28th Sunday Reflection: Together On The Way To Healing
Franciscan Reflections From The Hermitage – Together On The Way To Healing – 28th Sunday in Ordinary Time – (Luke 17:11-19)
Naaman is a foreigner, an outsider, rich and important, a leper commander in the Aramean (Syrian) army, fearful traditional adversaries of Israel. For the Jews, lepers were regarded as the ‘living dead’, an outward sign of sin, punishment on those guilty of envy, pride, theft, murder, perjury, and incest. The sin of fractured relationships with God and with others.
Naaman is indeed proud and used to getting what he wants through war, personal endeavour, skill, negotiation, and manipulation. So what does he do when he faces something that is outside his control; like most of us used to reciprocal and transactional relationships, he reaches for his credit card… and when that fails, blinded by pride, he becomes angry and dismissive. Going it alone is a repetitive motif in the journey to faith and healing. Only through the entreaty of others, does Naaman come to see beyond that anger and rejection.
Fast forward to the Jesus encounter and we find ten lepers meeting Jesus. Ten represents the whole, ten lepers represent the state of sin, the embodiment of all fractured relationships and human misery. In their ‘diseased state’, the nine Jews and one Samaritan have come together as an unlikely, but desperate community, seeking healing.
When we know our human condition, our common human dysfunctional state, we also can come together to overcome our divisions and prejudice, coming together for healing, understanding, and gratitude.
How does this encounter speak to us today?
Perhaps we are unable to see our own leprosy, feeling that in some way we are okay; not part of the human condition out ‘there’, neither diseased nor dysfunctional. Let us consider some of the evidence of the human race in the lives of seven million refugees in camps around the world. Let us allow ourselves to witness their life of squalor, desperation, and despair.
Let the hatred wash over us; between Serbs and Muslims, the violence between Israelis and the Palestinians, the Rwandan genocide, the war between Russia and Ukraine, the Chinese ‘re-education’ camps for their Uyghur population… and on… and on… and on.
Perhaps all this suffering may feel distant and beyond our control, so let us examine those we despise of our day, those living as our neighbours. ‘In my thoughts and in my words, in what I have done and what I have failed to do’… Those political and economic refugees that I see competing for jobs and resources that are my right, my national right.
On land, in the sea and the air we breathe, contaminated by our right to the good life. Pumping millions of tons of toxic sludge into our rivers and seas… destroying our echo-system and annihilating other species… our right to subdue, dominate, monopolise, and monetise.
In order to protect ourselves and our ‘goodies’ from each other, we spend daily on weapons sufficient to feed our hungry world for an entire year.
Eighty percent of the gifts of creation, the resources of our home that we call earth are in the hands of twenty percent of the elite whom we call ‘blessed’. The wars that we support we call ‘holy and just’.
And so we bow our heads before Jesus and ask for healing by acknowledging our communal disease, ‘Lord have mercy, Christ have mercy’.
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