Matthew 17:11-19
This text from Luke’s
Gospel is often used to make us feel guilty, telling us we haven’t been as
thankful as we should have been. I much prefer encouragement to blame as a way
to influence folks, so this comment by Jesus troubles me.
So, how do we think
about this text, when Jesus is clearly trying to make the nine healed lepers
feel guilty? First, let’s put the story into modern terms so we can connect
with it better.
On a tour of Western
Africa, Jesus stopped near a village where ten Ebola patients were being treated.
They kept their distance from him, as they called out, “Jesus, Master, have
mercy on us!”
When he saw them, he
said to them, “Go and show yourselves to the doctors.” They were not healed
immediately, but by the time they reached the edge of town, they noticed that
they had been made well. One of them, when he saw that he was healed, ran back
to Jesus, knelt at his feet and thanked him. And he was a Muslim.
Then Jesus asked, “Didn’t
I heal ten people? Where are the other nine? Was this Muslim the only one who
took the time to praise God for his healing?” Then he said to him, “Your faith
has made you whole. Go on your way.”
In the original version
and in my modern adaptation, the outsiders are praised. Good Jews avoided
Samaritan territory whenever possible. Jews and Samaritans shared some aspects
of faith, and had Moses as a common ancestor in the faith, but they mostly saw
each other as too different to have cordial relationships with each other.
Today, while we
recognize that Christians, Jews and Muslims have Abraham as our common ancestor,
we are often suspicious of each other. Since all three faiths have extremists,
we don’t know if we can trust each other.
It’s only through the
circumstance of disease that the ten men (or men and women?) are stuck together
in exile from their communities.
We notice that Jesus comments
to the outsider that his faith had made him whole. While this could mean that
only the outsider’s faith had made him whole, we should not assume that the
faith of the other nine was not strong. After all, they all called out to Jesus
as master, and they all believed that he could heal him.
Where we see the
difference is in the giving of thanks. We are shocked to realize that it was only
the outsider – the Samaritan, the Muslim -- who took the time and effort to
return and give thanks for his healing. The others appear to have taken the
healing for granted.
They were so excited
about being healed that they headed directly to the priest/ doctor, so they
could be declared clean. Once officially declared healed, they were able to hug
their families and get back to making a living, get back to normal lives. So,
while they may have been grateful to be healed, they were more focused on what
came next. In the process, they neglect taking time out to give thanks. In so
doing, they take the healer – God – for granted.
How often do we take God
for granted? How often are we so focused on what comes next that we neglect to
take time to give thanks for what we have been given?
Let’s make a list of
some things for which we can be grateful, but which we often take for granted.
We woke up today.
We woke up today in a
house, on a bed, with blankets, and heat and air conditioning.
We live here in the
Nature Coast of Florida, where we have God’s beautiful creation right outside
our doors.
We have beautiful
sunsets.
We have family and
friends to love and care for.
We have enough to eat
and drink, with a variety of foods and flavors.
We have food our
ancestors never ate, and we have seasonal foods all year ‘round.
We are relatively
healthy. If we are not as healthy as we could be, we have medications and
therapies to control our un-health.
While we may complain
about the relative cold, we don’t have snow to shovel.
We have many ways of
communicating with each other, from face to face, to landline phones to cell
phones and computers and tablets.
We create beauty, with
gardens and cut flowers, with paintings, with carvings and wood-working, with
fabric, with colored stones, and much more.
We have jobs, or
retirement income from jobs.
We have cars to get
around, or we have friends who are willing to provide transportation.
We have stores nearby –
maybe not the stores we want, but at least we can get what we need nearby. We
can order what is not available locally from the internet and have it delivered
in a few days.
These are some of the
matters of just living that we often take for granted.
As Americans, we may
take for granted the ability to worship as we wish, as often as we wish. But
after my time in Eastern Europe in 1987, I realized how valuable our freedom of
religion is. In some places in the Arab world, and the communist world, it is,
even today, difficult for Christians to worship.
We even take for granted
that we have been born American, and not Chinese or Russian, or Egyptian.
As Lutherans, we focus
on the grace of God, on the gift of freedom in Christ to care for one another.
We take for granted this freedom which means we need not strive to be perfect,
since we are made perfect through Jesus Christ.
We believe that God
created all that exists, including the world that surrounds us, and our very
selves. We believe that Jesus is the Son of God, who lived and died to prove to
us how much God loves us and how readily God forgive us. We believe that
through the Holy Spirit, God communicates with us and connects us to each
other.
We have Jesus’ promise
that death is not the final word in our lives, that our relationship with God
continues even after we die.
In our day-to-day
living, we tend to take much of what we have and what we do for granted. I
encourage you this week to examine your lives and notice how much you take for
granted. Take time, right then, to give thanks.
We believe that all we
have was given to us by God. Yes, we have worked hard to purchase what we own,
and we have scrimped and saved money to improve the conditions of our lives. But
at the beginning, it all comes from God.
So, let us give thanks to
God for our health, our wealth, our location, our loved ones, and the countless
ways in which God blesses our lives every single day.
Please pray with me.
Generous God, we give you thanks for everything you give to us. Forgive us when
we forget that you are the source of all we have. Remind us to give thanks to
you, and to strive to be as generous as you are. Amen
