Homily from St. John’s Russian Orthodox Mission Church in Lewisburg, PA, Sunday Dec. 4, 7532 (civil calendar Dec. 17, 2023)
(Above: Healing of the Ten Lepers, from the Codex Aureus Epternacensis, c. 1035-40)
“Many and various virtues has God given us to work out our salvation. One of the foremost virtues is gratitude.” So begins an old Slavonic Church Gospel commentary on today’s Gospel account of the ten lepers, drawn from St. John Chrysostom, Blessed Theophylact, and others.[1] (See the texts of both of today’s Gospel accounts pasted at the end below.)
“There is nothing greater or more beneficial,” the commentary continues. “Everyone who with paeans of thankful praise glorifies the Lord, the Giver of good gifts, greatly multiples the divine gifts for himself, whereas everyone who displays a mindless and thankless disposition is deprived of all good things, being stripped of them by a just judgement as one who angers God.”
Our Lord and God and Savior Jesus Christ Himself at the time of today’s Gospel account was planning to go to Jerusalem to offer Himself as a Sacrifice of gratitude in effect on behalf of the whole world. As He passed by the lepers said, “Jesus, Master, Have mercy on us.” They were in effect saying the Jesus Prayer. Often, we consider the roots of the Jesus Prayer elsewhere in scripture, but here we see it from a group of lepers, outcasts from society, diseased, forced to live outside the city. Their request for mercy is put as a recognition of Jesus, whose name means “He who saves,” as Savior and Master, though not yet fulfilled in the Church as would be the case with the one who was thankful.
As the commentary notes, “God, the Lover of mankind, was moved to mercy by the piteous voices of the lepers; He had compassion on all who endured cruel sufferings; for this reason did He appear on earth and become man.” And He told them to fulfill the Old Testament law in showing themselves to the priests to give evidence to be reckoned among the cleaned. “Therefore, He keeps the Law unbroken, and at the same time He grants them mercy as God; He lifts His voice, giving health to their souls and perfect well-being to their bodies.”
The details of the Old Testament law of cleansing lepers prefigures in the spiritual meaning of its elements Christ Himself. By a living bird called to be offered, we can understand how the living and heavenly Word underwent suffering in His own Body. By the offering from a cedar tree is understood Christ’s incorruptible body. Hyssop in the offering refers to the Spirit as an herbal remedy for illness of the cold. Spun scarlet mentioned in the offering testifies to the blood of the New Covenant, the running water prefigures Baptism, the cup of oil to Chrism of the Spirit, and the shaving of hair to reject self-exaltation and all sin.
All this from the law is fulfilled in Christ, the commentary notes, for He “became for us the medicine of salvation, in that He willed to suffer death by crucifixion.” The healing of the lepers and their being told to offer themselves to the priest also shows forth how the Law was “an image of the blessings of grace yet to come, a figure of the mystery of our salvation.” The leprosy itself figures how “sin makes the mind and the soul unprofitable and unfruitful through dead works, that is, foul and impure passions.” The ancient Church commentary continues, “Sending the leper out of the camp is a figure, showing that he whose mind is deadened by sin and who is wasted by various passions must necessarily be separated from the multitude of the saints and remain outside the sacred assembles.” The law viewed those partially leprous as needing more complete separation than those who were fully leprous. For it figures how, as the Apostle Paul noted, that when the faithful sin, we are not even to eat with such a one, but it is not forbidden to eat with unbelievers gathered for a feast. It is a worst state to be a believer and to cling to an identity of sin, than to be one of the harlots and publicans with whom Jesus spent time to bring sinners to repentance. It is a worse state of self-imposed separation from God’s grace to be a self-righteous sinner who fashions himself saved. This is why gratitude is so important in the Church. The very Eucharist’s name means thanksgiving in Greek, and is boudn with the mystery of Confession.
Brothers and sisters, the one of the ten who returns to express gratitude symbolizes in living and embodied terms the Church and our condition, what we must do to be fully whole in Christ, even though we are also as mortals fallen. The first step of salvation, of our spiritual warfare or ascetic struggle in synergy with grace, is recognizing how we can of our own selves do nothing. Thus, the Eucharist or thanksgiving is central to the Church. As the Priest says at Liturgy at the high table on behalf of the people, “Thine own of Thine own we offer unto Thee, on behalf of all and for all.” And the one who returns to express thanks in the Gospel prefigures the Church, for as a Samaritan he points out the universal nature of the Church as the renewed and fulfilled Israel of the New Testament, for all people. And just as there are Ten Commandments in the law, so one of those commandments, one of the Ten, is the basis for all the others, “Thou shalt have no other God before me,” and from that comes what Jesus noted as the other Great Commandment, “Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.” All the commandments become one from the basis in the Church, the Israel of God in the New Testament, of which we all commune.
Only the one who comes to express gratitude, and prostrates himself, recognizes the purpose of the healing – its demonstration that Jesus is the Christ, the Messiah, and the Son of God, and God. Also, his gratitude recognizes that the healing is for wholeness to serve, not for self-assertion. Thus, we should pursue our prayers for healing of all kinds, with recognition of the divinity of Jesus Christ, with gratitude, and that we may be whole for service to our Lord and His Church today. Thus, the one thankful one also prefigures the Church and the Body of Christ.
In the other Gospel account, of the woman with the flow of blood who heals, she returns to Jesus to say she was the one who touched Him. He knew this of course, but her public recognition was an expression of gratitude also. It would have been easy for her to have been lost in the crowd, to go back to her life without attentiveness. Yet she also figures the Church. For she like the one healed leper is one of the remnant of Israel who returns to give thanks for a life of service.
St. John Damascene, whom we commemorate today, was healed of a severed hand, made whole by the intercessions of the Mother of God, healed for service to the Church to continue writing his inspired teachings. The Great-Martyr Barbara, whom we also commemorate today showed steadfast faith and gratitude amid tortures of her martyrdom or witness, which inspired many and provides help for us still. Many Orthodox Christians chant her troparion each day, recalling Jesus’ promise to her that those who remember her and her sufferings would be preserved from sudden, unexpected death and not depart this life without benefit of the Holy Mysteries of Christ, the deepest thanksgiving. “Let us praise holy Barbara who has broken the snares of the enemy. By the help of the weapon of the Cross, she has escaped as a bird and flown Godwards.”
Unworthily on a micro level in my own life, I can think of how many times I have sinfully not given thanks as I should, for all the blessings in my life, and all the miracles of God’s grace. Blessed with baptism in the Orthodox Church, which would have seemed as far away from my background and previous life as possible, and cleansed from past sins, meeting my wife in Church, being blessed with an Orthodox family, unexpectedly being called to this area to teach, and then unexpectedly being part of the starting of a new Orthodox mission church, and a path to ordination not foreseen. But there had been many detours, sins, fallings, tribulations and tragedies also. All such that I need be grateful every day, and for every day that God gives me further to give thanks, to repent, and to serve His Church, to prostrate myself before Him, to participate in the mysteries of His Church. Gratitude and repentance and the mysteries of the Church are so closely interwoven. How often I forget, and how often daily God helps. When being trained to be first a Deacon and then a Priest at the monastery in Jordanville, I was instructed to remember while censing to even cense spaces in the Church where there are no people or immediate icons, because the bodiless powers of the angelic realm are with us in worship. So too our blessings through the grace of God surround us and often unrecognized.
In our daily lives as we experience blessings, let us give thanks, and let us offer ourselves in service to the Church, the New Testament Israel, the Body of Christ. Let us do so with prostrations in our prayers at home as we are able, like the grateful ones in the Gospel accounts, so that bodily we may express and become used to humility not as an idea but a practice of daily life. And let us throughout the day like the lepers exclaim the Jesus Prayer, even if silently, “Lord Jesus Christ have mercy on me,” and follow up then like the grateful ones with participation in the services and mysteries of the Church. That is a five-word prayer in Greek and Slavonic and even in shortened colloquial English, “Lord Jesus Christ mercy me!” As the Apostle Paul wrote, “in the church I had rather speak five words with my understanding, that by my voice I might teach others also, than ten thousand words in an unknown tongue.” Surely those words of understanding, as the Gospel accounts teach today, express the inspired language of giving thanks embodied in our lives through the grace of the Holy Spirit given by Jesus Christ.
Glory to God for all things!
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The Reading from the Holy Gospel according to Luke,
§85 [17:12-19]
At that time, as Jesus entered into a certain village, there met Him ten men who were lepers, who stood afar off. And they lifted up their voices and said, ‘Jesus, Master, have mercy on us!’ And when He saw them, He said unto them, ‘Go, show yourselves unto the priests.’ And it came to pass that as they went, they were cleansed. And one of them when he saw that he was healed, turned back and with a loud voice glorified God, and fell down on his face at His feet, giving Him thanks; and he was a Samaritan. And Jesus answering said, ‘Were there not ten cleansed? But where are the nine? There are none found that returned to give glory to God, save this stranger.’ And He said unto him, ‘Arise; go thy way. Thy faith hath made thee whole.’
Holy Gospel according to Mark,
§21 [5:24b-34]
At that time, many people followed Jesus and thronged Him. And a certain woman who had an issue of blood twelve years, and had suffered many things under many physicians, and had spent all that she had and was no better, but rather grew worse, when she had heard of Jesus, came up behind Him in the press of the crowd and touched His garment; for she said, ‘If I may touch but His clothes, I shall be whole.’ And straightway the fountain of her blood was dried up, and she felt in her body that she was healed of that plague. And Jesus, immediately knowing in Himself that virtue had gone out of Him, turned about in the press of the crowd and said, ‘Who touched My clothes?’ And His disciples said unto Him, ‘Thou seest the multitude thronging Thee, and sayest Thou, ‘Who touched Me?’’ And He looked round about to see her who had done this thing. But the woman, fearing and trembling, knowing what had been done in her, came and fell down before Him and told Him all the truth. And He said unto her, ‘Daughter, thy faith hath made thee whole. Go in peace, and be whole of thy plague.’
[1] The Gospel Commentary, trans. Hieromonk German Ciuba (Erie, PA: Russian Orthodox Church of the Nativity of Christ (Old Rite), 2002).