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Homily for the 28th Sunday in Ordinary Time
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The lepers of this morning’s gospel get it right—in exactly the wrong way. They know enough to cry out, “Jesus, Master, have pity on us!” and
to obey when He says, “Go show yourselves to the priests.” They get that part right. But then—once healed—they just keep walking. Only
one of them—and a Samaritan at that—realizes that something greater has happened than the restoration of his skin. The others receive healing.
Only one receives wholeness.
The great irony of faith is that it begins with need but matures into gratitude. Ten men pray. But only one man prays again—in
thanksgiving. The others vanish into the anonymity of the “merely cured.”
Last week, the apostles commanded Jesus to, “Increase their faith.” This week, the Samaritan shows us what that looks like in practice: not
more miracles, but more gratitude. The apostles thought faith meant God acting on them; the Samaritan discovers faith means God acting through
him. Faith begins when we ask; it grows when we return.
As St. John Chrysostom said, “The gift of grace is doubled when it is received with gratitude.” In other words, the miracle isn’t finished until
thanksgiving completes it.
Every now and then, one of my students tells me something like, “I don’t go to church on Sunday because it’s boring and I don’t get
anything out of it.” Yes, well, I don’t get anything out of playing the cello. I also don’t own a cello, and I have never practiced. And yet, the
myth persists that when it comes to prayer and art, one simply has to be “inspired” or worse yet, “talented.”
There is a hip-hop dance team called “Les Twins” who have revolutionized the art—have had an influence even on ballet and tap.
There are two of them, obviously. They’re twins. And I discovered them because I chanced upon an interview with them on the radio. The
interviewer said, “Does it help that you’re twins?” And one of them answered, “No. It helps that we practice nine hours a day.” It also helps
that their father is a professional jazz musician and that their mother dances with the Paris ballet.
I have a friend who is a famous artist. This friend told me never to use her name in a sermon, so for the purposes of the story we will refer
to her as Joan. My mom is a famous artist, and [Anyhow,] young wanna- bes are forever approaching Joan with a painting under one arm asking
her if they should pursue a career in art. “Well,” she sighs (and every time, it’s the same answer), “do you like paint?” If they take the painting
out from under their arm and show her, she sighs again (I’ve seen this happen a hundred times) and she says, “Bring me forty more of those,
and I can begin to give you an answer.”
Joan had a friend in art school. This friend had worked with Andy Warhol in his “factory” on East 47th Street. She had made a name for
herself creating these fascinating little kinetic sculptures out of coat hangers and steel wool. She started to get famous. Got a gallery. And her
career was just taking off when she realized she had never really learned how to draw. So she applied to grad school and got in. But the director
of her gallery warned her that to drop out of the art scene now would ruin her career. She dropped out anyway—and it ruined her career. She
found another gallery eventually, but never attained the notoriety she had while working with Warhol. “In retrospect,” she told my mother, “the
fame was admittedly thrilling. And working with Andy was fun. But art—real art—is what brings me joy. And I’d have been a fool to
sacrifice joy for the sake of fun.”
Choosing fun over joy is actually worse than depressing…it’s actually sinful because it involves turning away from the greater good. My
students sometimes ask me why I quit being a beach lifeguard. Wasn’t that more fun than being a monk? Well, yes. Yes it is. But in defense of
my decision, I can say this: There’s nothing more depressing than a fifty- year-old lifeguard.
Hannah Arendt—a historian and philosopher who attended the trial of Nazi Adolf Eichmann—spoke of “the banality of evil.”
“For when I speak of the banality of evil,” she wrote in her famous essay Eichmann in Jerusalem, “I do so only on the strictly factual level,
pointing to a phenomenon which stared one in the face at the trial. Eichmann was not Iago and not Macbeth, and nothing would have been
farther from his mind than to determine with Richard III 'to prove a villain' Except for an extraordinary diligence in looking out for his
personal advancement, he had no motives at all… He merely, to put the matter colloquially, never realized what he was doing… It was sheer
thoughtlessness—something by no means identical with stupidity—that predisposed him to become one of the greatest criminals of that period.
And if this is 'banal' and even funny, if with the best will in the world one cannot extract any diabolical or demonic profundity from Eichmann,
this is still far from calling it commonplace… That such remoteness from reality and such thoughtlessness can wreak more havoc than all the
evil instincts taken together which, perhaps, are inherent in man—that was, in fact, the lesson one could learn in Jerusalem.”
Now, perhaps it’s a bit of a leap to jump from a 40-year-old lifeguard straight to a Nazi war criminal…but I wonder. After all, Saint Augustine
himself defined sin as “choosing a lesser good over a greater.” The nine chose comfort over communion, health over holiness, fun over joy. Only
one saw that gratitude is the doorway to joy itself.
So if last week’s lesson was “faith the size of a mustard seed can move mountains,” this week’s is: faith the size of gratitude can move
hearts.
St. John Vianney once said, “If we knew the value of the Mass, we would die of joy.” The Mass is the Church’s great act of
thanksgiving—Eucharistia. Every time we “return to give thanks,” we become that lone Samaritan, falling at the feet of Jesus, made whole in
body and soul.
May we learn to return often—to Mass, to prayer, to joy—and to hear Christ say to us, “Stand up and go; your faith has saved you.”
In the name of the Father…