11/14/2018
Luke 17:11-19 As Jesus continued
his journey to Jerusalem, he traveled through Samaria and Galilee. As he was
entering a village, ten lepers met him. They stood at a distance from him and
raised their voice, saying, "Jesus, Master! Have pity on us!" And
when he saw them, he said, "Go show yourselves to the priests." As
they were going they were cleansed. And one of them, realizing he had been
healed, returned, glorifying God in a loud voice; and he fell at the feet of
Jesus and thanked him. He was a Samaritan. Jesus said in reply, "Ten were
cleansed, were they not? Where are the other nine? Has none but this foreigner
returned to give thanks to God?" Then he said to him, "Stand up and
go; your faith has saved you."
I have a priest-friend, Fr. Warren
Harvey, who has a penchant for saying: “Never forget who you are, and whose you
are.” Not only is that a very catchy saying, it is also a very profoundly true
saying, and the two elements – who and whose – are closely connected to each
other, and shed light on each other. Who we are are human persons endowed with
intelligence and freedom, while whose we are indicates we are children of God,
created in God’s image and likeness. We are not only the final product of the
long, slow process of evolution, where we climbed out of the muck and mire of
the primeval matter to stand erect and rule the world and reach out to the
stars. But we are also given all our greatness by the hand of God, who
fashioned the first man and woman out of the dust of the earth, but also
bestowed his own breath – in Hebrew ruah – his spirit, in us. As a result, we
achieve nothing without him, we belong utterly to him as a baby belongs utterly
to the mother while in her womb. We must strive every day to recall not only
who we are, but also whose we are. Both components are critical for us to find
peace and joy.
The French philosopher, Etienne
Gilson, suggested that the fault of the first sin, and indeed every subsequent
sin ever committed, has this failure to remember who we are and whose we are at
its core. He wrote in densely philosophical language, “Thus the radical contingence
of the finite being (that’s me and you) brings it into absolute dependence on
necessary Being (that’s God), to Whom all must be principally referred as to
its Source…” He continues, and here’s the take-home message: “If we forget this
the original transgression [of Adam and Eve] is re-enacted in ourselves, or
rather it is just because its effects continue that we forget it so easily”
(The Spirit of Medieval Philosophy, 129). That is an extremely elaborate way of
saying the same thing Fr. Harvey said: “Never forget who you are and whose you
are.” In a sense, that forgetfulness was at the root of Adam and Eve’s sin, and
that same amnesia belies all of our sins. We forget whose we are; and that even
our every breath comes from the divine lungs, like a first responder giving a
dying man CPR.
In the gospel today, ten lepers are
cleansed by Jesus. But only one of them returns to give thanks and to glorify
God. It seems remarkable that the other nine should so soon forget the source
of their blessing, namely, Jesus, the Son of God. But then again maybe it
should not surprise us that so many forget who they are and whose they are.
Could that proportion of one to nine be the approximate number of those who
choose to remember the Source of all blessings, and those who foolishly forget?
And notice it is a “sin of omission” – they failed to do something, they did
not remember. The other nine did not kill anyone, they did not rob a bank, they
did not lie or cheat. They simply forgot who they were and whose they were.
That forgetfulness lies at the root of all human sin and frailty.
I believe that modern-day atheism
is a collective and coerced amnesia that is being inflicted on our society.
Slowly but very systematically, God is being removed from the public square and
from the public dialogue, and being relegated to the closet and to an
after-thought. Now, when we pray in public, what do we do? We observe a moment
of silence, we stare into a void, where no one is listening and no one is
answering. Radical atheists like Richard Dawkins argues in his book The God
Delusion that religion is to blame for humanity’s greatest miseries: wars,
oppression, racism, genocide. I know that some of this movement is
well-intentioned and there is some truth to the arguments of the atheists. But
the bottom line is that we are forgetting who we are precisely because we are
ignoring whose we are.
If we are not the children of God,
whose children will we be? Like the ugly duckling in the Hans Christian
Anderson fairy tale, we will go around asking aimlessly, “Are you my mother?
Are you my mother? Are you my mother?” That is, until we find our way home to
God, and realize we are made in his image and likeness, and far more splendid
than even a beautiful, white swan.
Praised be Jesus Christ!
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