The Faithful Foreigner
“Was no one found to return and give praise to God except this foreigner?”
Contemporary Omaha based artist Bill Hoover specializes in art that is geometric, textured, and figural. We can tell that this representation is limited for its two dimensions: that, if we saw the image in person, there would be a lot of rich variation in depth and texture of the image.
It is interesting, in this depiction, that the one leper who has returned is the only figure in the painting who is homogenous: he is one, dark void almost cut into the canvas. The other nine figures are mixed in their coloration and composition. Jesus, meanwhile, seems to float above the scene, glowing with the soft, celestial light of divinity, with which he enfolds the darkness of the man who has fallen at his feet.
All of the lepers have received terrestrial blessing. The leper who returned in gratitude has received spiritual blessing.
For where you go I will go, and where you lodge I will lodge. Your people shall be my people, and your God my God.
— Ruth 1:16
Eighteenth Sunday after Pentecost
Texts for This Week
Prayer
O God, our refuge and strength, true source of all godliness: Graciously hear the devout prayers of your Church, and grant that those things which we ask faithfully, we may obtain effectually; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever.
Thine arm, O Lord, in days of old
Pastor and Classicist Edward Plumptre composed this hymn in the late 1864 when serving as a hospital chaplain. It has thence come down to us as one of the most well-beloved songs on the theme of health and healing in the corpus of Victorian English hymnody. The text was first printed as the leaflet A Hymn Used in the Chapel of King's College Hospital, and collected the following year in the second edition of Plumptre's Lazarus and Other Poems. The first half of the hymn recounts the healing miracles of Christ; the latter half are a prayer for that same healing power of Christ to be present today.
