This Sunday Is Your Chance To Be the Leper Who Returns

Jesus saves 10 lepers from the disease that has ruined them on the Twenty-Eighth Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year C. One returns to thank him. It’s a vision of the amazing saving work Jesus does for each of us, and how we should respond.

Here are five takeaways drawn from Sunday Readings columns at this site and the Extraordinary Story podcast.

First: The lepers were more than just sick, says Pope Benedict XVI.

Luke tells us that 10 lepers, suffering from the disease that rotted their flesh before death, “stood at a distance” and shouted, “Jesus, Master! Have pity on us.” The Gospel says, “When he saw them, he said, ‘Go show yourselves to the priest.” They went, and were healed on the way.

Pope Benedict XVI explains what this meant for the lepers:

“Leprosy was not only considered a disease but also the most serious form of ritual ‘impurity.’ It was the priests’ duty to diagnose it and to declare unclean the sick person who had to be isolated from the community and live outside the populated area until his eventual and well-certified recovery. Thus, leprosy constituted a kind of religious and civil death, and its healing a kind of resurrection.”

Leprosy had given these men a death sentence, and worse. It had made them ugly, impure, and a threat to their family, friends and neighbors. Jesus was essentially lifting an execution order at the last minute when he cured them. He gave them something they hadn’t even hoped for: A new start in life.

No wonder when the leper returns, he “fell at the feet of Jesus and thanked him.”

Second: But this Gospel isn’t about leprosy. It’s about us.

Leprosy has been all but eradicated today, but the focus on leprosy in Scripture is still relevant, Pope Benedict said.

Today “It is not the physical illness of leprosy, as stated by the old norms, that separates us from God … but sin — spiritual and moral evil,” he said. “If the sins that we commit are not confessed with humility and trust in the divine mercy, they can even reach the point of producing the death of the soul.”

Think about the ways sin is like leprosy:

• Sin makes us ugly. Nothing spoils good looks like selfishness and unkindness, while kindness and generosity make anyone attractive.
• Sin is infectious too — “sin creates the proclivity to sin,” says the Catechism, and “bad company corrupts good character,” says Paul.
• Sin is isolating. People often have to leave the company of others to indulge in their sins, and the more selfish sinners become, the more friends they lose.
• Sin kills the soul like leprosy kills the body because, as the Catechism puts it, mortal sin, unconfessed “causes exclusion from Christ’s Kingdom and the eternal death of hell, for our freedom has the power to make choices forever, with no turning back.”

Being forgiven is like being cured of leprosy — it transforms us, restores us, and saves us.

Second: That means we can see in this Gospel as a step-by-step guide to what we sinners should do.

Step one is to call out to the Lord: “Jesus, Master! Have pity on us.”

Don’t make the mistake of thinking that God won’t hear your prayer if you are in a state of mortal sin. That’s a lie direct from the devil. Not only can he hear you, he is eager to hear from you, as Father Jacques Phillippe points out in his book Searching for and Maintaining Peace. Pray more than ever if you are in sin — even if you feel you have to “stand at a distance from him and raise your voice” like the lepers in this Sunday’s Gospel.

Step two is spelled out by Jesus himself: “Go and show yourself to the priest.” For us, this means, “Go and reveal your sins to the priest in confession.”

As the Church’s Code of Canon Law (960) puts it, barring physical or other impairment, sacramental confession is “the only ordinary way  by which the faithful person who is aware of serious sin is reconciled with God and with the Church.” The U.S. Bishops created a booklet listing some common serious sins, including not just sins against other human beings such as fraud, but sins against God, including missing the minimum requirements in our love for him, such as Sunday Mass.

Step three is gratitude, which we see twice in the readings: In the cured leper who returns to Jesus, and in Naaman, the foreign king in the First Reading who is cured of leprosy by Elisha.

Naaman’s healing, like ours, is a return to innocence: “His flesh became again like the flesh of a little child,” and he is so grateful he renounces his gods and wants to bring back two carloads of earth to continue his sacrifice of thanksgiving to the One God at home. In other words, his gratitude fuels his “firm purpose of amendment,” a prerequisite for true repentance.

Third: If we knew what was happening in the confessional, we would flock there and cry tears of gratitude.

St. Faustina, the saint of Divine Mercy who had mystical encounters with Jesus, reported these words from him:

“When you approach the confessional, know this, that I Myself am waiting there for you. I am only hidden by the priest, but I Myself act in your  soul. Here the misery of the soul meets the God of mercy.”

St. John Chrysostom said that “after confession, a crown is given to penitents.”

Yet, many Catholics today, like the lepers, don’t appreciate confession.

When only one leper returns to thank him, Jesus says “Ten were cleansed, were they not?
Where are the other nine?”

Only 10% of Jesus’s lepers thanked him. Today, only 6% of Catholics name confession as the “most meaningful” sacrament, and Catholics ranked confession last in how “meaningful” the sacraments are in a 2023 study by the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate, CARA. In fact, 75% of Catholics surveyed don’t go to confession even once a year, which is a minimum requirement of the Church. Most of those 75% go “rarely or never.”

The last five popes all agreed that the chief spiritual problem of our time is the loss of the sense of sin. People no longer see sin as a big deal, and this mistake has resulted in a pandemic of sin, like a zombie apocalypse of leprosy.

Fourth: To aid your gratitude, remember that Jesus did more than call out from a distance to heal us.

As Pope Benedict XVI put it, “In his Passion [Jesus] will become as a leper, made impure by our sins, separated from God: He will do all this out of love, to obtain for us reconciliation, forgiveness and salvation.”

St. Paul met Jesus on the road to Damascus where he was so riveted by what Our Lord had done for him in his passion and resurrection that his whole life became a sacrifice of gratitude — “even to the point of chains, like a criminal,” he says in the Second Reading.

We are all weak. We all sin. St. Paul was no exception. But he held on to the sacrifice of Christ as his lifeline, proclaiming: “This saying is trustworthy: If we have died with him we shall also live with him; if we persevere we shall also reign with him … If we are unfaithful, he remains faithful, for he cannot deny himself.”

Fifth: So, at this Sunday’s Mass, be aware that we gather as lepers calling out to the Lord.

In the original Greek of Luke’s Gospel, the word used for the leper’s thanksgiving when he returned to Jesus is eucharisteó, the same word St. Paul uses to describe how Jesus instituted the sacrament of his body and blood.

The leper’s gratitude is the same kind of thanksgiving that gives our Eucharist its name.

In his book The Feast of Faith, Pope Benedict XVI says the Mass is reminiscent of the ancient Hebrew todah sacrifice of thanksgiving. As described in Leviticus 7:11-13, this “communion sacrifice of thanksgiving” looks a lot like our Eucharist. Benedict quotes a scholar who described the todah this way:

“The thanksgiving sacrifice presupposes a particular situation. If a man is saved from death, from fatal illness or from those who seek his live, he celebrates this divine deliverance in a service of thanksgiving which marks an existential new start in his life.”

It’s fascinating that the 10 lepers were a group of Jewish people traveling with a Samaritan. The disease that threatened their lives forced them to put their differences aside and live as one.

This is us at Sunday Mass, a ragtag group of people of different ages, different backgrounds, different political views, and different ethnicities. We have one thing in common, though: We have gone out of our way to return to Jesus at Mass to offer our sacrifice of thanksgiving to him for saving our lives.

If we live it to the full, our Eucharistic communion has the power to start our life over again, like a leper restored to life at last.

By Tom Hoopes