Anointed

Propers: The Eighteenth Sunday after Pentecost (Lectionary 28), A.D. 2019 C

Homily:

Lord, we pray for the preacher, for you know his sins are great.

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

Oil was the lifeblood of the ancient world, much as it is for ours today. But whereas we tend to dig our oil up from the deep recesses of the earth, the peoples of the Bible grew theirs on trees. Olive oil made their world go around.

You’d be amazed what you can do with olives. First they would be harvested and stored in boxes or crates. Oil would leak out—so-called virgin olive oil—and this would be set aside for cooking and for food, that famous Mediterranean diet. Then the crates would be stacked one atop another, and the added weight would squeeze more oil out. This second grade would be used as soap, to remove dirt and other oils from the skin, and as medicine, to treat and heal wounds.

Finally, the olives would be laid out into a great mill or press and crushed with a heavy stone wheel, pressing out one last measure of oil, and this third grade would be used for illumination, to fuel the oil lamps that lit the whole of the biblical world. Thus in one simple fruit, God provided for His people food, cleansing, and light. Little wonder that oil was used to anoint prophets, priests, and kings—that in fact the very word “Christ” derives from “chrism,” the Greek word for anointing with oil.

So when we read passages from the New Testament instructing Christians to anoint the sick with oil, we must remember that this is not simply magical thinking. Miracles do occur, of course, but not so often as we would like. To anoint the sick means to care for the sick, to treat the sick, to cleanse their wounds with the best medicine of the day. And that is still what we are called to do: not simply to pray the pain away, but truly to help as best we can, as best society can.

For indeed, Christ is the Anointed. And whenever we anoint someone in Jesus’ Name—as we do today, in honor of St Luke the Physician—we remind both them and us that Christ is present in our afflictions, in our sufferings, forever found amongst the outcast, the needy, the hungry, the wounded, the foreigner, and the forgotten; forever leading us from darkness to light, from brokenness to wholeness, out from this world of death and despair up into life everlasting. Oil is the sign of Christ’s Holy Spirit, the tangible promise that we are all in this together. We all suffer together; we all rejoice together; as one Body of Christ, with Jesus as our head.

So by all means, let us pray for the sick. But let us also, as part and parcel of prayer, visit them, comfort them, care for them and heal them to the best of our ability. Moreover, let us build together a community and a society in which people who fall ill are not forced into a catch-22 between bankrupting their families or certain death. It was Cain who first retorted to God, “Am I my brother’s keeper?” And Christ’s resounding response to us is, “Yes.” You bet your butt you are.

Now, in our Scriptures this morning we read two wonderful tales of healing, both of which tend to turn our expectations on their heads.

First up we have Naaman, the great and glorious general of the armies of Aram, who at the prompting of his slave girl—a “little, little girl,” according to the text—parades himself into Israel seeking a miraculous cure for the one enemy he can neither outmuscle nor outwit: a wasting skin disease.

But his healing comes in an unexpected way. There is no great reception. There are no ecstatic dances or gyrating priests, no magical incantations, nor plumes of scented smoke. Indeed, the prophet Elisha, whom the warlord has marched all this way to see, doesn’t even bother to come out to greet him. Instead, the messenger reports: bathe in the Jordan seven times, and be cleansed.

That’s it? Talk about an anticlimax. The Jordan, I’m afraid, is nothing to write home about, and surely for someone so great and important as Naaman, a bigger deal ought to have been made. But again salvation comes from the little, little slave: “Father”—Father, she calls him—“if the prophet had instructed you to do something arduous, to fulfill some great quest, would you not have done it? How much more when all he said was to wash and be made clean?”

So Naaman, to his credit, swallows his pride, wallows in the mud—and is healed. And his skin, it says, becomes like that of his little, little girl. In Baptism, he is become like her: humble, innocent, selfless, grateful, and whole.

A bit shy of a thousand years later, Jesus encounters a group of 10 lepers—real leprosy this time, of the sort brought in by Alexander the Great, turning people into something akin to the walking dead—who cry out for mercy and for healing. “Go and show yourselves to the priests,” Christ replies, something even simpler than a bath. With nothing left to lose, they do so, and while still on their way they find themselves astonishingly, impossibly made whole. No longer lepers, no longer outcasts, they quite understandably rejoice. But only one returns to prostrate himself at Christ’s feet, and this one a Samaritan.

Once again, the glory and mercy and wonder of God are revealed not to an Israelite, but to an outsider, a foreigner, indeed, a traditional enemy of God’s people. Once again, salvation is found not in great quests or herculean feats of might, but in simple obedience, humility, and trust. This is what Christ asks of us.

We don’t need to lead a Crusade to conquer the Holy Land. We don’t need to flagellate ourselves or impose trials of great suffering to prove our devotion to the faith. We don’t need to denounce the unclean or impure or (God forbid) those who vote for the other political party. All we need do is humble ourselves to trust the Word of God made flesh in Jesus Christ our Lord: love your neighbor as yourself; turn the other cheek; forgive seven times a day. Only in this way are you and I made whole.

And this may well mean that we must swallow our pride in order to see what Jesus is still doing out there, amongst the outsider, the foreigner, the person of a different culture or religion or status or class. For this is where true life is found. Jesus will always be at work amongst those whom the religious exclude. And He will always be calling us to come and join Him, to stand with Him, on the other side of all the lines we draw to separate ourselves from our fellow human beings.

Don’t do it because you desire Heaven. Don’t do it because you fear hell. Just do it because Jesus tells us to, and we trust that He is Good. Love the neighbor. Forgive the sinner. Feed the hungry. Heal the sick. Comfort the grieving. Teach the Truth. And always know that God is Love.

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.