Eighteenth Sunday after Pentecost
“Gratitude” — Rev. Brent Gundlah
First Reading (2 Timothy 2:8-15/NRSVUE)
Gospel Reading (Luke 17:11-19/NRSVUE)
I’ll admit it: I enjoy a caffeinated beverage every now and again (as the thirty-two ounce iced coffee sitting on my desk every morning will confirm). I’m also rather lazy (so I generally buy my coffee rather than making my own). And I’m very much a creature of habit.
The confluence of these three truths about myself means that I tend to go to a defined set of coffee shops on a regular basis. And because I’m such a creature of habit, when I arrive at that little speaker in the drive-thru line where you place your order, the people inside (who must have either a camera or some sort of psychic ability) often know that it’s me and know what I’m getting.
The fact that they would commit even one brain cell to remembering how I like my coffee is kind of nice — truth be told, I’m really grateful for that; and focusing on gratitude is way better than feeling embarrassed about my boring predictability. At the end of the day, it’s all in how you choose to look at things.
A few Mondays ago I stopped at such an establishment — one that I often go to on Mondays, and I happened to be the only car in line. As I rolled up to the open window, I discovered the two young folks working inside engaged in a conversation — one that I couldn’t help but overhear. They were recapping the highs and lows of their weekends, in the form of a game called “Rose and Thorn,” the structure of which is pretty simple: participants take turns sharing a “Rose” (a positive experience or a success) and a “Thorn” (a challenge or a struggle); and that’s about all there is to it, really.
As I was sitting there in my car, looking at my phone and trying to mind my own business, one of them walked towards the window and said, “Hey, what about you?”
“Me?” I replied.
“Yeah. What are your rose and thorn from last weekend?”
Now, the previous two days weren’t exactly the best I’d ever experienced (we’d had a slew of house-related problems to deal with, among other things), so coming up with the latter was pretty easy — but the former, not so much; in fact, I struggled mightily with it. Frustrated that I couldn’t come up with a rose of any consequence, I finally gave up and just blurted out something insipid.
At first neither of the baristas uttered a word in response — they just stared at me with the disapproving look that people of their generation often give to people of mine. Finally, one of them decided to break the silence, saying: “That’s really the best you could do?” And sadly, at that particular moment it was. Feeling incredibly self-conscious, I took my beverage, said “thank you” and prepared to drive away, but not before the other one decided to throw down a challenge: “You better come better prepared for this next Monday,” she said.
In the days that followed I felt like I was studying for an exam; I kept a running inventory in my head of all the things that happened in my life — trying to come up with something I was happy about and grateful for that I could share the following Monday. And what I soon discovered was that, when I put my mind to it, I didn’t have much trouble finding things — both large and small — that I was happy about and grateful for. And so this past Monday, I actually had the inverse of the problem I’d had the previous Monday, which was pretty nice.
The thorn I decided to go with from this past weekend was getting my flu shot, which left me feeling a little ragged. My rose was being able to video chat with both of our daughters at the same time (which is rare these days) as they sat together at a cafe table on the streets of New York.
But as I was driving away with my coffee in hand, feeling triumphant that I’d done better at game this time, something occurred to me. When I’d mentioned my thorn, I hadn’t stopped there. I’d told them that I’d gotten my flu shot and felt lousy, but I also told them that, since Saturday was rainy and dreary, I’d spent most of the day curled up on the couch under a blanket, napping and watching college football, which was kind of nice.
Even though I had spent much of the previous week focused on finding the roses (which was good in and of itself), I’d also managed to find some roses amidst the thorns (which was, perhaps, even better).
Sure, I felt awful after my flu shot, and that wasn’t fun. But, hey — I have health insurance to pay for my flu shot and a couch upon which to rest and a blanket to keep me warm and a TV to watch and a roof over my head and time to relax, which is way more than a lot of folks have — and when I thought about all of this, I found myself feeling grateful, and that was pretty cool. A little gratitude goes a long way; a little gratitude can change everything. And that’s the whole point of today’s gospel story from Luke.
As it begins, Jesus and friends are passing through the area between Samaria and Galilee on their way to Jerusalem. This is, for the record, somewhere that no respectable Jewish faith leader in that place and time would ever go; it was a little too close to Samaria — that place where those foreigners live, that place where those people who don’t worship right live; but Jesus doesn’t care about such things.
As Jesus and his entourage enter one of the villages in the region, ten men with a skin condition approach him seeking a cure (Jesus had, by this point, established quite a reputation for his ability to heal). He tells the ten men to go see the priests at the temple and, as they’re making their way there, they’re suddenly cured.
One of them decides to head back whence he came in order to praise God and thank Jesus (as it turns out, he’s a Samaritan), and Jesus wonders why the other nine didn’t choose to do the same. Jesus then turns his attention to the grateful, newly-healed Samaritan and says to him, “Get up and go on your way; your faith has made you well.” Simple enough, right? Yeah, sure it is.
In some ways, this story is similar to others that Luke includes in his Gospel — stories in which Jesus goes to places that the faith establishment would never go, to care for people for whom they would never care. And several of Jesus’s own parables speak to the same kinds of things.
The ten men we hear about at the beginning of the story would never have been allowed in the temple because their skin condition would have made them ritually unclean. But the Samaritan among them would have been doubly-excluded — first, because of his disease and second, because he’s one of those people (a foreigner and a Samaritan). Low and behold, he’s the one who shows gratitude, the one who’s faith, as Jesus declares, has made him well. Go figure.
But there are some questions that remain unanswered here. First, why does Jesus send all ten men to see the priests at the temple when when he knows the Samaritan would never be allowed in? Once the other nine are cured of their affliction they won’t have a problem getting in, but the Samaritan will always be unwelcome. In all likelihood, Jesus does this (and Luke then writes about it) in order to highlight the exclusionary cruelty of the religious powers that be. And this criticism is only amplified when this outsider, this outcast, this unclean and undesirable person is the only one who ends up doing the right thing.
The second open question here is this: Why does Jesus make a point of saying that the grateful Samaritan’s faith has made him well when all ten men are healed? Well, the answer to that one is really the whole point of this passage.
This is a text where the translation you’re looking at really matters. Sometimes people forget that the Gospels were originally written in Greek, not in English — and the choices that translators throughout the centuries have made as they move from the former to the latter can really affect the meaning of what we end up reading.
For example, if you have a look at your pew Bible (the New Revised Standard Version), the beginning of today’s passage says: “On the way to Jerusalem Jesus was going through the region between Samaria and Galilee. As he entered a village, ten lepers approached him.”
But if you look at this passage in your bulletin (taken from the New Revised Standard Version Updated Edition) it reads: “On the way to Jerusalem Jesus was going through the region between Samaria and Galilee. As he entered a village, ten men with a skin disease approached him.”
The first defines these men as their disease (they were “ten lepers”), which is not so great, while the second defines them as people who happen to have a disease (they were “ten men with a skin disease”). And this is a big difference. Good on the translators of the Updated Edition for trying to get this right — I mean, when you know better, you do better.
In your bulletin and in your Pew Bible, the final sentence of our passage says this: “Then he said to him, ‘Get up and go on your way; your faith has made you well,” which brings us back to our second unanswered question: Why does Jesus says this when all ten men are cured?
Once again, looking at another translation might shed some light on this. Strangely enough, this time we head backwards — all the way to the seventeenth century — and the King James Version of the Bible, which reads much differently; just listen to what it says: “And he said unto him, Arise, go thy way: thy faith hath made thee whole.” Not “well,” but “whole.” And this is a big difference too.
In the King James, all ten men in the story are cured, all ten men are, in some sense, made well. And that’s because, Jesus’s healing isn’t available to just a select few. But only the Samaritan is made whole. And what is the difference between the Samaritan and the other nine men?
According to Jesus, it’s that he has faith. And what is the one thing he does that the others don’t do? He gives thanks. Jesus seems to be equating gratitude and faith. Now, I didn’t pay an awful lot of attention in math class as a kid, but if gratitude equals faith and faith makes us whole then, by the transitive property (I think), gratitude makes us whole.
In the early chapters of Luke’s Gospel, John the Baptist shows up in the wilderness preaching a baptism of repentance and, as we’ve discussed before, to “repent” means to change the way you look at things for the better, and to change the way you live your life as a result of seeing things differently. And maybe, just maybe that’s what Jesus is driving at here: that living faithfully — that being made whole — means perceiving our existence through a lens of gratitude.
I have to say, my ongoing coffee shop game of “Rose and Thorn” has become, for me, a spiritual practice of sorts: it’s caused me to think about the myriad blessings I’m thankful for, it’s helped me to look for and to find blessings in things that don’t necessarily seem like blessings; it’s been an unexpected opportunity to see thing differently. And while might not seem like that big of a deal, it’s kind of a big deal to me.
Like I said earlier: a little gratitude really does go a long way. And Jesus certainly believed that it did.