Our God is a Merciful God
Fr. Tom Seitz, Jr.
October 10, 2022
Ten lepers called out, saying, “Jesus, have mercy on us!” Later, when one of the lepers saw that he was healed, he turned back, and praised God with a loud voice.
Today’s story of the ten lepers illustrates two ways we can respond to God. Like the lepers, we can call out to God to have mercy on us, and, like the lepers, we can praise God with a loud voice for who he is and for what only he can do and what he has done for us.
When we sing or say the Kyrie to God, the “Lord, have mercy,” at the beginning of our worship, we are echoing the plea of the ten lepers to be cleansed, to be restored, and to be made new so that we might enjoy full and loving fellowship with our fellow human beings and with God. And when we sing or say the Gloria, that begins “Glory to God in the highest, and peace to his people on earth. Lord God, heavenly King, almighty God and Father, we worship you, we give you thanks, we praise you for your glory,” we are echoing the praise of the leper who returned to Jesus to give praise to God for his healing, for the gracious answer to his plea for God’s mercy.
As you may know, we normally sing or say the Kyrie during the seasons of Advent and Lent because those seasons highlight our need of God’s mercy. And we sing or say the Gloria during the rest of the year in praise to God for all the mercies we have received from him, most especially his Son’s victory over sin and death, that spiritual leprosy which only God can cure, which will have no final place in his heavenly kingdom.
The ratio between the ten lepers who pleaded for God’s mercy and the one who returned to praise God for his mercy seems pretty accurate to me in a more general sense. I am willing to bet that God was merciful in obvious ways to at least ten times the number of people who have returned here or to some other place of worship this morning to praise God for those acts of mercy.
When Jesus asked the question to the one man who did return to praise God, “Where are the other nine?” I don’t think he was condemning those who didn’t return. Rather, I think he was genuinely puzzled by their lack of recognition of who he was and where he came from, especially since they were Jews who should have known better whom they were dealing with, that is, their long-awaited Messiah, the very Son of God. Instead, it was a person Jesus and the rest of us would least expect, the one who might be forgiven for not recognizing Jesus as God’s unique channel of mercy, who gave the God of Israel his loud and heartfelt praise.
Our first lesson set the stage for Luke’s subsequent account of the ten lepers. It is the story of another leper, Naaman, a foreign commander whom God used as an instrument of his judgment on the faithless king Ahab and his wife Jezebel. It was he, and not Jehoram, the king who succeeded Ahab, who unabashedly declared, after humbling himself and obeying the simple instructions of the prophet Elisha to wash seven times in the Jordan River and be cleansed, that “there is no God in all the earth except in Israel.”
God has preserved these stories in our Bible for our sakes, that we might come to recognize and return praise and thanks for his many blessings to us in our own lives, praise which we show forth not only with our lips here but also in our lives after we leave this place by witnessing to those around us in countless ways so that God might also turn the hearts of our neighbors to recognize where their mercies come from, and might even return their own praise to God here or in some other place of worship.
Paul reminds Timothy that these stories have an enduring and saving life of their own. “My hands and feet may be chained in a prison in Rome,” Paul tells Timothy, “but God’s word is not chained.” Ironically, the only way Paul could know for sure that these stories would continue to have power to instill faith in God’s daily mercies was by being imprisoned and then discovering that his letters and his conversations with his jailers and with various government officials were changing the lives of many people, people he did not know, even you and me who are listening to this living Word of God today, of receiving and recognizing God’s mercy in their lives and returning praise to him.
One of the best spiritual disciplines recommended to those who attend a Cursillo or a Walk to Emmaus or to a Kairos prison weekend is to answer the following question each week and to share that answer with a fellow Christian: “What was your closest moment to Christ?” And so I would ask you, as I ask myself, “What WAS your closest moment to Christ last week?” If you’re like me, you may have to wait in silence for a while before the Holy Spirit brings those moments back to your remembrance. So don’t be impatient. Take as much time as you need. And don’t assume that Jesus was absent from your life last week, that he may have passed by the ten lepers or Naaman, but he didn’t pass by you or me, because he did. He had to, because he lives in you and you live in him by virtue of being washed and cleansed in the waters of baptism. Where did you encounter Jesus? That’s the question. Let’s stop going through life like the nine lepers who continued to suffer from what someone has called a “thankless forgetfulness” even after God had cleansed them from their leprosy. Counting our blessings is itself a blessing. Today, the first day of the week, the day of resurrection, the day of new and unending beginnings is the day God has set aside for us to remember, to remember the mercies we may still be seeking and the praises we may yet want to offer.
We express our praise and our pleas for God’s mercy not only by singing or saying the Gloria and the Kyrie, but in our corporate prayers, by giving voice to our specific pleas and praises, either silently or aloud.
We have dedicated an entire stained-glass window to Jesus, the healer, the fount of all mercies, including the story of the ten lepers at the bottom of the window, as well as those in succeeding generations who have been channels of God’s healing and mercy, women and men like Florence Nightingale, whose insistence on proper hygiene was an act of mercy that prompted the praises of the wounded British soldiers in the Crimean war. Or Brother Damien, who devoted his life to the care of those on the leper colony of Molokai. Or Louis Pasteur, who prompted vaccines against cholera and anthrax. Or Edward Jenner did with the smallpox vaccine, or Francis Crick and James Watson did in opening up genetic treatments through the discovery of DNA, or Salk and Sabin did with the polio vaccine, and on and on and on, with AIDS and shingles and pneumonia, with measles, mumps and rubella, with COVID-19 and with leprosy.
God answered the cries of his people for mercy through these and countless other channels of his saving grace, prompting the praise of his people. Let us, then, persevere, never despairing of God’s mercy toward us, returning here, week in and week out, to plead for God’s mercy and to lift our voices in praise to God, from whom all blessings flow. AMEN.