Fr. Ricardo Chinchilla, CJM
The healed Samaritan this Sunday has something to share with us.
He wants not only the gift but the Giver. He knows it’s not about the healing but the Healer. He is in awe of a God with his feet in the mud of our streets and eyes on our sores.
“The glory of God is the living man,” St. Irenaeus affirmed, and who is more “living” than this little man of Samaria?
He, twice excluded, returns healed, shouting for joy, dancing on the dusty road, free as the wind. Yet, it’s not enough for him to return to his own family, overwhelmed by this unexpected flood of life; he wants to return to the source from which it flowed. One thing is to be healed, another to be saved.
The healing allowed the sores to close, but in salvation, the living spring opens, you enter God, and God enters you as fullness. The nine healed find health; the one saved finds the God who gives springtime skin to lepers, makes life flourish in all its forms, and whose glory is seeing this man graduate into a full “living being.”