Father Thomas Welbers' Homily

“Stand up,” Jesus says, “your faith has saved you.”

Can you get a sense of how striking, powerful, and unusual those words are? The man with leprosy had already been healed. Jesus does not say the equivalent of, “You’re welcome!” Instead, he says, “Stand up. Get up off your knees.” Now, equals stand, facing each other. Jesus was calling him not just to give thanks, but to be a partner in his mission.

Then he says, “Your faith has saved you.” Now, notice he did not say, “Your faith has healed you.” The man acknowledged rightly that it was the power of God that healed him. But now Jesus wants to take him to the next step. It wasn’t his faith that got him healed. It was first of all a need for healing that brought him to Jesus, along with the nine others. But it was his faith that brought him back.

All the others were equally healed, and they went, as Jesus told them, to show themselves to the priest – they got their healing certified, and then went about their own, ordinary business. But when Jesus heals, he doesn’t simply want to return us to our ordinary business, especially since he is usually on the sidelines of our ordinary business, not at its center. Jesus’ design in healing was that they share in his mission, that they be transformed. And so, one man let himself be more than healed. One man let himself be transformed. So he came back.

Interestingly, in coming back to Jesus, he disobeyed the Law – because the law of Moses said he had to have that healing certified by the priests before doing anything else. And actually he disobeyed Jesus too, because Jesus told them to go the priests and get their healing certified. This man, realizing he was healed, said there is a higher law, a higher voice that I must obey. And that was the voice of faith. His inner law told him that he had to come back first, to give thanks, and then to be raised up, to be transformed, not just healed.

How often, when we pray, do we pray for healing, or for some kind of gift, some kind of favor? How often are we just praying to be restored back to where we were? But how often should we be praying to be transformed, to allow God to make something new of us? Can our faith be to trust in the power of God, to do what God wants, rather than simply seeking to get God to do what we want? Can we move from the kind of faith that asks God to do what I want, or to give me what I think I need, to the kind of faith that says simply, “I trust that God wants to transform me, and I will allow God to do in me what he wants, whatever that may be”?

© 2004 Thomas Welbers