If you aren't giving thanks, you aren't healed!

Homily
28th Sunday in Ordinary Time
10 October 2010
St. Lawrence Catholic Campus Center

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Life has kicked all us of around one way or another. Even the best looking, the richest, the most famous among us have thorns in their side. We may not believe it, but it's true. Every human person is in need of healing. It is the inevitable part of the sinful condition we find ourselves in. It is the reality of living in a world where good and evil co-exist. We all get beat up. We get sick. We find ourselves in danger. We are afraid for our lives. We are ignored. We are treated as objects, not persons. We are lied to. We are cheated on. We catch bad breaks. We are misunderstood. We are judged by the worst thing we have done. And worst of all, we are not just the victims of these things. We are sinners ourselves. We do these things to others. We use them. We lie to them. We cheat them. We judge them. We all do it.

Being a happy person, a person who lives life to the fullest, means all of this junk that makes up a human life must be healed. The junk needed to be healed yesterday. It must be healed today. It must be healed tomorrow. Healing is a process that is never complete. Even the healthiest person among us is still vulnerable. That is the human condition. It is inescapable. We all need healing. And so it should not be hard for us to relate to the leprosy experienced by Namaan and the ten men in today's scriptures. It should be the simplest thing in the world for us to see ourselves in these characters. But sometimes the simplest things in life are the hardest to keep simple. We spend so much time trying to mask the brokenness that we experience, to anesthesize the human condition, and to hide our own sinfulness, that it is hard to see ourselves in the lepers. We don't see ourselves in the lepers, and this comes across when we hear the Gospels and hear nothing and see nothing new. The healing stories in the Gospels are many. Jesus heals many people over and over again. Not everyone, not even the majority, but many people. We have the stories that can sound like a broken record. Jesus sees a paralytic, a blind man, a demoniac, and lepers, and he heals them. Heard it. Know it. Is there anything new? Did the reading of today's Gospel move your heart? Or did you dismiss it as something old?

Yet the Gospels are not boring. They are not old. They are alive and they strike to the heart of the human person. We are boring. And we let ourselves get old. But these Gospels are not so! In the you're ok, I'm ok, we're ok culture, where pain and loneliness and brokenness, and the reality of the human condition is not confronted, but just anesthesized, where everyone is just a pill away from being cured and being happy, the Gospel healing stories can lose their vitality and excitement. Now I'm preaching to myself again. I lose motivation for preaching these stories myself because I lose motivation in confronting my own brokenness, my own loneliness, my own weaknesses, and my own sinfulness. What is worse, my desire to heal myself instead of asking for the healing I need, makes me want other people to heal themselves. Why can't everyone just fine their own pill? The result is that I am afraid of the brokenness of others around me, that they will ask something from me I am unwilling to give them. My friends, it takes a lot of work to admit we need healing everyday, and we need the healing that you can't get from a pill, but the healing that comes from the mercy and grace of God, who alone can heal us completely, and who alone can and does make all things new. It is easier to pretend that I'm ok, you're ok, we're ok, at least in the short term, than to find a way to make ourselves like the leper, completely dependent upon the mercy of Jesus, and on his power to heal them. We can make ourselves feel better by taking a pill, and we can fill the emptiness we all experience with many things that makes us temporarily feel less vulnerable and dependent, but it is all a false healing. It is healing from the outside in, not from the inside out. And when we heal ourselves from the outside in rather than asking someone else to heal us from the inside out, we not only kill ourselves, we kill others, by continuing to be motivated not by the worst thing that has ever happened to us, or the worst thing we have ever done. If we are not healed by someone, if we are not healed by relationship, if we are healed only by a pill, then we will destroy all the relationships around us.

Ten men were healed of their leprosy in today's Gospel, but only one was healed from the inside out. The rest were healed only from the outside in. What a remarkable Gospel this truly is. The same is true for us. Many of us have been able to mask our brokenness in one way or another. Most of us look ok from the outside in. Yet hardly any of us celebrating this Mass today have been healed from the inside out, at least not completely. Very few of us have the grateful hearts that Namaan and the one leper have. It is hard indeed to enter into true worship and thanksgiving of God, which we have the chance to do in the context of this solemn liturgy. It is easier to hide from God, even here in this sacred time and space, than to rend our hearts to him, than to truly trust God enough to place our lives on this altar with Christ, where the promise of conversion and healing and life comes true within the paschal mystery of Jesus. St. Paul tells us to try again today, though, for if we have died with him, we will live with him. If we persevere, if we keep trying, we will reign with him. He will not force the relationship, but our Lord will never withdraw his mercy and grace from us, for He is faithful. We know deep down that the mercy and grace made present to us once again at this Mass is enough for us. It is enough to heal us. It is enough to set us free. It is enough to make all things new.

May we see in today's Gospel story how blessed are the lepers who cannot mask their own brokenness, and instead are dependent upon Jesus for their healing, and by the grace of this Eucharist, may we be healed of our independence and self-soothing, and ask the Lord to touch us and to heal us. May we have the humility to see ourselves in those who come to Jesus for healing. Yet may we never settle for being healed from the outside in, but may the sign of our healing be our ability to enter into true worship of God, and to proclaim the greatness of His mercy, with gladness and thanksgiving! Amen.