The Fourteenth Sunday after Trinity – September 1, 2024Psalm 84; Proverbs 4:10-23; Galatians 5:16-24St. Luke 17:11-19
In the Name of the Father, and of the +
Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
In the collect for today, we asked that
God would keep His Church with His perpetual mercy.[1]
This wording connects us with the lepers who cry out to Jesus for His mercy.
However, the original wording of this collect would have us ask God to keep His
Church with His perpetual propitiation. Propitiation is the act of Jesus
to appease, or satisfy, or resolve, the anger of the Father.[2]
It is the aspect of the atonement that is directed toward God. Jesus’ death on
the cross satisfied the punishment for sin. It satisfied God’s wrath toward
sinful man.
A prayer for God to keep His Church
through or by His perpetual propitiation is asking for God to continue
to smile upon His people; that the propitiation of the wrath of God would last
forever. How can God continue to smile upon His people? Only through the Body
given and Blood shed of Jesus Christ. It doesn’t mean that Jesus’ Body and
Blood are constantly re-sacrificed or constantly in a state of being
sacrificed. Rather, that the Body and Blood of Jesus that were once crucified
for the forgiveness of sins endures forever.[3]
The crucifixion happened once. The effects of this sacrifice are perpetual,
that is, they last forever.[4]
They endure. The satisfaction of God’s anger toward sin is an everlasting state
because Jesus is forever the Crucified One; crucified as adjective not verb.[5]
How might a return to this earlier
collect be appropriate for this Gospel reading? The ten lepers cry out to Jesus
to have mercy on them. They do not announce their leprosy, as commanded in the
law. They do not beg for healing. They ask Jesus for mercy. They lift up their
voices, a phrase commonly used for prayer. Jesus has mercy on them. All ten are
cleansed. All ten are healed. But only one returns. Only the Samaritan returns
to glorify God, that is, to give thanks to Jesus.
Did you catch that? What you might think of as two distinct actions are in fact one. The Samaritan leper glorifies God with a loud voice, that is, he falls on his face before Jesus’ feet and give Him thanks. The falling on his face is an act of worship. It is the word for worship. He bows before Jesus because he has realized that Jesus is the God of all creation. He is the Alpha and the Omega. The courts of the Lord, the Holy Habitation of the Almighty is the presence of Jesus.[6] The Samaritan knows this by faith and his faith guides his actions. Better to be in the presence of the Body and Blood of Jesus than to spend a thousand days anywhere else.
Last Sunday, Jesus identified Himself
as a Samaritan, as the Good Samaritan. The Samaritans and the Israelites were
once the same people. But 700 or so years before the birth of Jesus, the
Assyrians invaded Israel and cast many of the northern tribes into exile.[7]
The Assyrians then imported hundreds of foreigners into the region and these
intermarried with the native Israelites. Soon, the importation of foreigners
led to a mixing not only of peoples but of religion. It began as continued
worship of their foreign, pagan gods but soon this worship was placed on top of
the worship of the true God. The Samaritans are the result of this mixing. They
accepted the first five books of the bible but rejected all others. They
centered their worship on Mount Gerizim rather than Jerusalem.
Once the Kingdom of Judah returned from
exile in Babylon, the tide turned, and the Judeans began to persecute the
Samaritans. In 172 BC, the Judeans destroyed the Samaritan temple on Mount
Gerizim. There are hundreds of years of bad blood between the Jews and the
Samaritans. The Samaritans are mixed blood heretics in the eyes of the Judeans.
By the time of our text, the Samaritans are a tiny community, barely hanging on
to existence.
And yet it is a Samaritan who can
recognize the Messiah. It is a Samaritan who sees the True God in the flesh and
knows to worship Him. It is a Samaritan to whom our Lord compares Himself in
the parable of last week.
The Pharisees, and by consequence the most
people living in the Near East, considered leprosy to be the consequence of
sin. Since leprosy can refer to several different diseases in the Bible, it is
entirely possible that in some cases it is the result of sin. There are actions
and behaviors that lead directly to life altering diseases. At the same time,
there are some who contract these diseases by chance. They have done nothing
wrong. As they ask Jesus regarding the blind man, “Whose sin caused this disease,
this man’s or his parents?’”
In either case, whether one’s behavior
causes the disease or one is simply a victim of the disease, the Christian
response is (in the first place) the same: repentance. In falling on is face
before the feet of Jesus, the Samaritan is doing exactly that. He is glorifying
God by recognizing his own unworthiness. “Lord, Jesus Christ, thank you for
having had mercy upon me, a sinner!”
This is how we know that the Samaritan
gave thanks to God for His perpetual propitiation. The Samaritan recognizes his
sorry state. It was plainly obvious in his condition! The wrath of God was seen
in the oozing sores of his flesh, a constant and painful reminder of his sin. This
man, as all men, was in need of the mercy of God, something that could only be
achieved through reconciliation with the Father.
And how might the wrath of God be
satisfied? How might the anger of God be turned away from the Samaritan? The
breaking of the Body and shedding of the Blood of Jesus. The very same Body and
Blood which still effects your salvation. You are in every bit as much need of
salvation as the Samaritan with oozing sores. Your sins are more hidden; the
effects of your sins are likely more secret. But they are just as deadly as the
Samaritan’s disease. The remedy is repentance, acknowledgment of your sins and
an appeal to God for His mercy, which He has promised to all who believe, all
who are baptized, all who trust in the saving Blood of Jesus.
Now, when I said that repentance was
the Christian response to sin, whether sin suffered or sin outwardly committed,
I said this response was the same in the first place. That is because a sin
which is suffered must be responded to with repentance and faith. However, a
sin that is outwardly committed must likewise be met with repentance and faith
but also the fruits of repentance, namely, the putting away of that sin. After
being healed and falling at the feet of Jesus, the Samaritan is not free to
return to worshiping on Mount Gerizim. He is not free to return to rejecting
all but the first five books of Moses. His freedom is now found in Jesus
Christ. His freedom is from the sins which burdened him. He is now free to live
as a child of the Heavenly Father, a child according to promise.
The Samaritan was a heretic by birth.
He did not worship the True God from his youth. He worshiped a false god who
went by the same name. He did not worship in truth and sincerity. But the
presence of the Body and Blood of Jesus, the healing of this man’s body and
soul, turns his worship toward that True God. He is turned by the words of
Jesus to worship in truth and sincerity. He knows where salvation is to be
found. If someone asked him the meaning of Isaiah 53, “But He was wounded for
our transgressions, He was bruised for our iniquities…”[8]
the Samaritan is unlikely to have an answer. But he gets it. He knows where
salvation is to be found. He knows Jesus is the great high priest and salvation
is found in His body alone.
Keep, we beseech Thee, O Lord, Thy
Church with Thy perpetual propitiation; and because the frailty of man without
Thee cannot but fall, keep us ever by Thy help from all things hurtful and lead
us to all things profitable for our salvation; through the Holy Body and Precious
Blood of Jesus Christ, Thy Son, our Lord, who livest and reignest with Thee and
the Holy Ghost, ever one God, world without end.
In + Jesus’
name. Amen.
[1]
The change in this collect was brought to my attention via Rev. William
Weedon’s blog post at https://www.gottesdienst.org/gottesblog/2020/9/13/thoughts-on-the-collect-trinity-xiv?rq=Trinity%20XIV.
[2]
Hebrews 2:17.
[3]
Psalm 118.
[4]
Hebrews 7:24-25; 9:11-15.
[5]
St. Matthew 28:5.
[6]
Psalm 84:10.
[7]
2 Kings 17.
[8]
Isaiah 53:5.
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