Before they were “lepers,” they were just human beings, people
like you and me. Imagine with me their stories.
Perhaps two of
them were brothers, sons of a wealthy Jewish landowner. Having grown up with
every advantage, with slaves to wait on them, and parents to dote on them, they
now had beautiful wives to praise them at the city gates, and sons to continue
their ancient lineage. They were taught how to buy their way out of adversity. They
were thrown for a loop when the unclean spots first showed up on their skin,
and they were numb with incomprehension when they both found themselves cast
out into wilderness caves to die a shameful death. Misfortune came to other
folks, but not to people like them! After Jesus pronounced them clean, their
world made sense again. The sickness was but a small blip on the screen of
their upwardly mobile life. Of course God would heal them. Hadn’t God always
given them what they wanted? They were born to privilege, such was their
destiny. “Let’s go make a sacrifice at the Temple to celebrate our healing,”
they said to one another with relief, as they quickly slipped back into their comfy
lives. “We have hundreds of lambs this year in our flocks. We can spare at
least five for God.”
Perhaps
another of the lepers was a very industrious woman, a real “woman of valor.”
She was smart and worked hard. Before the leprosy struck, her home was
spotless; her weaving was admired by the whole village; her children were
handsome and well-behaved. She was the one who had heard from a passing beggar
that Jesus was a powerful healer. She had gathered the other lepers and led
them to the spot by the side of the road where she had heard that Jesus might
pass by. After Jesus stopped and made her clean, she headed home quickly with
long and purposeful strides. “And it’s a good thing I stopped to chat with that
dirty old beggar,” she mused, “because now I really am healed. Whew, if I
hadn’t gotten everyone together and grabbed Jesus’ attention, then I would
still be sitting over there in that putrid cave, nursing my sores. What a close
call.” She congratulated herself daily on her good thinking, and poured all of
the energy from her newly healthy body back into her work.
Perhaps
another of the healed lepers had been a sickly child, pale and always wheezing.
His only comfort had been the attention that he got from being sick: the
fervent prayers of his father on his behalf; the worried and tender
ministrations of his mother. Even before the leprosy, he was unable to work and
sat outside the Temple begging every day. It was a lonely existence, but it was
the only life that he knew. When the leprosy struck, he was not surprised. He
knew how to deal with sickness; he expected an early death. And even better, after
his banishment, he found that he enjoyed the companionship of the other lepers.
For the first time in his life, he was not alone; others suffered with him. As
they sat around the fire together at night, he could comfort the others with
his words of wisdom about sickness. When Jesus healed him, he knew that he
should be pleased, yet he was disappointed and even resentful. “What will I do
now?” he fretted. “The others won’t need me anymore, and I don’t even have a
trade. Maybe I can go off someplace where no one knows me and pretend that I’m
still sick? Yes, that’s it. Nobody has to know …” After visiting the Temple, he
quietly slipped away, unable to break away from a life of pain.
And I can
imagine two other lepers who were gamblers. They loved dice games and races
and gave very little thought to God. They even used to bet on whose fingers
would fall off first when they lived in the lepers’ cave. Even before the
leprosy, they lived life moment to moment, easily moving on from village to
village, drinking more wine than necessary and making pleasure and excitement their
highest goals in life. For them, their leprosy was bad luck, and their cure was
like winning ten denarii with just one roll of the dice. As they moved on to
the next adventure, skin clean and lives restored, they nudged one another
jovially in the ribs and said, “Wow, what a stroke of luck! Disaster averted
for now! If only our luck will hold for awhile. Maybe we’ll strike it rich in
the next town.” They never gave the strange rabbi on the road another thought.
And then of
course there must have been some obedient lepers. These three were all very
religious: one was a scholar and one was a rabbi and the other was a woman
known throughout her village for her piety. Before they got sick, they had worked
hard to keep all of the laws and to avoid unclean people and doubting thoughts.
The leprosy had been devastating to them. It was surely a punishment from the
Holy One. They wracked their brains every day, as they shuffled down the road,
trying to find the mistake that they had made, the law that they had broken,
the tiny infraction or the evil thought that had brought down the righteous
anger of God upon them. In their disease, they worked even harder to earn God’s
forgiveness. They kept every dietary law that they could, even in their
poverty. They said all of the prescribed prayers, over and over. They avoided
unacceptable people like that heretical foreigner, the Samaritan leper, who
insisted on hanging around with their group. They encouraged one another with
the comfortingly familiar language of faith, giving one another gentle—and not
so gentle—reminders when one of them seemed to be going astray. They weren’t so
sure about this scruffy-looking Nazarene rabbi who was supposed to be able to
do miracles, but when he offered them the conventional, accepted formula of
going to the priests to be declared clean, they high-tailed it down the road,
full of hope. They knew how to obey. They had confidence in the Law. They
weren’t surprised when the priests in the Temple found their blemishes to have
disappeared. Now they had a second chance to prove themselves. They would work
even harder than ever to be faithful, obedient men and women. They would stay home,
away from sinners and questionable characters. They would loudly condemn
impiety. They weren’t going to let God’s anger strike them again, no siree.
And then we come to the tenth leper:
the hated foreigner, the Samaritan. He had crossed the border from Samaria to
find work in the south. He did menial labor and lived on the margins of society
with no safety net, no health insurance, no family support. He had an ugly
accent, and his religion was a mockery of the true worship of the Holy One.
Even the nine other lepers shunned him, giving him the scraps of the scraps
that they received, forcing him to huddle furthest from the fire on cold
nights. He had no one to talk to, no one to care for him. When Jesus pronounced
him well, it was the first time since childhood that anyone had offered him
kindness, the first time that any Jew had spoken to him without a snarl. It’s no surprise, then, that he was bowled
over by this cure, that he came running back to Jesus, and, without taking any
of the credit or the blame, fell down at Jesus’ feet, a servant of the Lord who
blessed him. “Praise almost seems to be inner health made audible,” writes C.S.
Lewis.[1] Only
the tenth leper, the pitiful outcast, was truly healthy; only he was saved. “Blessed
are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are you when
people revile you and persecute you … Rejoice
and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven.”
In a little while,
we, like the ten lepers, will shuffle forward and cry out to God. We are dying,
and our souls are full of sores. We, who are like the nine and yet who want so badly
to be like the one, we will stand all together before Jesus at this altar, all looking
to be saved. We will speak together the healthy words of praise, the words that
will unleash our tongues and tear open our hearts, the words of the great thanksgiving
for the grace that God pours out in Christ upon us all:
Lift up your hearts.
We lift them up to the Lord.
Let us give thanks to the Lord our God.
It is right to give God thanks and
praise.
It is right, and a good and joyful thing,
always and everywhere to give thanks to you, Father Almighty, Creator of heaven
and earth.”
[1]
C.S. Lewis, “Reflections on the Psalms,”
cited in John M. Buchanan, “Luke 17:11-19,” Feasting
on the Word, Year C, Volume 4, 165.
No comments:
Post a Comment