Gratitude and Leprosy of Our Day

10-09-2022Weekly ReflectionFr. Anthony Okolo, C.S.Sp, V.F.

Today’s liturgy calls our attention to the virtue of thanksgiving or gratitude and how it should be expressed. It is important to state that Our Eucharistic celebration of the Mass is our highest expression of our thanksgiving and gratitude for what God has done for us and that is why attending Mass every Sunday should be a priority.

The first reading and the Gospel narrate the miraculous healing of people who were affected by leprosy and how they went back to give God thanks for what He has done for them. Leprosy in the Old Testament or time of Jesus is understood as a sickness caused by sin thus, anyone who suffers from it must have committed a grievous sin that made God punish the individual. The healing they received motivated them to go back and give thanks to God in worship.

At times, misfortune has a way of uniting people together and that’s what happens in the gospel of today. In the common tragedy of their leprosy, they forgot they were Jews and Samaritans and remembered only that they were people in need. As a leper the person is separated from the family for fear of contaminating others. The individual is also driven away from the community. The individual is also cut off from any form of religious practices and is not even allowed to worship God with other members of the community. The individual is physically destroyed.

Therefore, when such an individual is healed, he/she is restored back to the community, family, and the religious community and made whole in body and spirit. The healing of Naaman and the leper in today’s gospel were made possible because of their humble acceptance of their situation and in humility asked God for healing. Again, they followed the direction of the one who seeks to help them. We receive our own too when we identify the leprosy that affects us, cuts us off from the family and community, cuts us off from our relationship with God and destroys our life. Thereafter, approach God with a sincere heart and in humility. Then, we take the final step which is that of thanksgiving and gratitude for bringing us back to our community, family and a closer relationship with Him that makes us whole. Some of us tend to be ungrateful to our parents, forgetting that there was a time we were so dependent on our parents virtually for everything. But with time we begin to remember that they were unfair to us. No matter what we have against them let us always be grateful to our parents, our spouses, our friends and our teachers and those who have helped us in life.

In a time of desperate need for something, we pray with great intensity but soon our prayers are answered and we forget God. The greatest thanks we can give God is to acknowledge Him in our life and we do this most expressively when we come to worship God in the Sunday Mass with other members of the community of faith.

Fr. Tony Okolo C.S.Sp., V.F.