepers. Only one, the foreigner, realized his healed condition and returns to give thanks to Jesus. Jesus declares to him that his faith has healed him.

Thoughts for Your Consideration, By Fr. Stephen Dunn

Leprosy in Jesus’ time was a terrible affliction, not so much because of the medical condition, which, though severe, was not leprosy in our clinical definition.  But it was fearsome because it inspired fear.  And fear generated exclusion.  That was the desperate social aspect of this physical condition.  Scholars tell us that no matter what the physical result of Jesus’ miracles, we should look more to the healing than the cure.  The deepest healing was to be re-integrated into the community; the life of the society.  In our Gospel account, Jesus sent the ten lepers he encountered to the Priests at the Temple, to seek the remedy they were requesting from Divine mercy.   When, through his intervention, they found that they were healed while they were “along the way”, all but one simply continued to the Temple.  The foreigner, the Samaritan, came back to thank God by showing his gratitude to Jesus.  He would not have been welcome at the Temple, but he became the “break-through person”, welcomed into Jesus’ group of disciples when he returned to give thanks. 

Our first reading links this event to the healing of Naaman, also a foreigner, a Syrian. Again, it was a case of leprosy.  Interestingly, this story was important to Jesus, as Luke indicates in another place [4:16-30].  Our text today describes how Naaman expressed his thanks to the prophet Elisha in a unique fashion.   The prophet had worked a curious miracle for him, even though he was an army general of the king of Syria. The curious part was Elisha’s demand that Naaman wash seven times in the river Jordan.  But it was effective, and the general offered the prophet a gift when he returned to give thanks. Elisha refused.  However, Naaman wanted to remain true to the Divine power that saved him, so he asked the prophet for two donkey loads of earth, to allow him to offer his future acts of worship on the holy ground of Israel.  This the prophet Elisha granted.  And thus did this foreigner become, in a unique way, part of Israel’s story of salvation.  

Two obvious themes emerge in our texts: the central role of thankfulness in a Biblical spirituality, and the unique effect of miraculous healing: the breaking through of previously rigid boundaries.  What is the instructional opportunity for us as we are being mentored in spirituality by foreigners, a Syrian and a Samaritan? 

Like so many of Elisha’s miracle stories, and he had many, the story of Naaman  is very earthy.  It revolves around the role of water and soil.  First of all, we are made aware of how very real they are.   It was no fun plunging seven times into the river, and the donkeys certainly felt the burden of carrying all that dirt. But beyond being so earthy, the water and the soil actually generated a spirit of thanksgiving. 

A recent news story might serve as a parable of that Biblical message.  Not long ago, a strange experience began to affect the Inuit people in Greenland, who mostly live along the edge of the ice sheet that almost covers the island.  At its centre, the ice is as much as three kilometers thick.  A journalist observed: “to the mainly Inuit people of Greenland, global warming is a gift from the heavens”.  One Inuit woman remarked: “the glacier is retreating and we can see the mountains now”.  What do they see?  They have been able to verify mineral deposits of great financial value: zink, uranium, rare-earth minerals, even gold.  The journalist, along with some aboriginal leaders, see in this the healing of their “enforced and subsidized marginality”.  They will no longer have to share such humiliation with “the many ex-nomads of the world”, including of course, so many of the Native Peoples of North America. 

At one time, roughly twelve thousand years ago, the Great Lakes bioregion where I live was also hidden under several kilometers of ice.  Collectively, these millennia later, we have not learned to exhibit reverence for the healing waters, as Naaman did.  Collectively, we are not anxious to link our worship of the Creator God to the soil as Naaman did.  For us, it is soil that the glaciers prepared to be some of the most fertile on the planet.  It is now water and soil that experience the “leprosy” of being outside the boundary of our concern. 

The liturgy has brought the two Biblical healing narratives together.  Perhaps our challenge is to do likewise in the context of this as yet dangerous new millennium.  Can we find a way, as Jesus did with the Samaritan, of generously healing the marginality of the Inuit of Greenland (and around the globe) by helping them toward a “mutually enhancing” relationship, as Thomas Berry counseled, with their newly revealed mountains?   Will the growing strength of our thankfulness for creation break through the boundaries we have established, and open our spirituality towards caring for all the members of the Earth community?