“TEN CONQUERED BY ONE (ONE IN THREE & THREE IN ONE)”
Saint Luke 17: 11-19
14th Sunday after Trinity: 22 September Anno Domini 2019
Father Jay Watson SSP
As even lawyers, scribes, and Pharisees knew (and know), all the Law is summed up in The Great and First Command: Love The Lord thy God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength (Mk. 12.30)
“And it came to pass” that Adam would not and did not. And now you cannot! You cannot even come to God. You do not pass through your own Samaria’s or Galilee’s to Christ or His New Jerusalem. “I cannot by my own reason or strength believe in Jesus Christ, my Lord, or come to Him” you confess in the Small Catechism.
He enters the village—the village of the damned. Your rotting and dead heart, before He baptized + you, and the diseased blackened heart and flesh of the Lepers. They were sinners but their leprosy was not the payback for an individual transgression or trespass. They were decaying because they were sinners in a dying world. They were, like you, still being doled out their wages. But even those sinners still were called by The Holy Ghost to The Mercy which came to them “Jesus, Master, have mercy on us.” You said the same thing in the Kyrie a few minutes ago. Good.
Those ten men had names—their original names, and their soon-to-be-new-and forever + Names.
Their old names would still pester and plague them, as your old name does as well. Yes, it’s Adam, but specifically that’s only the surname. It’s Ms. Self-first; Mr. Cursing; Boy sermon-despising; Child parent-disrespecting; Madame Hate; Mrs. Lust & Mr. Cheater; Kid Thieving; Gal Gossip; and Guy Greed with his moll Gal, Coveting.
The Law kills. The Law does not make alive. You are to obey the Law or die. You can’t. You don’t die because Jesus obeyed The Law for you; on your behalf. Though you must obey because it’s still God’s Word, you obey still by Jesus obeying and keeping you IN HIM, and He IN YOU, so the credit is still yours by His Grace in the Faith given you as gift. You are not healed of your spiritual (or physical) leprosy by your own actions, not even by your own faith—if you misperceive faith as YOUR action. You are healed by Jesus.
The Lord had mercy. He spoke The Word. The Word does what Jesus desires—always. Though He said “go shew yourselves unto the priests” (primarily so the 10 could be readmitted into synagogue, Temple, and societal fellowship and worship) they were healed on the way—probably while still in visual distance from The Christ.
The Word is with you now. But then, and now, that Word is never separated from Jesus’ Person AND WORK. He Who is life Himself, heals, restores, regenerates, and preserves you and all other former dead men, by His own suffering and death. He took the contagion of leprosy, the soul crushing twin tablets of Guilt from out of your wounds and off of your lungs, and allowed them to be hammered into His sinless flesh and ground down into His suffocating lungs. The Ten Commandments stand over Joseph of Arimathea’ s cave-grave, as the Tombstone Testament that WAS against you. “For Christ is the end of the law for righteousness to everyone that believeth.” [Rom. 10.4]
The temptation now is simply to read to you all most of Paul’s letter to the Galatians…to show you the foolishness of clinging to your fallen concepts of trying to DO and ACT and somehow resurrect the Commandments as your polar North Star for direction and life compass. So, yes, here’s some “law” 😉 go and read Galatians. Believe, teach, and confess this Crucified and Risen God/Man. Embrace tightly the Christ, Who right now, embraces you. You need not go and show yourselves to any old Priest of The Law, for you are fallen with that cleansed Samaritan at the merciful feet of The Good Samarian.
As Paul finishes much of his explication in Galatians on how Jesus is the end of the Law to all who believe; that you are dead to, and freed from, the law (in + Baptism) but alive unto God by being Crucified + with Christ; he segues into the new and everlasting Testament of Holy Eucharist.
You are freed from the 10—the bondage of Hagar which is Mount Sinai. You live in joy and peace in the Freedom of Sarah which is Mount Calvary—and its delivery in The Church Catholic—The New Jerusalem of Christ’s Body and Blood.
Come THIS way, His Faith, which is in you, and will now again, be in YOU, hath made thee whole.
In the Name of the Father and + of the Son and of The Holy Ghost
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