Ten lepers

You could say that leprosy was the worst sickness. They used to call lepers “living dead”. Your body died slowly, in front of you, in front of others. You were thrown out of society, you became a castaway; some of them literally were being sent to an island, like Molokai. You had to walk round sounding a bell like an animal, crying out: impure, stained. They were like zombies. It was considered a punishment from God; he had touched your flesh with his finger and the corruption from the grave was beginning to get you. In a way it was a graphic way to have your death in front of your eyes. We are one of those ten lepers. We don’t normally see it, but our soul stinks. We are missing some limbs and we cannot walk; we lost our fingers to be able to touch; our eyes are gone, and we cannot see. We are blind, deaf and paralysed to spiritual realities. We all need to realise that we need healing from God. The more we recognise our leprosy, our real illness, the more we will look for him. How can we be healed if we don’t acknowledge our sickness?

A new leper joined the shameful community and told them about the miraculous prophet. They abandoned their caves and set out to look for him. Hopeless sick people are always hopeful of new treatments. It is possible to be cleansed of our leprosy and our flesh restored, like Naaman the Syrian, whose flesh became as tender as the skin of a little child. We normally don’t believe that we can be cured of our vices or addictions. And we give up. We stop looking for him.

We don’t know how long these lepers looked for Jesus. We don’t know how long we too need to look for him. But if we don’t look for him, we won’t find him and we won’t be healed. If we look for him, eventually we will come across him, like the lepers did, because at the end he is the one looking for us.

From a distance the ten lepers cried out: Jesus, Master, have mercy on us! A good act of faith. He told them to present themselves to the priests, to certify their cure. He could have touched them but demanded from them a little faith. They were disappointed; they thought he was going to heal them there instantly, but they didn’t know what to do and went to see the priests without much conviction. Like us, many times we do things without knowing really what to do. Go to the priest! He is telling us the same: Go to confession! Have faith in me. I can cure you. Go! While they were on their way, they were cured. We don’t know if it was instantly or gradually. But It must have been an amazing sight. Ten men dancing and embracing each other. The Samaritan told them they had to go back to thank Jesus. They said that Jesus told them to present themselves to the priests. They wanted to see their families as soon as possible. How quick we are to forget what God has done for us!

Only one came back to give thanks. It was a Samaritan, an outcast. Jesus complained: Where are the nine? It is one of the big disappointments of our Lord. This question keeps sounding through the timeline of history. He keeps asking this question to us: Where are you? We can be the nine or the one. Let us not disappoint Jesus. He has healed us many times and we haven’t returned to give him thanks.

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Increase our faith

Today we go to Jesus like the apostles and we ask him to increase our faith. Like them we have witnessed miracles, we have experienced things beyond our power, we have seen God’s grace, but we feel that our faith weak. We cannot do what Jesus is asking us to do, because Jesus normally asks for faith before he gives us a hand. After the transfiguration, coming down from the mountain, Jesus met the apostles trying to cast away a dumb spirit from a boy. They couldn’t because they didn’t have enough faith. His father came up to Jesus asking for help. Jesus told him that everything is possible for the one who believes. That man, sensing his lack of faith, realising that the cure of his son was dependent on him, gave us a great prayer: “I believe, but help my unbelief!”

Four men brought their friend to Jesus to be healed. He was complaining all the way, telling them that it was a waste of time. He couldn’t do much because he was paralysed. His friends were very stubborn. When they arrived at the house, it was packed with people. They weren’t discouraged and they dug a hole in the roof of the house, against the will of the owner. They lowered him through the hole right in front of Jesus. The people inside could see four faces looking down through the hole in the roof. The Gospel says that Jesus seeing their faith, healed him.

Jesus didn’t normally praise people. But he was impressed with the faith of the Roman Centurion, who trusted his word. His faith was shown when he told Jesus that just his word could heal his servant. We repeat his words during every Mass, just before Communion. We should say them with the conviction of the Centurion. Jesus commented: “I haven’t found this faith in Israel.” What would Jesus say about our faith? Would he praise us?

Jesus put clay on a blind man’s eyes and asked him to wash them on the pool of Siloe. He could have touched his eyes and healed them, but he demanded faith from the man. The blind man could have asked Jesus if he could wash his eyes in a nearby fountain. But he walked with clay on his eyes and recovered his sight. The man with a withered hand had tried millions of times to move it but with no avail. When Jesus asked him to stretch it out, it was healed. He could have refused to move it another time, but his hand wouldn’t had been healed.

What does Jesus need to do with us? What infirmity do we have that has to be cleaned? We can cry out like Bartimeus, the blind beggar at the side of the road of Jericho, from the top of his voice: Son of David, have pity of me! Or like the woman who suffered a flow of blood for twelve years and was healed when she touched the fringe of Jesus’ cloak. We have to do the same. We must go to the fountain of faith, to the springs of salvation, where the water gushes out pure and clear. We know where to find it, specially when Jesus comes to the altar after the consecration, and we only need to ask: increase our faith. There is plenty of it, and just a little bit, like a mustard seed, is enough for us.

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Parable of the rich man and poor Lazarus

We are both the men in the parable, whether we like or not, the rich man and the poor man Lazarus, with both their weakness and their strengths, with their aspirations and desires. Both lived parallel lives, clearly related to each other but completely opposite, in this life and the next in eternity, crossing each other at life’s intersections; the first will be last and the last will be first.

The rich man has no name. Possessions don’t give you real identity, don’t tell you who you are, don’t give you roots or indicate where you come from. In front of God we are the same, things have no value, they have no meaning. We are born naked and we are going to return naked, with nothing to hang on to, only with what we have given away. It is not important what you have, or what you have achieved, but who you are or what you have become. Things don’t make you who you are, but what you make of them. In front of God we are little children, with just toys in our hands.

We are the rich man. We live a life of our own, without realising that in front of us, there are so many people in need, both materially and spiritually. We normally have the door of our hearts closed. We live a life of self centredness, self conscious, navel gazing. We fail to be aware of the poverty that surrounds us. Lazarus’s sores are licked by the dogs, without us hearing their barking. Jesus tries to turn us around, to turn us inside out, to be aware of all the poor Lazarus’s outside our door. Pope Francis says that Lazarus “represents the silent cry of the poor of all times.” They are constantly knocking on our lives. The Pope reminds us that “to ignore the poor is to scorn God.” We need to see Jesus in the needy, disadvantaged, marginalised, ostracised. In every homeless person we can find him, even though they are dirty, smelly, and ungrateful.

Lazarus, on the other hand, has a name. Poverty is real and has real effects on people’s lives; you can identify it straight away. Some authors say that Lazarus was a real person in Jesus’ time, a well known poor man, perhaps sitting at the temple door, even helped sometimes by Jesus and his apostles. Judas would have given him some money reluctantly. We are also the poor Lazarus, at the side of the road of life, our sores in need of dressing, begging for God’s help. Lazarus precisely means God helps. Rich people don’t need God, they think they have everything figured out, only desiring more money. Rich countries abandon God, not feeling the need for God anymore. Cathedrals were built by the poor and the lame. Nowadays rich countries build structures for people, stadiums, arenas, courts for sports and games. God is absent from these buildings. When they are empty they have no soul.

We have to make sure that in this life we are poor in spirit, in need of help, another Lazarus; then in the next life we are going to be spiritually rich, to share the life of the angels and saints. The austerity of this life is transformed into the abundance of God.

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