Fr. John O’Callaghan: If you had skin cancer and some Shaman told you to take a shower, seven times, to be cured, how would you respond? You might feel grossly insulted and forever refuse contact with that person. Well, according to our first reading, that is the kind of suggestion the commander of the Syrian army got from the Elisha, the prophet of Israel. Naaman was insulted but, strange thing is, the mighty man did accede to the suggestion when his servants tactfully explained that if he had been asked to do something difficult he would have made sure to achieve it. Instead he humbly obeyed an instruction from a foreign prophet. By so doing he opened an opportunity for the word of the prophet, the word of God, to prove true. He was cured and we’re told that he went on to recognise that it is the God of Israel who is the one and only true God. This story tells of a movement not only from sickness to health, but ultimately from ignorance and misconception of God to knowledge and genuine faith. One could call it education; after all that word’s Latin etymology, ‘ex duxere’, means ‘to lead out of’ ignorance to knowledge.
And this Old Testament scene is set before us to prepare us for today’s gospel. As usual Jesus fulfills the Old Testament and goes beyond it. We learn of ten lepers, like cancer patients, who, recognising their need, solicit Jesus for a cure, which he gives. They have enough faith to call him ‘Master’ and follow the law of Moses, and go to show themselves to the priests. However one of them, seeing himself healed also understands that in fact Jesus has been God’s agent, that the cure was ultimately the work of God; so he acknowledges and thanks God profusely at the feet of Jesus. To recognise Christ, to acknowledge God and to thank him, that is what we are shown today, as a model for us all.
The first stage of faith is humility, accepting the reality that we are not self-sufficient, invulnerable and so superior that we don’t need other people. As St Paul reminds us ‘what have you that you have not received?’ Suffering can help us become humble.
The next is that God has power in the world and he showed it in Jesus Christ and his multiple miracles. We recognise that after creation, God did not retire, he did not say ‘Now the machine can go on running in the way it’s been set up’. No, God remains the Creator and is able to intervene one way or another. He is active in the world today through his Holy Spirit. That is why we pray for his help. Anyone who does not recognise this has a different idea of God.
Isaac Newton, a founder of modern science, wrote that ‘the wonderful arrangement and harmony of the universe can only have come into being through an omniscient and all-powerful Being’, adding: ‘that is, and remains, my most important finding’. Newton’s perception went deeper, behind the marvels of the universe to recognise the overarching reality of God.
The great artists also write of this. Oscar Wilde, towards the end of his imprisonment in Reading Gaol, expressed it thus: ‘ I tremble with pleasure when I think that on my leaving prison the laburnum and the lilac will be blooming in the gardens…..there is not a single colour hidden away in the chalice of a flower to which my nature does not answer. ….behind all this beauty, there is a spirit hidden …. And it is with this spirit that I desire to come into harmony’.
One can sleep-walk through life; staying on the surface of things. But the person of faith remains open to the reality of God, humbly acknowledges Him in Christ and is grateful for His gifts. That is what it is to be “e-ducated”.
Christ told the leper ‘Your faith has saved you’. Our faith in Christ must bring us the whole way so as ‘to receive what no eye has seen and no ear has heard, what the mind of man cannot visualise; all that God has prepared for those that love him’.