Twenty-First Sunday After Pentecost (C) – Luke 17:11-19
I’m not going to preach this week about current events, but there is one thing I can’t get away with ignoring. For the sake of those people it effects, I can’t. So, briefly: When a person who aspires to be a major governmental leader is caught admitting to sexual assault, and we just see it as par for the course, something is very wrong. I don’t mean what’s wrong with that person; that’s for another time and context. I mean there is something very wrong with our nation. To see rape as something normative is wrong. And yet we as a society continue to let it happen: One out of every three women in America has been the victim of some form of sexual assault. And they are not alone; one out of every ten reported rape victims is male.
I am not interested in politics today, nor in people running for office. I am interested in those who are hurting. The discussion of these things in the public discourse can reopen old wounds and exacerbate new ones. If you are here today and you have ever been treated like an object or assaulted, I want you to hear that I see you and acknowledge your pain. And more importantly, Jesus sees you. And Jesus loves you. You were created with God’s own hands, and imbued with God’s own image. Jesus came for your sake, to heal all your wounds. You are filled with the Holy Spirit, and the assault you have experienced is a denial of the holiness you embody. But that person who hurt you could not take away your holiness. It is ever renewed, and God is hard at work restoring your wholeness, and preventing this from happening again, to you and to others. You are worthwhile. You have the right to be safe. And part of my job as pastor, and all of our calling as Christians, is to help make sure you are.
Today’s Gospel lesson is one of those stories we teach to children in a little bit watered-down version, and then proceed to ignore for the rest of our lives because we think we’ve “got it.” It’s a children’s story. There are ten lepers, and Jesus heals all of them, and only one of them comes back to say “thank you.” It’s about how we should be more thankful about what God has done for us. It’s a good message for our young ones to hear—that we should be more thankful in our daily lives. But that’s not really the point of this story. (Or better, that’s only one point of this story. The Bible is one of those books that’s overloaded with meaning. A single passage can mean many different things to many different people. That’s what makes it a living word, spoken by a living God, to us today. We hear in it not just what God said 2,000 years ago, but what God is saying now.)
In any case, the story today is about ten lepers. Today, the word “leprosy” refers to a very specific illness called Hansen’s disease, a bacterial disease that is not particularly contagious, but that does cause nerve damage and sores to the extremities if left untreated. But in the ancient world, “leprosy” was the word used for a whole host of skin diseases—that is, for nearly anything that caused severe blemishes or discoloration of the skin. There was a significant fear that these skin diseases were highly contagious, although in reality most were not, so people with leprosy would be cast out of society, made to live on the fringes of the village, away from other people. Often those labeled as lepers would band together, so they could at least have some sort of contact with other people. We can see this in our story today, when we’re told that the ten lepers approach Jesus “keeping their distance” from him. It’s funny, we have all these stories about people coming to see Jesus, but this can’t really do that. They want to come to him, but they’re kept away. Even the little children can come to Jesus, but these lepers cannot.
And strangely, Jesus doesn’t close the distance between them. For all the talk we have these days about Jesus bridging the gap between people and going to those on the margins—all of which is true, of course—[but] we here, Jesus stays where he is and shouts back. “Go and show yourselves to the priests.”
This is not exactly an easy thing for them to do. The story begins by telling us that we’re in the region between Samaria and Galilee. The priests are at the temple in Jerusalem. It’s a distance of about seventy-five miles, which Google Maps says would take about 25 hours to walk. I think Google Maps is being generous. These lepers come to Jesus for help, and he basically tells them to take a long walk. What kind of a response is that?
Well, it’s the response of somebody who knows his Bible. Chapter fourteen of Leviticus is one solid block of legislation discussing how someone with leprosy becomes clean again. See, a person with a skin disease wasn’t just sick. He was also considered to be ritually unclean. in order to purify him once the disease clears up, you need two live birds, a block of cedar wood, scarlet, and hyssop. One bird is sacrificed by drowning, and then everything else is purified by being dipped in that bird’s blood. And then, after sprinkling the man with leprosy seven times, the priest lets the bird fly away. Then he is pronounced clean, but before he returns to normal life, he has to sit outside his tent for seven days, and then has to shave all his hair off, wash his clothing and his body, and then he’s really clean. And that’s just the beginning. In thanksgiving, and for atonement, and for various other reasons that I don’t really understand, there are a series of other sacrifices he has to make, with the priests at the temple.
In short, the healing of the leprosy is just the beginning of the process. The leper can’t return to society until he goes to the temple and shows his healed skin to the priests. It’s as if Jesus is saying, “Sure, I’ll heal you, but you’d better get going, because you’re going to have to go to Jerusalem before all is said and done, and that’s a long journey. Don’t even wait to be healed; just go.”
Which means that, when the lepers hear Jesus’ instructions, they respond to them in an incredibly faithful way. They set off for Jerusalem. Jesus does not appear to have healed them yet, but they go anyway. Nobody would set off on a journey that will take three days at best, unless they know when they get there it’s going to be worth it. If they arrive at Jerusalem, and are still leprous, they’ve made the trip for nothing. But they do set out on this journey, because they believe in Jesus, and they believe he will heal them. And so they are healed. On the way, they discover that the leprosy is gone.
Jesus will, by the time this story is over, praise the one leper who returns, saying that “your faith has made you well.” But the sneaky thing to notice here is that his faith isn’t somehow better than the other nine’s faith. They all have tremendous faith, all ten of them, because if they didn’t, they wouldn’t have followed Jesus’ directions. In fact, they all specifically have faith in Jesus, because they have done what he said. They turned to him for healing in the first place, and then they trusted completely that he would heal them.
So, what’s special about this one that returns, if not his faith? The difference, the Bible tells us, is that he is not a Jew; he is a Samaritan. The distance between the two, religiously speaking, is not really very great. In fact, their scriptures are almost exactly the same. The Pentateuch, the first five books of our Old Testament, were and still are understood by the Jewish people as the most important part of the scriptures. But the Samaritans also understood them to be scripture. That is, they were people who shared exactly the same scriptures as the Jews. The only difference is that in the Samaritan Pentateuch, all the references to the temple in Jerusalem were changed. Instead of understanding the One Place of Worship to be Jerusalem, the Samaritans had their own holy site, a mountain called Gerizim. That was where God wanted to be worshiped.
Which is to say that this one Samaritan leper had no real connection to the Jerusalem temple complex. Jesus told the ten lepers to go and show themselves to the priests. On the way, they discover they are cleaned. The nine Jewish lepers still have to go show themselves to the priests in Jerusalem and spend a week performing rituals and offering sacrifices before they can really enter society again. But the one Samaritan leper doesn’t have those rules hanging over his head. He really couldn’t care less about the temple in Jerusalem. Of the ten lepers, he is the only one that is free to come back.
It’s worth noticing that he’s actually free to go wherever he wants. He could go home. He could return to normal life. But he chooses to go directly back to Jesus, to throw himself at his feet and thank him. When we are freed from the rules and expectations and systems of oppression that govern our lives, we don’t just have more options. That freedom transforms us into something else. We become people who live in gratitude and generosity. This gratitude and generosity is the sign of our freedom in Jesus Christ. Because living in him gives us new eyes, and a new heart, and it radically reshapes the way we look at the world around us. We start to see what God is up to, start to see “God sightings” everywhere, and we can’t help but rejoice in what God is doing.
This freedom is a gift we have all received. All those things that get in our way, all the rules and expectations that exist to prevent sin, Christ has taken them to the cross with him, nailing them there where they cannot affect us any longer. And then, through the waters of baptism, our leprous hearts have been washed clean, and we have been given a share in Jesus’ resurrection. You have already been made free through the love of Jesus Christ. This transformation toward gratitude and generosity is already at work in you.
So I want to challenge you this week, just slightly. Make an extra effort to pay attention this week to everything God is doing in your life. Look just a little harder for those “God sightings.” Put on the new lenses Christ has given you, and really see. And then pay attention to what’s going on inside you when you do see. I have a feeling that you will well up with prayers of thanksgiving. And that deep down, you’ll start to live into the freedom God has given you, and turn with gratitude and generosity(,) to love a world in need. Amen.