**********Introduction:
= We live in a mobile age: “stay connected” जुड़े रहें
= Lepers: not connected from the world
= How connected are we to the Lord?
= Eucharist means “thanksgiving.”
= When was the last time we thank God for something ?
= Our ingratitude can be the worst leprosy. कुष्ठ बीमारी
= The ten lepers
represent the whole of humanity, poisoned by sin
= Whole week the Lord has blessed us/cured us let us
give thanks to him
= Examine: are we grateful to God/ Parents/ neighbours
**********First Reading
=Naman Thanks Yahweh and received greater blessing than his physical
healing that is the gift of faith in Yahweh.
= Naman dipped seven times, how often do we go for confession to dip ourselves in the
ocean of mercy to make ourselves clean? How often do we go for Eucharist to
take a dip in the ocean of love to heal ourselves and restore ourselves as a
child of God.
= In the confession, we became a new person altogether just as the skin
of naman became like the skin of a little child.
= Have we recognized Jesus as our true God just as Naman recognized
Yahweh as the true God of Israel?
= What are we giving in return to God like Naman who was ready to
present gifts to Eliza? Are we people who only receive and do not give?
= Elisha did not take anything from Naman. Do we take bribe in our
office or something extra from some people in our profession?
= Money got from questionable sources, from politician to build our building, for
ordination, jubilee. We have no right to ask as to where did they get from. But
if we come to know that it is from the corruption, we need to return back. We
need to trust in the providence.
= A common misfortune had broken down the racial and national barriers.
In the common tragedy of their leprosy they had forgotten they were Jews and
Samaritans and remembered only they were men in need.
*****************Gospel:
= They missed loving encounter with the Lord, their
healing remained at the physical level alone.
= There are various kinds of prayers: petition,
adoration, contrition and thanksgiving. All the nine lepers made the prayers of
petition, contrition and adoration but after healing they forgot to make the
prayer of thanksgiving.
= Samaritan was healed body and soul for all eternity
They got certificate of cure from the priest but they
missed the greater blessing by their ingratitude.
= Does our invocation “Lord, have pity on me”, turns into “Thank
you Lord.”
= All 10 men obeyed Jesus to go to the priest and show
themselves to him. So they showed that they had faith.
= How can we forget that,
just the day he decided to embrace a leper, Francis of Assisi understood
the whole of Christianity and began his journey to become “very similar to
Jesus” to the point of being like him “physically” receiving the stigmata? “ HE
SAID: We lepers”
= Jesus became a leper
for us: He can no longer go openly into the villages but is forced to stay in
desert places and to live the situation that was before of the leper. The Latin
text of Isaiah’s prophecy about the Servant of the Lord says among other
things: “We considered him like a leper” (Is 53,4b). Jesus, the Servant, the
Messiah, the Savior, has become for us as a leper to heal our leprosy in the
body and in the spirit!
= On the cross he will
have wounds like a leper, but we can fix our gaze on him in the sure hope of
being healed and with the certitude of the compassion of the one who “took upon
himself our sufferings and our evils” (Is 53,4a)
**************Lessons
= Every time we
commit a sin we render the skin of our soul dirty and we need the pool of the
confessional/confession/priests/Eucharist/sacraments/sacrametals to deep
ourselves in them and make it clean like Naman.
= We all need healing from one thing or the other and
our healing both physical and spiritual should bring us closer to
God like that Samaritan.
= Pope Francis: “Our relationship with
God should not be limited to only asking favours from him or praying only in
times of happiness.
= We need to thank God even in pain (2Tim 2:10) Job: God gave and God has
taken away; praise be the name of the Lord
= Pope Francis: Go to the
periphery, In fact, who was more peripheral of the lepers who are the living
dead, especially at that time when they had to stay far away from contact with
other people?
= We need healing at two
levels: one, more superficial, concerns the body, the other and deeper touches
the inside of each person, what the Bible calls “heart”, and from there spreads
to the whole of existence.
= It was after burning numerous victims during those times of war,
famine and pestilence that the Minister Martin Rinkart composed
the great song of praise: “Now thank we all our God”
= They say God has two dwellings: one in heaven and one in a
grateful heart.
= Helen Keller: “So much has been given
to me that I have no time to brood over that which has been denied.
= Being grateful for the things received is the best means of receiving
the new ones.
= Are our children grateful, if not that means that
they were never taught to be grateful by the parents friend, a teacher, a
doctor, a surgeon
= As King Lear said in the day of his own tragedy.“How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is, To Have a thankless child!”
= George Herbert a poet: “O God you have
given us so much, Give us one thing more: ‘a grateful heart’
= Blow, blow, thou winter wind,
Thou art not so unkind
As man’s ingratitude
= Don Bosco: “A grateful boy is a Holy boy
= We need to pray for our benefactors
= Mary was a grateful mother: “My soul glorifies
the Lord; my spirit rejoices in God my saviour.”
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