Leprosy in Jesus’ day was no joke. Being a leper was a kind of walking death, considered evil and unclean. Because the condition was not well understood… and all kind of maladies could cause one to be called a leper from psoriasis to skin cancer to various kinds of skin infections, it was impossible to know who was contagious and who was not. They were excluded from every part of community life. They could not live, worship, eat, walk, or talk among “normal” people. They were required to stay away, keeping a safe distance from life’s normal activities and gatherings.
So, to
survive, they scrounged, depending as best they could, on the charity and more
typically the trash of others. Lepers of that day not only lost their skin to
continuous infection and inflammation and to the lack of basic care but they
were also separated from the community. They had nothing, and no hope, yet they
could – from forty paces – watch the real world, and real life, happen just
outside of their reach.
Once, a band of ten of these lepers met Jesus. Nine were apparently Jews from who knows where, and one was a foreigner. Together they kept on the move, scrounging food, water and makeshift shelter, as best they could. Perhaps they helped one another dress wounds as they limped along from place to place. The status and situation as lepers made them a kind of community of the sick and the outcast. What they had most in common was their disease, so their other differences did not matter so much.
When the saw Jesus they stood at a
distance – as was required by the law – and shouted for mercy.
I’ll bet they made the same cry to
every passing rabbi, holy man, and probably to every hustler and snake oil salesman with
a reputation for healing whomever came within earshot. If they were lucky, they’d
get some food or clean clothes or perhaps money laid down on the road from a
distance. Their prayer was simple: “Jesus, master, have mercy on us.” And Jesus
granted them mercy, and without conditions or expectation he gave them their
lives back. He told them to present themselves to the priests because the priests
were the ones who would certify that the lepers were cured and allow them to
rejoin the world.
So off they went toward the city and
toward the priests. And as they went, their leprosy went away; they were cured!
As they walked their old dead, rotting flesh dropped away and they were clean,
bright, like new-born babies. Jesus stood there and watched. He put no
conditions on his gift, but he just watched and waited.
Imagine their feelings at this moment. They
were grateful. They were no doubt thrilled. I imagine them, laughing, relieved,
feeling just wonderful! And most of them had someplace to go… assuming the
other nine were Jews, they were off to the temple or wherever they could find a
priest to pronounce them fit and clean.
Call me an optimist, but I am also sure
that they were thanking God that this holy man Jesus had cured them. To them, Jesus
was the most wonderful person in the whole world! They could leave the exiled
life and re-join the land of the living!
But even if they were thanking God as
they ran to rejoin their old lives, they forgot something….
You see of the ten, there was one who had
no place to go. The priests who would pronounce the nine clean, would still
consider the tenth man unclean, even without his leprosy. This was a time when
people kept to their own communities, lived, worked, and functioned with their
own kind. And cured or not, he was a Samaritan… the old prejudices and customs would
still keep him outside his friend’s community… unclean, unreconciled, now a
stranger. He was no longer apart of the same community as his nine equally
cured companions.
We tend to look on this story as one
about gratitude… and Jesus certainly names that issue, but this is a story
about community, and the grace of being apart of a community of people. The tragedy
was that the nine, in their gratitude, forgot about the one who was different
than them.
No one could imagine advocating to the
priest at the temple for the tenth leper and saying, “for all these years, this
Samaritan was one of us, but now that he—like us—was healed by Jesus of
Nazareth, you cannot welcome him back in?” No one could imagine that God’s
grace and healing power, mediated through Jesus, would do more than cure a
physical disease… his healing would also knock down the barriers that were in
fact much bigger than the disease they were cured from.
That is, no one could imagine it until
after Jesus’ cross, death, and resurrection; it would not be until the Holy
Spirit filled and baptized a new community, that we could imagine—and
experience—that the nine could have also
been reconciled—and equally healed—with the tenth person.
“Jesus, Master, have mercy on us.”
The one who came back in the Gospel
story, came back to the only place, to the only person, he could possibly go. And
in that return, we see that this healing was much bigger that anyone could
previously have imagined.
All ten lepers were cured. And all ten
stayed cured, as Jesus said, “were not all ten healed?” But there was more
going on. Jesus saw past the imposed exile of the tenth man. And when that man
went to only place he could go, he received something more. To him Jesus said,
“Rise up and go your way, your faith has made you well.” The Greek for “made
you well” is a different word, a theological word; it means “being made whole,”
or “being made complete.” It also means being saved. Go your way, Jesus told
him, your faith has made you not just cured, but whole, and saved.
All ten were healed, all ten were given
their lives, but one had an epiphany, where his gratitude turned into awe. For
the tenth man, the light bulb went off and he came back…and was made whole! All
ten were given their lives back; but only one was given the fullness of life.
For the one
who was made whole, the one who came back to Jesus, his gratitude was the
gateway to a something bigger: an epiphany that what God is brings to us is
wholeness.
We all have had troubles in our lives,
and we all have had blessings. It is easy to imagine crying out to God when we
are in trouble. It is very easy to imagine that when everything is going well
that we don’t. To just get caught up in the blessings and the busyness, we can
forget to return to God. The one who returned received all that Jesus had to
give—not just blessing, not even just healing, but wholeness and return to life.
Christ touches us, heals us, blesses
us. And he waits for us to move from acceptance to gratitude and to awe. And
that’s when we are made whole.
Here is a link to the Scripture readings.
No comments:
Post a Comment