For Sunday, October 13, 2013 – Luke 17:11-19
At the heart of it all is mercy. Healing our leprosy, whether physical, mental or spiritual, is but an outward sign of the most radical and audacious news—the God of love living in Jesus cannot stop healing and reconciling and making all things new. Ten times out of ten, we are made new! Nine times out of ten, we do not comprehend the enormity of this amazing grace. We miss so many mercy moments, and venture forth unaware that we are being healed.
Once in a while, we not only get healed—we also GET IT that we are getting healed! With a stroke of sudden awareness we see the unfailing love in which we are encased, like new skin, leprous no more. Once in a while, thanksgiving wells up within us, bounds alongside us, laps at mercy’s heels, tumbles over itself in an outrageousness of joy. Mercy heals us. One time out of ten, a tsunami of gratitude plunges us onto the shores of new life.
All ten are healed, regardless of when and if they will ever notice. For one, healing finds completion in thanksgiving and changes the direction of his life. He turns around, sees the source, breathes out gratitude. Maybe the others will send notes in a few days: “Appreciate your kindness, it was nice to be healed.” We don’t know. We only know that for one, an outsider among the outsiders, accustomed to living at the edge, in that shadowy “region between Samaria and Galilee,” everything has changed—the utter awesomeness of grace, glorious grace, has swooped in upon him, and he is never the same again.
How to live now, in the awareness of such abundance and grace? Ten times out of ten, crying out for mercy brings the gift of mercy. But we are so accustomed to the leprosy, to living in rejection and fear on the outskirts of our life, not daring to believe that we have more to give than we have given so far. How shall we help one another, beggars all, to acknowledge the healing, to rise up on a wave of thanksgiving, to begin to live the wholeness that has already come, already weaves itself through our ordinary days?
