For Sunday
Proper 23C
Collect
Lord, we pray that your grace may always precede and follow us, that we may continually be given to good works; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever.
Amen.
Reading
Reflection
When reading a story, sometime the setting is more important than any character. It doesn’t just set the scene, it controls it, pushes against the protagonist, and challenges the reader to imagine seeing this scene taking place in any other place. The setting of this week’s gospel is that important. It is doing 90% of the work for Jesus.
Jesus has left the crowds behind as he has walked into the borderlands, where no respected Hebrew would go. Our vision of borders as a place of security and order is a modern gloss on a history of chaotic territorial disputes and expectations of lawlessness. People lived in cities for mutual protection through living in proximity to neighbors and sharing of resources. The modern understanding of nation didn’t exist.
It is because of this sketchy view of borders, that they became the place people to which people were cast out. A Hebrew that couldn’t be a Hebrew couldn’t just go be a Samarian. So guess what? They were forced into a no man’s land in between, relegated to a life of constant danger and inhumane conditions, struggling to find food and shelter, and begging for generosity. To survive, people in the borderlands would develop a kind of community, finding neighbors in the same condition. The sort of conditions that we might compare to a tent community of people experiencing homelessness today.
Jesus enters this space where rabbis and Pharisees don’t go, endangering his ritual purity and his very life. And he heals several people plagued with leprosy. After he has been challenged by some Pharisees for healing on the Sabbath. And telling his followers about faith as small as a mustard seed. After saying a little doubt is great doubt and a little faith is great faith. He goes to where people of faith send their own to lose every last bit of it. And he restores them to wholeness, in community. This isn’t about gratitude, but about the true will of God.