HOMILY for 28th ORDINARY SUNDAY : 9th October 2022
I wonder if you know the story of the Biblical Scholar who was challenged at a railway station by one of those enthusiastic evangelical Christians with the question “Have you been saved?” You can hear and see me give this Homily/Sermon on https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u_sO8K8rVhU
His reply was “Do you mean have I been saved…. or am I being saved or… will I be saved? Because the answer varies. Yes, I have been saved. (Eph 5:28) Jesus died for us on the cross. But am I being saved? (1 Cor 1:18) Well I am doing my best, and will I be saved? (Rom 10:9-13) That’s in the hands of God.” Indeed, as he might have gone on to say, those who are convinced they are saved and others are not, have by claiming this put themselves further away from God. This was after all the claim of the Pharisees who Jesus so often condemned.
We get this idea of being saved at the end of the story of the healing of the ten lepers in our Gospel today. (Luke 17:11-19) All ten lepers are clearly healed, but when one turns back to Jesus to praise God, it is then that Jesus says to him “Your faith has saved you.” So, God’s healing power has worked in all of them, but the one who turns back is told that something more has happened to him. Yet what is interesting is that it is his “faith” that has done this; but his faith is not an organised set of beliefs in God and in Jesus, nor even in some kind of understanding of what God is like. Instead his faith is simply his expression of praise.
We humans, especially those of us who are “religious”, all too easily want to define how God works in our world. It makes it so much easier for us if we know precisely what we have to do to be a good Christian. The Catholic Church has too often been guilty of doing this, of giving people a list of things they must do; and sadly this has tended to make those who do such things complacent, and those who fail in some way feel rejected. But God’s news, as we hear in our 2nd Reading (2 Tim 2:8-13) cannot be chained up in this or any other way; so when someone says “I feel there must be some power underlying the Universe but I don’t know what it is,” we need to be pleased that they are responding to God in their way, even if it isn’t quite ours; for God works in unexpected ways.
The story of Naaman, part of which is our 1st Reading, (2 Kings 5:14-17) shows us this very clearly. Unfortunately, the crucial part is not given to us unless we go and read it in the Bible. ( https://www.biblegateway.com) The point is that Elisha’s suggestion that Naaman washes seven times in the River Jordan angers Naaman greatly and he declares “I thought that he would surely come out to me and stand and call on the name of the Lord his God, wave his hand over the spot and cure me of my leprosy. Are not ..the rivers of Damascus, better than all the waters of Israel? Couldn’t I wash in them and be cleansed?” He is eventually calmed down by his servants, who suggest that it can’t do any harm; and so he tries it and as we see, it works. Naaman also has to learn that the true God does not expect payment for his healing, instead he discovers the glory of simply praising God just like our leper, only in his case by taking some soil back home with him. Remember that in those days people tended to think that a god was limited to his or her own land, which explains why he needs that soil.
We need to realise that although God does indeed work powerfully in the Church, especially through the Sacraments that he has explicitly given to us, this does not mean that God is limited in any way, nor that God needs our response in order to work in us. As we heard at the end of our 2nd Reading “We may be unfaithful, but he is always faithful, for he cannot disown his own self.” God works to heal Naaman, even though he doesn’t believe that washing in the Jordan will make any difference; and there are so many other instances where God is at work, despite people’s lack of faith. Indeed, many people who are now Christians became Christians precisely because they decided to pray even though they didn’t really believe in what they were praying to. In the end, they found that it made all the difference in the world to them.
So we need to realise that praising God just like the leper did, without realising exactly what the God is like, is one of the most powerful ways in which we open up to more of what God is, and in which we are drawn more fully into the God who is always more than we can express or imagine. It is the leper’s praise that draws him into the mysterious process by which he is saved, in which God’s saving grace can work more fully in him. John Newton was a captain of a slaving ship. He was not only involved in a wicked and cruel trade, but he himself was a man who did not follow any moral code. Yet somehow, in the midst of all this, God spoke to him and gradually transformed him from what he was, into someone who rejected that past and became a powerful Christian preacher. He expressed what had happened in the hymn we all know so well.
“Amazing grace, how sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me.
I once was lost but now I’m found, was blind but now I see.”
Of course, I regret that he did not find his way into becoming a member of the Catholic Church, but nonetheless his Hymn has inspired many Catholics, as well as other Christians, to recognise how God can work in us even when we are not really ready for him.
Mind you, God cannot force himself on us. He’s given us free will and if we choose to completely deny him, he cannot stop us from destroying ourselves. Our 2nd Reading makes this clear, “If we disown him, then he will disown us.” But disowning us doesn’t mean that God gives up on us. He heals the 9 lepers who do not return to praise him, and he still provides all of us, even if we reject him, with the sun and the rain, and life itself. Remember what Jesus taught ? God “causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous.” We must never limit in our minds the ways God may work.
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