Twenty-Seventh Sunday in Ordinary Time (Year B)

Homily

Most Rev Timothy Costelloe SDB
Archbishop of Perth

Sunday 12 October, 2025
St Mary’s Cathedral, Perth

Download the full text in PDF

I imagine it would not come as a surprise to any of you to hear me say that among the many themes which Saint Luke highlights in his gospel, the theme of faith is one of the most important. This is true of all the gospels, of course, but St Luke invites us to reflect on faith in a deep and personal way.

We see this already from the earliest pages of the gospel where Saint Luke presents Mary, the mother of the Lord, as the great example of true Christian faith. In this month of October which is especially dedicated in our Catholic tradition to Our Lady, our reflection on the story of the Annunciation reminds us that for everybody faith is, as it was for Mary herself,  a journey which has moments of great joy and moments of great challenge and difficulty.

As you will recall, when Mary is first informed by the Angel Gabriel of what God is asking of her, she is frightened and confused, but as the story unfolds and the angel reassures her that it is the power of God and the presence of his Spirit which will strengthen her, Mary is able to make her great declaration of faith: it is a declaration also of openness and obedience to the will of God: I am the handmaid of the Lord she says. Let what you have said be done to me.

What this teaches us is that faith is indistinguishable from trust. Sometimes we think that faith is only about our intellectual assent: what it is that we believe. Faith is certainly about this, but faith is much more about who it is in whom we believe. To say, as we do each Sunday, that I believe in God is really saying much more than that I believe that God exists. It is saying I believe in God, I trust in God, I have confidence in God, and I am ready to build my life on this trust and confidence.

In today's gospel, the well-known story of the healing of the ten lepers, St Luke invites us to reflect a little more deeply on faith. At the start of the story all ten of the lepers are men of faith, in the sense that they are men of hope. They have clearly heard about Jesus and about His miraculous powers and they hope that they might be able to receive the benefit of His powers. “Jesus, master, take pity on us,” they say. We are in a desperate situation and there is nothing we can do to fix ourselves. We need you to help us.   Perhaps there are many here in the Cathedral this morning who in one way or another have found such a prayer on their lips or in their hearts. We understand where these men are coming from.

Jesus does not heal them immediately - instead HHGGe tells them to go and show themselves to the high priests. The reason for this is that in the Jewish tradition and law of that time, it was only the priests who could verify the reality of a person's healing. In sending these men to the priests, Jesus is really testing their faith as the only reason they would go to the priests would be to have their healing acknowledged. They go in hope, but they also go in obedience to the Lord's word, and this is an act of faith.

The gospel tells us quite simply that as they went on their way they were cleansed and we can presume that they continued on their way to have their healing verified by the priests. They remained obedient to the word of Jesus, and they should not be criticised for that. The interpretation sometimes given of this story, that the nine men were ungrateful, is unfair to them. They were simply being faithful to the law and to its requirements as they understood it in their religious tradition.

The tenth man, a Samaritan so not a Jew, did not go with the others but turned back and threw himself at the feet of Jesus and thanked him. While all ten men had started a journey of faith by coming to Jesus, only one recognised the true reality of what had happened to him: that in the person of Jesus he had encountered the healing power of God and that it was to Jesus that he had to return and give thanks.

Only he had recognised that it was by turning back to Jesus and praising and thanking him that he was directing his thanks and praise to God himself.

At the beginning of the story all ten men had recognised in Jesus someone whom they hoped might be able to respond to their desperate situation. This is often the beginning of faith for many people, including perhaps many of us. But St Luke is telling us this morning that this is not enough: true faith sees in Jesus the presence of the living God who seeks more from us than a recognition that He can be the answer to our needs and desires.

True faith sees in Jesus, the face and life-giving presence of the God who loves us with an everlasting love, who calls us His friends, and who invites us into a profound relationship of communion and love. True faith sees in Jesus the face of the God who has made us for Himself and who longs to bring peace and stillness to our restless hearts. Ture faith sees in Jesus the one who can heal our deepest hurts and bind up our deepest wounds.

This is the faith that saves us. This is the faith that enables us to stand up and continue on our journey. This is the faith that will bring us safely home.

So perhaps today our prayer can be the simple prayer once offered to Jesus by His disciples: Lord, increase our faith. Teach us to put all our trust in you.