28th Sunday in Ordinary Time
There are three worthwhile insights to be gleaned from today's readings. The first insight is that is a necessary disposition for a Jew, a Christian or even a non-believer, as Naaman was. The gesture of the grateful Samaritan is contrasted with his ungrateful companions who were also healed. Furthermore, Jesus suggests that gratitude is a rather scarce commodity. "Were not ten made clean? Where are the other nine?" he asks. Gratitude is a human disposition which has to be cultivated. He must train ourselves to recognise the blessings we have, to acknowledge the source of those blessings and to and to return thanks. This is every bit as important on the human level as on the religious level.
We find the key to the second point in Paul's encouraging statement to Timothy. Paul had been Timothy's mentor. Both men had travelled extensively together on the mission. Paul had made the inexperienced Timothy bishop in a small rather insignificant church. Timothy is now writing to Paul about the many hardships his congregation is inflicting on him. Paul of course is in prison and he writes with a heavy hint of irony: 'I have my own hardships to bear'! "Though I am in chains, the word of God cannot be chained." Many of us believe God's word is chained. We hear it within the limits our experiences place on it. People of faith live within a tension. We're what our environment and traditions have formed us to be; yet, at the same time, God's word calls us to go beyond those circumstances to shape a new environment and create new traditions.
We hear this tension in the first reading. On one hand, Yahweh, the God of Israel, is still limited by geography. At the time this narrative was composed, Israelites believed Yahweh was God only of Israel. When Jews travelled outside the Promised Land, their God was powerless to help them. The gods whose territory they entered took over at the border.
That's why the now-cured Syrian general Naaman asks Elisha for "two mule loads of earth." He plans to take the Jewish soil back to Damascus and spread it around his property. As he says, "I will no longer offer holocaust or sacrifice to any other God except to Yahweh."
Though Yahweh normally has no power or influence in Syria, Naaman intends to pray on Israelite soil, empowering Yahweh to help him. The universal, indiscriminate God will evolve out of this primitive image based upon the Jewish experience of their crude tribal kings. Just as a nation's understanding of their God develops and changes, so on an individual and personal basis, the God we worshipped as children is very different to the God we now worship.
We hear a parallel tension in the Gospel. On one level, the actions of Jesus are limited by the Jewish law, which says only the priests can declare someone a leper or cured of leprosy. That's why, though cured by Jesus, the ten must "show themselves to the priests," who will officially declare them cured.
On the other hand, Jesus, like Elisha, reaches beyond the norm. He first cures a heretical Samaritan. Then, after this outcast Jew returns to thank Him, Jesus makes the mind-bending statement, "Stand up and go; your faith has saved you." It's precisely because Samaritans lacked orthodox faith that mainstream Jews ostracized them. To everyone's amazement, Jesus is declaring that God's saving actions aren't limited by a person's orthodoxy or location. The word of God will not be chained or limited by our small minds.