The Love that Brings Fullness of Life
Sermon preached on Sunday, January 18, 2026 by Subdeacon JD Swartz
In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.
In preparation for this homily, I was reviewing commentaries and read one which called the introduction of today’s passage “typical of earlier miracle scenes.”[1] Typical miracles, typical Jesus, doing typical Jesus things like healing ten lepers. The banality of the miraculous is a strange phenomenon no matter its reasoning – whether it is due to our lack of belief, or due to the fact that we belong to a tradition which teaches us to expect the miraculous and encounters with the Divine; but there is always one group for whom the miraculous is never typical, never boring, and never unbelievable – those whose lives have been affected by it.
Growing up, my family’s house bordered a large, wooded area and as children, my friends and I would spend our days in the forest building forts and playing games and as we were explorers we were always on the lookout for quicksand. In the 80s, every movie with a decent adventure and many of our cartoons warned us of the dangers of quicksand and with so much representation, it was obviously going to be a big problem for which we had to be prepared.
As a child I had the same level of wariness regarding leprosy. Growing up in church, I heard recurring teachings on biblical stories about leprosy. My childhood mind conjured horrific images regarding those with the disease. And while I was slightly disappointed to find out that quicksand was never going to be in the cards for my forest adventures, I was greatly relieved to discover that leprosy is now curable and was never the highly contagious disease I assumed it to be. In fact, leprosy has a very low transmission rate and in Scripture the term leprosy wasn’t necessarily about what we now medically understand as leprosy, but it included any skin condition which could indicate impurity. It was for this ritual impurity that lepers, whatever their medical condition, had to live apart from society and why despite better scientific understanding, medical advancements, and simple treatment methods, there remains a social stigma around leprosy, even now.
I actually gave the homily on this passage last year around this time and spoke on the difference between healing and cure – a cure is a definitive action to eliminate a disease, while healing is the process of becoming whole. We go to the doctor in hopes of a cure, putting an end to ailments; treatments are targeted to remove an issue. But while surgery and chemotherapy might cure cancer in someone’s body, the removal of the disease does not necessitate their being made whole. Patients who have been cured may very well live with scarring and pain from treatment, may be heavily burdened by financial weight, may live with the continuing fear of recurrence, they may feel incredibly isolated. Being cured without being healed is trauma.
The trauma of the ten lepers was not their flesh. As I said, leprosy in Scripture was a generic term for any skin condition, and the lepers in today’s reading were not the first to be cured, which is why the priests already had rituals to restore them. To say that Christ cleared up someone’s eczema may sound far less amazing than curing their leprosy, but that may be precisely what occurred. Medically, their lives may never have been on the line, even leprosy itself is not a disease which progresses quickly. The real miracle is not the cure, but the pathway to healing which was granted them. And if you think this take is simply a modernist rejection of the miraculous, I would argue that you are unfamiliar with the debilitating ramifications of isolation.
This group was not only removed from their communities, not only their families, but also from their God, for they could not gather to worship. And while ritual purity was required for their restoration to life, such a requirement is no longer an impediment. Christ came to bring life, and to abolish death in all its forms including socially. We are created by the Triune God, in His Image, made to live in community with Him and with one another. The reduction of a person to an adjective, particularly an adjective which we believe deserves our hate, our derision, our avoidance, is an act of dehumanization unworthy of any who claims Christ as their Lord.
If we read today’s Gospel as simply a story, then all you need to know is that these men were lepers. If this is only a story, we can reduce them to their disease or disability and you will know all you need to know about them, because they aren’t really people, but merely serve as a problem which needs to be resolved, and we can reduce Jesus Christ to the role of a quick-fix, rather than Divine Revelation. These lepers, these men, these humans, in all of their complexity, no matter their background, no matter their faith – because let’s not forget, one of them was a Samaritan – no matter any otherizing factor, were healed, were restored, regardless of their level of gratitude or recognition of the fact that they had encountered the love of the living God.
We fear this love because we cannot control it, for it is not our love but the love of God in which we may participate. We scoff at it for we are not its center, and we distain it because it forces us to contend with the reality that it is common to all people, shared freely, even with those whom we find unworthy of our own small facsimile of it. We hate the weight of its responsibility and prefer instead that we be chained to the delusion of individual freedom, thus avoid love’s binding liberation. We dread it because it finds us, in all of our perceived unworthiness; it is unbridled and we are unable to define its borders. Love is the most feared of all the Holy Mysteries, for God Himself demands that we extend it even unto our enemies.
Love, brothers and sisters, is the Sacrament par excellence – the foundation of every Sacrament encountered within the Church, the basis of the Incarnation of Christ, the very reason for creation’s existence. In this love no nation, no race, no group comes first; in its light no system of control, no political force, no oppression may stand triumphant. And where we would stand in its way, love would seek to envelope and heal us.
I do not believe in the division of sacred and secular, for I have yet to see where God is not, though I see where He is ignored and where He is disregarded. As Wendell Berry put it, “There are no unsacred places, there are only sacred places and desecrated places.”[2] The difference between sacred and desecrated is not a boundary, but rather, how we relate with the sacred reality of place, of space, of person, or of people group. And we are charged by He who is love to act with love. St. John Chrysostom says, “Only a fool would attempt to change the world with a simple message of love and peace. So we can conclude that Jesus was a fool. Only fools would agree to follow such a man, and then continue his mission even after he had been killed. So we can conclude that the apostles were fools. Only fools would take seriously the message which a bunch of fools were preaching, and accept that message. So we can conclude that all of us are fools.”[3] For Christ and love, count me a fool, anytime, because, as martyred Catholic Archbishop Oscar Romero put it, “Christian love…must win out, it is the only thing that can.”[4] We cannot cure the world, we cannot end its problems; we have been placed here by the Great Physician to heal, to bring to wholeness those whom we encounter, and that by one another we may all encounter Him. Let us participate in, express, and act upon this love which is the greatest of miracles for it restores, transforms, and heals all back to its very source – the eternal God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
Amen.
[1] Joel B. Green, The Gospel of Luke in The New International Commentary on the New Testament. Eerdmans Publishing, 1997, pg. 619
[2] Wendell Berry, “How To Be a Poet” in Poetry Magazine, January 2001; https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/41087/how-to-be-a-poet
[3] St John Chrysostom, “On Living Simply: The Golden Voice of John Chrysostom,” Robert Van de Weyer, compiler. Liguori/Triumph, 1997, pg. 52
[4] Oscar Romero, “The Violence of Love,” James R. Brockman, S.J. compiler. Orbis Books, 1988, pg. 7