Happy shall he be, that taketh and dasheth thy little ones against the stones. - Psalm 137.9

Abbot Philip Lawrence of the Monastery of Christ in the Desert in New Mexico, noting that the monks of his community pray their way through 270 psalms per week, admits that, "It takes a lot of inner work to come to appreciate the Psalms." Contrary to the modernizing trend, the abbot and his brothers still pray the entire Psalter, even though "the images of the Psalms can be graphic, violent, and even a bit ugly at times."

He's right, of course: It isn't all green pastures and uplifted gates. These ancient Hebrew poets call their enemies horrible names and ask God to do horrible things to them. Sometimes, they call God some pretty horrible names because they think God has done horrible things to them. Various commentators have offered various bread-crumb trails through this perilous territory. C. S. Lewis offered the creative approach of reading these passages as a caution against provoking those feelings in others by treating them unjustly. Dietrich Bonhoeffer advised readers to see, on the cross, God's ultimate answer to these pleas. C. H. Spurgeon, that rugged old Baptist, warned the comfortable reader against false spirituality: "Let those find fault with it who have never seen their temple burned, their city ruined, their wives ravished, and their children slain; they might not, perhaps, be quite so velvet-mouthed."

But for my money, Walter Brueggemann who, while he includes and affirms the foregoing views, sums up this way: "My hunch is that there is a way beyond the Psalms of vengeance, but is a way through them and not around them." The wily abbot is right: pray them; pray them all without once refusing to set a dainty spiritual foot into the muddied waters of our souls. Alexander Solzhenitsyn, his own life raped by the injustice of Stalin's Gulag, cries out, "The line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?" The cursing Psalms are God's scalpel to lay bare the diseased portions that yet cling to our converted hearts, and to cut them away mercilessly which, in the end, means mercifully.

For we are an aroma of Christ to God among those who are being saved and those who are perishing; to the one a fragrance from death to death, to the other a fragrance of life to life. Who is sufficient for these things? - 2 Corinthians 2.15-16

Elephants in Kenya can tell a Masai tribesman from a Kamba by a single sniff from a considerable distance. That's good for the elephant, because the Masai hunt elephants and the Kamba don't. 

It's good to know in advance whether someone is on your side. Of course, that doesn't help much if you can't get away and don't have the option of changing sides.

Paul tells the Corinthians that Christians give off a different spiritual smell depending on whose doing the huffing. He's working out a rather complex military metaphor that he introduces in verse 14: the Roman military parade. When a Roman general won a great victory, the senate voted him a triumph. They rounded up all the captured booty along with a selection of the prisoners and marched the whole cavalcade down the main street of town where, along with other ceremonies, they sacrificed the POWs to the appropriate god. One feature of these festivities was the burning of clouds of incense. 

If you were a member of the conquering army or citizenry, it probably smelled great. If you were a prisoner chained to a chariot wheel, not so much. Christ moves in often-unseen victory through our world and every person can pick a side. One day, however, when the battle ends and we behold the Lord in his glory, that choice will be fixed forever.

Who is sufficient for these things? Paul feels the weight of the burden: When we declare the gospel, we force people to pick a side, and they define their eternal destiny when they turn up their noses at the scent of grace. Our problem, in other words, is not whether people like our smell; it is whether we smell of salvation. 

Were not ten made clean? But the other nine, where are they? Was none of them found to return and give praise to God except this foreigner? - Luke 17.17-18

As a species, we aren't very thankful. A recent study reveals that random acts of kindness receive a "thank you" only about one time in twenty.

The good news is that most people will help when asked, gratis, with no negotiation or prior expectations. Across cultures, granted favors exceed refusals at roughly a seven-to-one ratio. "Ask and ye shall receive," it seems, is a general truth not limited to prayer. Which is fortunate, because the same study reveals that people request assistance about once every ninety seconds! 

So we get what we want eighty percent of the time but acknowledge the help on only five percent of those occasions.

It is interesting that the experiment focused, not on institutional or business settings, but homes, where people know one another. We are least grateful to those we know best. In fact, most languages, spoken in small communities of close relationships, lack any word for "thank you"! 

Something similar may have been at work when Jesus confronted ten scruffy lepers somewhere in the wilds of Palestine. The nine Jews may have looked at the thing as part of the perq package of their heritage: Of course a Jewish messiah would heal Jewish lepers. Jesus was family; he wouldn't expect acknowledgement from the home-folks. Anyway, they may have thought they'd said "thank you;" the study revealed we over-rate our own gratitude on a regular basis.

The Samaritan, however, remained enough of an outsider that he could still be shocked by grace. 

Two interesting notes: First, this story, found only in Luke's gospel, comes toward the end of what scholars call "The Journeyings Toward Jerusalem." In 9.51, Jesus "set his face to go to Jerusalem" and to the cross.  Second, Jesus tells the Samaritan to "get up," the Greek word used for the resurrection of Christ. 

Jesus went to the cross that we might know the resurrection from death in sin to life in the Spirit. Have you said thank you today?