Romans 6:18-23; Matthew 8:5-13
Glory to God the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.
Today’s Gospel shows us something unusual: Jesus is amazed.
A Roman officer has a servant who is ill, and he comes to the Lord to ask for healing. The Roman understands the Jewish law well enough to know that he shouldn’t invite Jesus into his house; the Lord is a Jew and under the law of Moses, entering and touching this Gentile’s house would make Jesus ceremonially unclean for the rest of the day; Jews who kept their law could not even eat a meal with someone who ate forbidden foods – a law-breaker, unclean, impure.
If the Roman officer had come to Jesus just a few hours earlier, he might have had a better understanding about purity. Just a few verses before today’s Gospel reading, in Matthew chapter 8 —
When Jesus came down from the mountainside, large crowds followed him. A man with leprosy came and knelt before him and said, “Lord, if you are willing, you can make me clean.”
Now the skin disease called leprosy was contagious, so the Jewish law commanded not to touch people with leprosy.
Jesus reached out his hand and touched the man. “I am willing,” he said. “Be clean!” Immediately he was cleansed of his leprosy.
The Lord touches this man. Does he break the Law and become unclean? Not at all. The Lord reverses the order of nature by his own power. Last week I mentioned that in his baptism, the Lord didn’t need to be cleansed from sins, but rather his holiness filled the water with life and blessing: Jesus didn’t get wet; the water got Jesus.
Here the Lord touches the unclean leper, and is not made sick and unclean – rather, the leper is made whole and pure.
Here’s a picture of our salvation! We come to the Lord, full of confusion and guilt and uncleanness, and he is not afraid of contamination. He doesn’t even address our protest that we are sinners, unworthy, begging for a pardon we don’t deserve. Instead, like the father of the Prodigal Son, as soon as we set our feet on the road to repentance, the Lord comes running to embrace us. And he is not defiled by our sins but begins the process of making us holy, pure, and alive to God.
But today’s Roman officer didn’t see the Lord touch the leper, so he says, no, don’t come to my house. I understand the chain of command, and I know you can give the order for my servant to be healed, and obviously the universe will obey your orders.
When Jesus heard it, He marveled, and said to those who followed, “I have not found such great faith, not even in Israel.”
There are saints and theologians who work out exactly what the almighty immortal God the Word knew during his 33 years as a Man, when he knew it, and how that all works. I am not that saint, and I can only marvel and be amazed myself at this statement that the Lord was amazed at the Roman officer’s faith.
Here is the God who made heaven and earth, who has been from before the ages, and yet he still has a sense of wonder and delight.
G.K. Chesterton wrote,
A child kicks his legs rhythmically through excess, not absence, of life. Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, ‘Do it again’; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead…
It is possible that God says every morning, ‘Do it again’ to the sun; and every evening ‘Do it again’ to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we. (Orthodoxy, pg 60-61).
I would like to put a smile on the Lord’s face and cause him to be amazed when you and I begin to share his sense of innocent wonder, when we do our stumbling best to offer him clean hands and a pure heart.
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Have you seen advertisements for health-care supplements that claim to purify your blood? You’ve actually already got a liver and kidneys to do that. They work full-time pulling poisons out of your bloodstream.
Your soul has something similar. Day by day you encounter pain and suffering – this is normal in this sin-damaged world, as the Lord promised: “In this world you will have tribulation” (John 16:33). But your soul is not meant to fill up with the poison of pain and sorrow, or turn septic with anger, sarcasm, or cynicism; you have a mechanism that’s meant to purify the poisons from your soul. It is called thanksgiving.
The saints, with the wisdom of experience, tell us to give thanks even for betrayals, insults, disasters, and injustices, “Know that the trying of your faith works patience. But let patience have its perfect work, that you may be perfect and entire, wanting nothing” (James 1:3-4). So we thank the ones who rob and do us wrong, because they help free us from the sicknesses of soul called love of possessions or love of our rights.
But most of us are not strong or wise enough to give thanks for all things (Ephesians 5:20). So for us, it is vital to taste and see that the Lord is good (Psalm 34:8) and meditate on what scripture calls “his goodness, and his wondrous works to the children of men!” (Psalm 107:31). Then when a stone falls on our lives, we are not crushed by our grief – because we know how to “give thanks to the Lord for he is good, for his mercy endures forever” (Psalm 136).
“I will give thanks to the Lord because of his righteousness; I will sing the praises of the name of the Lord Most High.” (Psalm 7:17), says the Psalmist, “for I am fearfully and wonderfully made: marvelous are thy works; and that my soul knows right well” (Psalm 139:14), for “he hath done all things well.” (Mark 7:37). “With thanksgiving, present your requests to God. And the peace of God, which passes all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus” (Philippians 4:6-7).
Understand this: Gratitude is a discipline, not a mood. We don’t withhold thanks when we don’t get our own way; God will not be coerced, but will continue to permit “rain to fall on the righteous and the unrighteous” (Matthew 5:45).
If we will allow thankfulness to have its full work in us, it will purify the poison from our sufferings, and then “you will be blameless and pure, children of God without fault in a crooked and perverse generation, in which you shine as lights in the world” (Philippians 2:15).
And don’t stop with merely verbally saying that God is good: Do good, especially when you have been wronged.
“When someone throws a rock at you, throw back bread instead!”
— Luba Fomin, 99-year-old concentration camp survivor.
This is a virtue the Bible calls philótimo (Romans 15:20; 2 Corinthains 5:9; 1 Thessalonians 4:11). Philótimo is remembering how deeply we are indebted to the good God who loves mankind, so that we become filled with love for others – and without concern for our own rights or what anyone owes us, we honor and supply and serve others. “Through Jesus, therefore, let us continually offer to God a sacrifice of praise — the fruit of lips giving thanks to his name. And do not forget to do good and to share with others, for with such sacrifices God is pleased” (Hebrews 13:15-16).
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Have you ever noticed how much of our praying is done in the imperative mood? We’re always giving God instructions: “Forgive us. Heal them. Grant repentance to that one. End hunger. Fix everything.”
Yes, our word “to pray” literally means to ask. And St Paul exhorts us to “present your requests to God” (Philippians 4:6). But if our God-talk doesn’t feature thanksgiving, dogmatic and doxological praise for who the Lord is and what he has done, and express love and fear of God the Trinity, then we are just making the Almighty our errand-boy.
Even the Our Father, the model prayer Christ gave us, begins and ends with the glory and lordship of God.
Why do we spend so much time telling God how to do his job and so little time giving thanks and praise for his wondrous works and his awesome holiness?
A moment ago I quoted from Philippians, “Present your requests to God” – but you probably remember the whole verse: “Do not be anxious about anything, but in every situation, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God. And the peace of God, which passes all understanding, will guard your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus” (Philippians 4:6,7).
When you undertake to walk in thankfulness, you confess that God is the source of everything you have. When you are thankful, you’re humbling yourself by confessing that this life is not about you. A humble person is grateful, but pride never gives thanks.
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Finally: The mercy and steadfast love of God is not a feeling or a mood God sometimes has, but it is God’s continual choice to act. So for you and me, thankfulness is not an emotion but a commitment and a discipline. It requires practice. No virtue becomes natural without being practiced daily, but with intentional repetition it may become our accustomed way of life. Gratefulness may not be your heart’s native language. But with only a little diligence it can start to become your heart’s language.
The difference between the person who becomes hardened and destroyed by suffering, and the one who is made compassionate and holy by suffering, is in the way they cooperate with the divine action of grace. Let gratitude open your mouth to confess the goodness of God, so that your lips can teach your mind – and your mind can teach your heart.
“And let the peace of God rule in your hearts, to which also you were called in one body; and be thankful. Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly in all wisdom, teaching and admonishing one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing with grace in your hearts to the Lord. And whatever you do in word or deed, do all in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through Him” (Colossians 3:15-17).
To the glory of God the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.
