Thanksgiving is a tricky time. I mean, it’s great to gather up family and friends, if that’s your thing, or just to get some good downtime and take some nice long walks. There are a lot of nice options. Or at least there can be.
The thing is that, as with some of the other major holidays, Thanksgiving can be a time when people have mixed feelings. I think that’s the case anyway, but especially this year, when so many people’s lives have been so fundamentally affected by the economy, and continue to be, this is going to be a tough Thanksgiving to say, “Just say thanks.”
And that can be a double whammy. Some of us might not feel like we should have mixed feelings – like we should be able to sign up with the “grateful” crowd. And then we can start to feel guilty about that.
And then you throw God into the picture and it gets even more complicated. Because this holiday can be so easily interpreted as, not just "Be thankful for the good things in your life," but "Be thankful to God for what you’ve got."
Which sounds innocent enough, but it can be a slippery downhill slope. Because if I’m thankful for what I’ve got, for what God has given me, it starts to become quantified. I can easily – if unintentionally – move into a space of comparison with other people. “What I’ve got” seems to have as its companion piece, “what I haven’t got” or “what the next guy has got.” Being thankful for what we’ve got can begin to quantify and compare things. So it can lead, even unconsciously, to the idea of amounts. Sort of, “I’m thankful I have this because those people over there have even less and I don’t want to be like them. Whew.”
So this is how comparing “what we’ve got,” which of course we’re thankful for, can so easily and almost invisibly become a place of hoarding and self-protectiveness and division between people. We want a bigger line between us and those who have less – it’s not what we intend with our minds, but emotionally it can feel that way. Our Thank You becomes “Thank you for that line!” And we get irritated at the line between us and those who have more. And we become overfocused on the lines and what’s on each side of them.
And the problem with all that – and this is the whole slippery slope thing – is that it can lead simply into a place of fear.
And the problem with that is, I just don’t think that a place of fear is where God wants us.
I don’t think God’s plan for Thanksgiving is to make us all end up more afraid than grateful.
So how to we untangle that complexity, how do avoid that slippery slope?
I think the Gospel story actually gives us some solid ground. And as usual, stories about Jesus help us because they undo all our usual assumptions about how the world works. Stories about Jesus don’t just get us to come to a different conclusion that’s still based on all the usual ways we think and see the world. Stories about Jesus change the way we see the world.
This story of the ten lepers is clearly about gratitude. But it gives us the right orientation on it.
If we read it superficially, like all those lepers were ungrateful and un-Christian, and at least one of them had the good sense to remember to write a thank-you note – then I think we’re missing the mark. That would have been about fear and obligation, and that’s not what Jesus had in mind.
These were ten lepers – and we don’t really know exactly what the skin disease was, we just know it was bad enough to be in a category that ostracized them from the society they desperately needed to support their physical needs. Ten people in desperate need of being included back in society, in that system, at least to a degree whereby they could better meet their needs of not being told they were unclean, unacceptable, untouchable, and then their needs of shelter, food, community.
And they approached him, knowing he was some kind of great healer – they called out. Now, this was a common rule for lepers, mentioned in the Old Testament. They were to call out “Unclean!” when someone approached them. Maybe understandable in that context, but still, how awful to have to ostracize yourself. That’s how rejected and isolated these people were – they had to create their own isolation.
Only right off, we see them change this rule – they do call out, but they call Jesus Master. And interestingly, they ask for mercy. Not “unclean,” and not “heal us.” But “have mercy.”
And that’s a big switch, right there. Why mercy? I don’t know for sure, maybe it was a way of asking him to not turn them away at all. It would be been merciful just to acknowledge their presence. Skin disease might well have been seen as the result of something they or their family had done wrong. Maybe the mercy was really just asking for Jesus to look at them. To just acknowledge their humanity – perhaps as we might acknowledge the humanity of someone we walk by who’s struggling with homelessness.
They ask for nothing more that we know about. And Jesus’ response is simply to tell them to follow the rules – only it’s not the rules for people who are outsiders. And that’s what’s interesting here. He tells them to follow the rules for those who are healed, who are included. It’s the usual procedure for being considered clean again, which is to be examined by the priests. That was the gateway into inclusion, the pass to being readmitted to humanity. This was big. And this is what he’s telling them to do, before anything else has happened.
Which to me would seem like doing it backward. I mean, aren’t they supposed to be healed first, and then be told to go to the priests? Jesus seems to skip the first part and go straight to the second, and so that’s what they do. They followed the instructions – Jesus’ instructions, which were Torah instructions, too.
So on all fronts, it really seemed like the right thing to do, if out of sequence. They follow instructions. And then in the process of doing that, they are healed. Whatever had kept that big firm boundary down between them and the “clean” people – the boundary that would have made other people say, “Wow, we’re thankful for what we’ve got, and at least we haven’t got that disease” – was erased. Done.
And that’s a nice story. A nice healing story. It seems like that would be the end. Isn’t that a complete plot line?
Well, you’d think so, except for this one renegade leper who turns back. He had been a leper, which meant an outsider anyway, but he was even more of an outsider than that. He was a Samaritan, a “foreigner” – Samaritans were from the northern part of the region and were considered outsiders by those down closer to Jerusalem. To Galileans like Jesus at the time, Samaritans were on the wrong side of the tracks. They had the wrong approach to religion, the wrong cultural background, the wrong political history. And here this outsider – who, based on the usual way of seeing things, should never have been healed by a great master in the first place – stops and turns back..
He changes the plotline in a way that people in Jesus’ day would have seen as nuts.
Because he could have lost everything, right? He was an outsider – as a Samaritan, he didn’t do “legit” religion in a “legit” way. His body had been literally untouchable. In not following proper procedure, for all he knew, he could have pissed Jesus off and gotten un-healed.
But he still turned around and went back.
And in doing that, he went to a whole new level.
He went back to Jesus to do something that had nothing to do with the physical circumstances of his life, as much as that seems like the big point of the story. He went back to Jesus for a whole new level of life that he realized was on offer that had nothing to do with his skin. He went back to Jesus for relationship – he went back for the cream.
And that was daring. There was nothing safe in this scene. It wasn’t comparative gratitude – like, “Whew, at least I didn’t get less than the others got, let me hoard what I’ve got, be thankful, and skedaddle.”
This leper got risky. He didn’t just receive the gift, he let himself be affected by it. He let himself be affected by Jesus on the inside, not just the outside. And then the inside was what became new and transformed. And when he felt that change, when he let it come in through his inner door, there was just no way to contain it. And it became sloppy all-out joy and love.
And so he ran back, because there was nothing else he could do. Ran back to the healer who, for all he knew, could have un-healed him for not following the rules. He ignored everything on the outside because of what was happening inside of him.
And that’s just it. The outside meant a lot, and Jesus knew that. This is not about our physical needs not being important. Jesus knew the healing was going to affect the leper’s ability to work and take care of his needs and have a place to live. Jesus knew that the outside matters. But what mattered more was the bounty that was on offer on the inside, the bounty of the leper simply realizing how loved and embraced he was, period.
Jesus has concern for our physical needs, and how that affects our very ability to function – that’s what he did in offering the lepers carte blanche with their healing. Sort of, “You don’t have to say thanks, you’ve got it.” As far as we know, these lepers were not un-healed because they didn’t turn around.
It’s just that that physical healing wasn’t the only thing on offer. Jesus’ comments – “where are the others, no one wanted to praise God?” – weren’t reprimands. They were an invitation into getting what was really going on there – which was far greater life than what could be contained by skin and food and shelter, as important as those things are.
That’s just it. As huge and significant as that healing seems to be – and let it be that huge, it’s meant to be huge, let that impress you – as huge as that was, there was something still bigger on offer. This interaction doesn’t diminish physical needs, it tells us that if they’re as huge as they are, then the needs of the spirit are that much bigger. And Jesus was inviting them onto this whole other level.
After all, Jesus works through invitation, not force or coercion, it wasn’t that they wouldn’t be healed if they didn’t get God. They were healed, period. And then they were invited into a whole new space – they were invited into relationship and response. And that’s what Jesus quietly invited, then noted – for whom, for us? He noted that the others had not, yet, been open to the gift that was so much bigger than the gift they were open to. They hadn’t been able to respond to it.
All of these readings – the Deuteronomy, the Corinthians, the Gospel – are not about comparative bounty, not about bounty in relation to what’s going on around us: “Thank you, God, because at least we’ve got x or y.” They’re about bounty of relationship with God regardless of what’s going on around us – regardless of what physical things we can name, or can’t name. And when we look at things that way, it’s not that we still don’t have very human needs – we do and we should. But when we look at our relationship with God and look at things from that place, it all starts to take on a different shape. Things that are graceful start to be bigger or they become visible in ways they hadn’t been before, and maybe we let ourselves take delight in them in a bigger way, even with the other needs in our picture.
If we come at things from the place of a bountiful relationship with God, a place of looking to God even if we don’t have it all figured out – if we come from that place then we start with a place of sufficiency. Not comparative sufficiency, like, “Thank God I have more of God than that other guy.” Nothing in the interaction with Jesus suggests that he gave less to the other nine lepers. But the place of sufficiency with God that means being completely welcomed, being sought after, and having God work with us to fill our very human needs.
And maybe that’s the last piece of what sent the leper back. Maybe he realized that if Jesus had just done what he had done in that moment – then maybe that was the same God who had been there all along.
And that’s a bounty that no one can measure.