“THE HEALING OF FORGIVENESS”
Saint Luke 17: 11-19
14th Sunday after Trinity: 13 September Anno Domini 2020
Fr Jay Watson, SSP
One can behold God as a Shield when things are going well. The Lord is your “mighty fortress” when the sailing is clear and calm and the battle seems to be with you; when your healthy, employed, fed, clothed, and content with loving family. But is God your redoubt, sanctuary, or tabernacle when you’ve god an incurable disease? Do you call upon and look to the face of The Anointed when you’re in pain, depressed, or just slowing wasting away? Would you rather spend a “day in [His] courts…than a thousand” in victorious, pleasureful, and glorious comfort? Everyone knows that “old Adam,” your “old Adam” would opt for the latter. It’s why you are always sinning and falling short; it’s why you don’t fear God. Fearing God is not cowering in servile and beaten terror. Fearing God is hating sin and error so much that you actively resist the world, the flesh, and Satan. You should go to bed each night exhausted, but in a good way, from your battle against trespassing. Now that’s a good work day in the field; that’s a good and faithful servant.
As much as one might like to “only” spiritualize todays Gospel text: “your sin is just like their leprosy,” that approach doesn’t really capture what’s happening. Sin, your sin, comes from the heart. It is not the things you think, say, and do, that is at the heart of your lost predicament, but what you are in your fallen “inner man.” And, no one can see it. It can’t be diagnosed by blood test, X-ray, CT scan, or any other empirical diagnostic tool. Ten of you could walk into any Church on any Lord’s Day and not be noticed as “spiritual lepers.”
Christ came to save the lost. He came to sinners to forgive them but He also came so that the forgiven sinners would be healed of disease and brokenness and might live in joyous physical victory—PHYSICAL.
The Lord is constantly healing poor miserable (sinners? Well, yes) but poor miserable people with miserable diseases and deformities: cripples, palsied, blind, deaf & mute, bleeding for years, physically possessed by demons, and also—LEPERS.
And as you know, Jesus did not heal every single person in Israel who had these body crushing abnormalities. And as you very well know—you who have seen dear and loved ones die from disease; you who yourself suffer from chronic and progressive diseases—Jesus doesn’t heal you either. Not all the time. Not usually.
So, does “[your] soul still longeth, yea, even fainteth, for the courts of The Lord?”
Even as you do not “see” The Christ with your eyes, as Saints Peter, John, or The Blessed Virgin, you believe. You confess The Creed, The Faith, The Christ “…and was crucified also for us…I acknowledge one baptism for the remission of sins…and I look for the resurrection of the dead…and the life of the world to come.” AMEN. Do you not say AMEN? So, even though you did not see with your eyes the healing of the 10 Lepers; and probably do not see with your eyes your own healing…do you not still say Amen? Where are you right now? Why are you here? You do not come into the courts of The Lord to be physically healed, or because it’s THE LAW to be here. You come here because your Lord and God your Savior and Friend, Jesus is here and He bids you come. You are constrained by The Holy Ghost to gather around the author and perfecter of your life just like all the miserable people in Palestine were so gathered by the Good News.
The “good news” (sic) of Satan, which is really foul and damning news, is that healing now in time, riches, wealth, power, success, health, luxury, HERE IN TIME, is all that there is. What foul and pernicious lies. Who would choose to be the “Rich Man” knowing hell awaits? You are Lazarus and you know that heaven awaits. Lazarus no longer has sores filled with puss, and those Lepers will also have perfect skin and bodies at the Resurrection.
Every time Jesus healed one person it was a sign that hell was in retreat, that sin had met its match, that Satan was being defeated. But they were only signs. The Lepers still aged, and may very well themselves, in later life, become lame, bind, deaf, and then…dead. The wages of sin IS death. But the encounter with The Christ guaranteed that those forgiven by His Grace and Given His Faith would stand with Job, and with The Resurrected Jesus one day in Eternity—with glorified bodies. It’s a promise. One believes a promise. That is your faith—the evidence of things not seen but held on to; guarded, and exercised daily in receiving all His gifts.
Naaman was not instantly healed. He was still a leper after the first dip, even after the third dip. Only after the seventh application of the Jordan and his stepping out was his leprosy healed. The 10 Lepers were not healed immediately upon their visual and physical “face-to-face” with The God/Man, but rather on their way to the Priest. Forgiveness, Holy + Absolution precedes life and salvation. There can be, usually is, a lag-time…your entire life from your own Holy + Baptism is, or may well be, the lag-time.
The joy of waiting patiently for the big pay-off, the ultimate delivery, the Heavenly Glory and Splendor is what Adam, Noah, Job, Abraham, Daniel, and all the others clung to. And because Jesus clung to the cross by allowing the nails to cling into His innocent and perfect flesh, all of His Disciples could/can also suffer “in Him” anything that befalls them. Peter crucified upside down, Bartholomew torn to shreds, James thrown from the temple and speared, Stephen stoned to death, and Paul beheaded after a long imprisonment. They were not healed—in this life. So dear Saint, why do you suffer your own grueling leprosy? I don’t know and can’t give you a human answer. God knows. He has greatness planned for you: Heavenly healing.
You wait with St. Paul this morning. You commune with Him at the rail. You hear Jesus’ Words of love to you through his letter to the Romans: “for I reckon that the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory which shall be revealed in us. For the earnest expectation of the creature waiteth for the manifestation of the sons of God.” [Rom. 8.18-19]
And to the Corinthians then, and now, “for our light affliction, which is but for a moment, worketh for us a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory.” [2 Cor. 4.17]
Leprosy…for a while…Life and Salvation forever. This is The Gospel of The Lord, through the suffering and death of Christ Jesus; the Resurrection of The Lord, and The Word to you now.
In the Name of the Father and + of the Son and of The Holy Ghost
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