Paulist Fr. Rich Andre preached this homily on the 28th Sunday in Ordinary Time (Year C) on October 9, 2022 at the Paulist Center in Boston, MA. The homily is based on the day’s readings: 2 Kings 5:14-17; Psalm 98; 2 Timothy 2:8-13; and Luke 17:11-19.

We’ve spent a lot of time with the gospel of Luke in the past 10 months. Luke is considered – among things – to be the gospel of women, the gospel of the Holy Spirit, and the gospel of social justice. But for the next three weeks, another theme comes to the fore: Luke is the gospel of prayer. 

Today, both the first reading and the gospel tell of people being cured of leprosy, but that’s not the main point. The focus is on gratitude. Gratitude and faith are inseparable from one another. That’s especially interesting to note since the emphasis is on the two people being cured who were not Jewish: a Syrian and a Samaritan.

For the next three weekends, Luke invites us to examine how we pray. In this first week, as we concentrate on gratitude, let’s take a moment to express our thanks to God for the gift of mercy.

It was still dark on my first Thanksgiving Day as a priest when my cell phone rang. The student chaplain at the University of Tennessee Medical Center sensed that she had woken me up. Could I please come within the hour? The patient in room 1206 was dying and wanted to receive anointing and viaticum.

I was annoyed. I had just been to room 1206 the night before. Another student chaplain had left a voicemail the evening before, asking for a priest to come, but the message gave no information on the urgency of the situation, and it provided no callback number. When I had arrived at the hospital the night before, the patient was unconscious and there was no nurse or chaplain available to tell me how sick the patient was or what the patient desired.

So, this poor chaplain on the phone in that pre-dawn hour of Thanksgiving morning received an earful from me. Could she please instruct her fellow student chaplains that when they left voicemails for us priests, could they provide detailed information, including a callback number? When we get these requests without sufficient information, it is difficult to adequately minister to the patients. I hope that I had the decency to apologize to this particular chaplain for complaining to her, since what happened wasn’t her fault, but I don’t remember if I did. I was pretty stressed out. I had Thanksgiving Mass later in the morning… and I still needed to prepare my homily.  

I had spent plenty of time preparing in the previous days, but the engineer and rule-follower in me had always struggled with this gospel passage. The nine Jewish people with leprosy didn’t do anything wrong, did they? They followed the directions of Jesus and the Torah, or the Law: go show yourselves to the priests to be declared clean.  

But as I turned on the coffee maker that Thanksgiving morning, I got a grip of myself. This woman was dying, and she was not to blame for the lousy information I had received the night before. I’d go to the hospital first, and the people of Blessed John XXIII Parish could suffer through a less-than-ideal homily.

When I arrived at the hospital 30 minutes later, caffeinated, showered, shaved, and having enjoyed a beautiful sunrise as I bolted down I-275, it was clear that I could not have provided the necessary ministry the night before. Now, her family was gathered around her, keeping vigil. I asked the five adult children to share memories about their mother. Through watery eyes, they told of a woman who had given tirelessly to each of them and to their extended neighborhood community in New Orleans. As we joined hands and prayed, the dying woman awoke. I anointed her and coaxed a sliver of the Eucharist into her mouth.

It was a moment of Thanksgiving. The word “Eucharist” comes from a Greek word for “thanksgiving.” In this tender moment, the tears began to flow. The family was filled with gratitude for all that had been, all they had shared, and how this woman had brought them so close to God.

After taking my leave of the patient and her family, I grabbed a quick breakfast in the hospital cafeteria, and I reflected on how my morning had paralleled our gospel passage. This story demonstrates that gratitude can only happen when we place something besides ourselves at the center of our concern.  

There was nothing in the Torah, or in what Jesus said, that demanded that these people cured of leprosy go directly to the priest. The Torah only required them to be declared clean before they entered back into community life. But Jesus was passing by the town. If they didn’t stop what they were doing right then and return, they would never have a chance to express their gratitude to him.

Similarly, when I had gotten over how I had been inconvenienced by the lack of information in the previous night’s voicemail, I was able to focus instead on the needs of the dying woman and her family.

The ability to be grateful is a sign of having faith. Faith and gratitude are inseparable. Both require us to have humility, to realize that our concerns are secondary to the acts of God. Faith requires us to pause from our worldly concerns to make time for God. Gratitude is that act of pausing from our concerns, to make time either to thank God or to thank the people around us.  

Today is also the feast day of St. John Henry Newman, who deeply influenced the first Paulists and even now influences the Paulist mission. While he had great intellectual abilities, Newman also – like Paulist founder Isaac Hecker, like Namaan the Syrian in the first reading, and like the Samaritan in the gospel – Newman was a person of introspection. I’d like to close with a beautiful prayer Newman wrote that shows the other-centeredness necessary to give thanks:

Stay with me, and then I shall begin to shine as you shine,
so to shine as to be a light to others.
The light, O Jesus, will be all from you.
It will be you who shines through me upon others.

Give light to them as well as to me;
light them with me, through me.

Make me preach you without preaching –
not by words, but by my example
and by the sympathetic influence, of what I do –
by my visible resemblance to Your saints,
and the evident fullness of the love which my heart bears to you. 

(Meditations and Devotions, Part III, VII, 3)

Amen.