There are messages for us in today’s readings. First, God tells the exiles in Babylon, through Jeremiah, to go on with their lives as if they weren’t in exile. Build houses. Marry. Have children. Tend your crops. In other words, don’t fall into despair and give up. Don’t keep waiting for things to change.
We aren’t exiles, in the literal sense, but figuratively, we are not where we want to be right now. It can be tempting to give in to despair. That’s not what God wants us to do. The ones who want us to give up are the ones who are trying to defeat us. That makes joy an act of resistance.
The psalmist praises God’s goodness to the people. It sounds to me like a refrain of encouragement:
Praise God, look at all that God has done for us
Bless God, God loves us.
And Jesus praises the faith of a Samaritan who expresses gratitude for being healed.
I hear a lot about gratitude, lately. The popular press has declared that gratitude is the key to happiness. It makes sense. Feeling grateful for everything you have is much more pleasant than moaning and obsessing about what you don’t have. Really, even on the worst days, most of us can find something to be thankful for.
We Christians tend to direct our gratitude to God.
In today’s Gospel reading, Jesus encounters ten lepers in the borderlands between Samaria and Galilee. The footnotes in our Bibles tell us that leprosy may refer to a number of different skin conditions. Whatever the pathology, the point is that these people had a disease that was clearly visible and that made them outcasts from society.
Jesus healed them all and sent them on to the priests, who would certify that they were fit to return to their communities. Only one man, a Samaritan, turned back and thanked God for making him clean. Jesus notes this, asking why “only this foreigner” thought to praise God for healing them. Then he tells the Samaritan, “Your faith has made you well.”
The Message Bible translates this last sentence, “Your faith has healed and saved you.”
I find this translation helpful, because it suggests that the man who thanked God for his healing received more than the other nine lepers. His gratitude demonstrated a real faith, a faith that would bring him close to God.
I see a thread in these readings. Jeremiah tells us to go on living and thriving in whatever circumstances we find ourselves in.
The psalmist reminds us that God is faithful, God loves us.
And Jesus tells us that gratitude to God is an important component of faith. It might even lead to salvation.
Put another way:
Listen to God, and keep going.
Trust God
Give thanks to God.
This is our homework.
