By Maximos Pafilis, Bishop of Melitene
Sermon on the Gospel according to Luke 17:12-19.
At the borderline of human agony and of divine condescension, the narration of the ten lepers weaves a study upon the memory of the flesh and the oblivion of the soul, dissecting the silent distance that separates healing from redemption. And yet, there, inside the heavy and blurry memory we carry and in our cracked present, sink some shadows that are unable to hold their shape. Thus must those lepers also have appeared; they looked more like demolished statues rather than like humans, dark spots in a horizon that had vomited them. The terror, the bitter truth, raises a wall, exactly there between the light and the ash. They scream, a wheeze that is uprooted from throats burnt and dry from the desert: «Jesus, Master, have pity on us!» (Luke 17:13). They do not seek many things, but they thirst for all things. More than the cure, they yearn to drink the gaze, the hope to exist again as persons inside the eyes of some Other.
The paradoxical command of the Christ, however, plants hopes that the dark need for recognition is not able to ignore, as without touching them or cleansing them at that moment, He pushes them to the observance of the Law and to the priestly establishment, to the formalistic mechanical ratification of existence. One could say that it acts as a stone in the lake of faith. Essentially, they hurry to ascertain if they are clean proceeding on the road —as they went— from the moment the command was heard until the moment that they would be redeemed. In any case here, however, begins the tragedy.
What is the difference between a guardian of the form and a lover of the essence, between the violence of the healing and the drunkenness of the gift? The nine continue their course, not because they are necessarily bad, but because they are simply «hollow», trapped in an endless lethargy of identity. Unfortunately, this happens often. We speak about a stance characteristic of the fortified Jews, who considered the miracle a possession of theirs and submitted the sacred moment of transformation to a dead procedure. Health becomes an idol and the legal settlement God. They lose the juice because they were dazzled by the peel. How tragically familiar… The safety of «belonging» blinds you, a narcissistic enjoyment of our shop window.
But, as Saint Theophylact of Bulgaria observes with acuity, distance and proximity are internal magnitudes: «In place they stood afar off, but in supplication they were near» (Gr. «Τῷ μὲν τόπῳ πόῤῥω ἔστησαν, τῇ δὲ ἱκεσίᾳ ἐγγὺς ἐγένοντο»).[1] How is it possible that they remain strangers to any gratitude, when they have just been healed? I must say that something does not breathe correctly here. There remains the one, the tenth. He who is left over. The alien Samaritan, the heretic for the Jews, the refuse. The fact that he is a foreigner and a heretic creates precisely the conditions for what we “pure” people easily call “sinful” or “immoral.”
He stops. This temporal pause concerns exclusively him who tasted the miracle. Only he felt God. Legitimate and necessary, but it is something deeper than simple gratitude, it is, so to speak, an earthquake of the soul. He returns «in a loud voice» (Luke 17:15), as his reaction springs effortlessly from the incandescent memory of the pain that he crossed. His worship escapes from every formal ritual and becomes wildfire, as he knows that no one owed him anything. Here is recognised the unhoped-for divine rain in the life and the soul of the human. It is a moment of indelible significance. We? We the «settled ones»? The truth is that often we resemble the nine, having the Church and the mysteries given, salvation almost secured in our logic. Anyhow, perhaps I weigh things, but thus it seems. We grow up, learning to appreciate whatever is solid. «We went to the priests», we fulfilled the debt. The repetition of religious acts, when it happens mechanically, leads finally to the cold concealment of indifference. We receive the gift and turn our back to the Giver, lost in the management of our «normality». We forget easily…
And who reproves us? The «stranger», the castaway. As a mentality, an atmosphere, a self-evident need, the demand of repentance marks the human of the margin. He whom the herd of the guardians of purity has written off, the drug addict who saw light, the whore who bled, the atheist who in a moment of crushing shouted «My God» and meant it, touches something real. This internal storm led him to the return. These fall at His feet. They have nowhere else to lean. Faith seems to be a bond and not a simple admission. However, inside our organised oblivion exist some thorns that are unable to submit to ingratitude. But is it so? The Christ asks: «Where are the other nine?» (Luke 17:17). The question remains suspended, not because He desires to learn —He knows— but in order that we touch the silence that their flight leaves. To forget at that hour is essentially like inhabiting a great delusion regarding your very existence. It is to live thinking that you are the cause of your own self, forgetting that every breath is borrowed. Houses and lives do not root without water, and so nothing is ours.
The Samaritan, the stranger, becomes the measure, showing us that salvation is not a matter of blood or observance of forms. He carves for us another road. As Synesius of Cyrene aptly points out, referring to the distinction of the legal provisions, «for when he wishes even the proselytes to commit something, specifically he remembers them too» (Gr. «ὅταν γὰρ καὶ τοὺς προσηλύτους βούληταί τι διαπράττεσθαι, ἰδικῶς καὶ αὐτῶν μέμνηται»).[2] So the dividing legal borders are extinguished in the thought and the judgment of God. Because, truth be told, God sees the abyss. The «alien» is saved not because he kept the form, but because he was grafted into the Person. What differentiates a bodily washing from a holistic salvation? «Your faith has made you well» (Luke 17:19). This is revealed in the face of the alien leper, who threw aside the formal securing and made his cure a sacrifice. He did not freeze at the letter of the law.
And we remain looking at the road. We equip ourselves with temporary well-being, in a stressful identification with nothingness. The nine figures have been lost in the depth, hasty to consume their health and to sink into the oblivion of everydayness, as their course is vowed to a happiness that does not possess memory, except only past grandeurs. Are they happy? Let us say so. But it concerns a shallow happiness, without juice. A pity, one might say. The tenth exceeds the decay and stands up, with his face bearing still the grooves of the tears in the dust. In his life however, despite its rational organisation, existed a crack that was not possible to close. We do not know what became of him, if he became a disciple, if he martyred, or if he lived quietly. His life, however, was grafted forever. This signals the conversion of the demolished old Ego into eucharistic existence.
Perhaps finally gratitude constitutes the only health, a way of true life, as this truth springs from the root of existence and all other things, the clean skin, the social acceptance, the success, are simply the shell. An essence that requires the diving, the decision to return and the recognition of the gift. It’s a personal choice, this move that no one forces you to make, to stand in front of what you’ve been given and say thank you, even if silently.
[1] Theophylact of Bulgaria, “Ta Heuriskomena Panta” [The Complete Findings], in Patrologiae Cursus Completus: Series Graeca, ed. Jacques-Paul Migne, vol. 123 (Paris: J.-P. Migne, 1864), 989.
[2] Synesius of Cyrene, “Ta Heuriskomena Panta” [The Complete Findings], in Patrologiae Cursus Completus: Series Graeca, ed. Jacques-Paul Migne, vol. 66 (Paris: J.-P. Migne, 1864), 792.
