The Kitchen Sink
An occasional piece of paper
October 14, 2007
Vol. 10 no. 37

Everything But...
           One week later, we are still 125 years old and still thankful! It appears the Lectionary readings are one week behind with the ultimate polite thank you by the healed leper. This Samaritan, a foreigner yet, knew how to give thanks for the good things in life he didn’t expect. Maybe he was an early Canadian.
           One way of looking at this story is that Jesus was trying to stay out of trouble for once. He was heading for Jerusalem by slipping through the border region between Galilee and Samaria - the place one should not go. Entering an unnamed village there were the 10 lepers, a nice round number of abject misery. Misery knows his name and they call out for mercy specifically to Jesus, although they make a point of not coming too close physically.
           Mercy is sometimes defined as grace or help that you don’t really deserve. The lepers genuinely believed that they had done something wrong to deserve their ugly and horrible skin disease. They had to believe it because everybody else was always telling them that they were obviously great sinners.
           The fact that the Samaritan said thank you is not surprising; it is virtually a reflex that most of us would naturally feel. Why did the nine others, healed and ready to live a second life, not say thank you? Did they not believe this was mercy, but their inalienable right that had been restored? Perhaps they weren’t ungrateful, but just didn’t believe “thanks” was necessary. After all, if there is no God then giving thanks is sort of a silly exercise. Who really thanks the universe?