Today’s readings: 2 Kings 5, 14-17; 2 Timothy 2, 8-13; Luke 17, 11-19.
The good news of the gospel is all about celebrating life. That news, as St Paul writes to Timothy in the second reading, cannot in any way be chained to boundaries of any kind. God’s action is as broad as the universe. This is what the healing from leprosy of Naaman by the prophet Elisha, and by Jesus in the gospel stand for.
Naaman in the first reading was a pagan commander of the Syrian army who had led various military incursions into Israel. This time round he returns to Israel to be cured of his leprosy by the prophet Elisha. In the gospel, with the healing of the 10 lepers and the gratitude shown by the Samaritan, St Luke provides a turning point in Jesus’s journey towards Jerusalem: it is the sign of God’s kingdom reaching out beyond the confines of Judaic religion.
The true healing of Naaman and the Samaritan was not that they were cleansed from leprosy, but that they became adoring hearts. Dietrich Bonhoeffer was right when he wrote that “to encounter God is to change”. Authentic conversion is not simply turning one’s back on one’s past, but being able to face the future serenely and without fear.
A basic dimension of true faith is the capacity to celebrate what one believes, the possibility of maintaining against all odds an attitude of praise, adoration, and thanksgiving towards God the Lord and giver of life. Most probably, that is our major challenge today: to remain in the right perspective that allows us to discern God’s working in our lives and in whatever shapes our life.
Today’s stories about lepers healed and brought to wholeness highlight this attitude of praise and thanksgiving, which flows from that inner healing we all need and aspire to. But there is also a second point which features remarkably: both stories speak of outsiders.
This poses serious questions to the Church in our times. For quite a long time, as Michael Frost and Alan Hirsch write in their book The Faith of Leap, “Mission was reserved for work among the unreached nations, for missionaries slashing their way through the jungle, going where no one had gone before”. This made the churches, particularly in the West, drift languidly into the role of fundraiser for the missions in far-away countries.
We are practically all children of a doctrine according to which one had to belong to the true Church in order to be saved. This led to proselytism, to being aggressively sure of ourselves, to limiting God’s innovatory capacity. It was the historical sin which blocked us from seeing through and beyond colour, race, religion and faith.
Acknowledging the dignity of each and every individual led the Church in the Second Vatican Council to celebrate the liberty of conscience. It is no longer a question of where the truth is and who possesses it, but rather how and where the truth is to be found. This change of mentality made, and still makes many uncomfortable. But it is the essence of the good news of the gospel we need to recover. It’s not only Christians that were created in God’s own image and likeness.
God’s covenant embraces all, and His kingdom is found wherever an offence is forgiven or a stranger is made welcome, or a prophetic voice is raised against injustice. God’s kingdom extends with humanity, wherever that is celebrated in its wholeness. On the contrary, it is made defunct wherever human dignity is abused.
What is at risk in our times is not the survival of the Church, but of the gospel ethos. Now is the time for the Church to put man again at the centre, but not at the expense of God the creator as happened with the Enlightenment. The mission of the Church in this day and age is to recover that wholeness which belongs to all that is human in as much as it is in true humaneness that God is made manifest.
True humaneness, as God himself, is something that transcends the inside or outside of the boundaries we set even through our religious institutions.