"Life After Leprosy"

The texts for this week's sermon are 2 Kings 5:1-15 and Luke 17:11-19

Life after Leprosy

In all of the reading and listening I’ve done about the texts today, there’s one word that keeps popping up time and time again: gratitude.  Every commentary, every blog and reflection page, nearly every person who sits down to write a sermon on Jesus’ encounter with the ten lepers... the focus is almost universally on the one leper who comes back and gives thanks to Jesus for his healing.

And in a lot of ways, that’s what it should be - it’s the driving point of this section of Luke’s gospel.  It’s the “punch-line” of the story, so to speak, as Jesus remarks at this one foreigner who returns to give praise to God, and it’s what moves Jesus to tell the Samaritan man to go his way, for “your faith has made you well.”

But every time I read this story, I can’t help but ask the question: what about the other nine?  There’s an author named Martin Bell who wrote a book called The Way of the Wolf - and in that book, he asks the very same question.  As with so many of the scenes and parables in the gospel, we tend to rush to the obvious conclusions - we sit back and shake our heads at the nine lepers who went on their merry way to the temple to be looked over and approved by the priests.  We make them out to be bad people, thankless people... we hold them up as examples of what not to do.  But what, exactly, did these lepers do to deserve our scorn?  Martin Bell brings these thoughts like this into sharp focus - and ever since I first read his imaginative defense of the other nine, it has stuck with me in a powerful way.

Bell writes about these other nine lepers and imagines the reasons that they didn’t come back, adding a thought-provoking story beyond the text that Luke doesn’t tell.  He writes, “Ten lepers were cleansed and one of them returned to give thanks.  That must be a nice thing to be able to do.  What about the others?  It’s simple, really.”  And then he describes the various experiences of these nine lepers that caused them to not go back: one was frightened by the experience and by Jesus.  Another forgets in his pure joy at being healed.  One simply isn’t able to say thank you anymore after years of begging, being shunned, and still being expected to say thank you.  One is a mother who hurried home to be reunited with her family.  One was a skeptic who didn’t believe Jesus had to do anything with his healing, while another believed so strongly that the kingdom was here that he went to proclaim the news to everyone.  One is offended because he’s now lost his livelihood and identity as a beggar, while another is offended that he didn’t have to do something difficult to earn his healing.

And suddenly, with one little “what if...” kind of thinking, these other ex-lepers don’t seem like the thankless, worthless ingrates that we make them out to be.  Suddenly, we’re reminded of the cultural stigma that leprosy brought with it in Jesus’ time and of the fact that these people were complete and total outcasts in their culture - not just the Samaritan, but all ten.  We’re reminded of the humanity of all ten lepers and the fact that each of them had their own, individual, unique situations that may have caused them to not return to give thanks.

What’s of even further interest is that the Old Testament passage from the lectionary this week actually goes to show a bit of support for Martin Bell’s imaginative second look at the parable.  Naaman’s outrage at Elisha’s instruction is complicated, but it also comes out of the fact that he expected something more out of Elisha in order to receive healing.  He wanted a fancy incantation, a flourish of the hands and a wave of the magic wand to wipe his leprosy away... but all he gets is the instruction to take a bath.  And it takes a humble servant to show him how silly he is acting in the face of simple instructions.

The support from the Old Testament certainly helps us to see that Bell’s story may not be a far stretch... but all the same, we can also see bits and pieces of those nine in ourselves.  And maybe that’s what makes this story so compelling and makes it attach itself to your reading of this parable.  Because we’ve been those other nine lepers before - maybe we’re even realizing that we’re being one of those lepers, so intent on ourselves and our own changed situation that we forget, or even refuse to go back to give thanks to the Lord.  It’s part of being who we are that sometimes we stumble, sometimes we forget and fail.  And often, we need that reminder that Jesus knows all these things... yet he loves us anyway.  Jesus didn’t make the Samaritan’s act of thanksgiving a prerequisite for being healed - the other nine were healed just the same as the one who came back.  It’s not like Jesus even necessarily passes any kind of judgment on the other nine when he asks where the other nine are - he could be amused, he could be genuinely wondering, he could be asking the way Martin Bell writes it.  Bell exclaims, “God, who knows where they are!  The point is this: Jesus does.  He knows where they are.”  First he says to the leper who did return, “Arise, go thy way,” and then he goes his own way - with a strange smile on his lips.  But where are the nine?  Don’t you see it in his eyes?  He knows where they are.  He knew all along.”

Jesus knows the situations of each of the lepers.  He doesn’t fault them for doing just as they are told, going to the priests, and being declared whole again.  But what Jesus does do is to point out the exemplary faith of this one Samaritan, this one foreigner who couldn’t go to the temple because of his nationality and culture, and so came back to the true priest, the one he recognizes as deserving his full thanks and praise.  You see, the Samaritan man didn’t just experience a miraculous healing: he experienced a transformation that led him to an even greater revelation.  Where the other nine saw and experienced a healer, someone to solve the problem in front of them, this one man, an outcast from two different societies at once as both a leper and a Samaritan, experienced the savior.  As this Samaritan man turns back to Jesus, Luke also embeds a deeper, spiritual turning toward Christ into that action.  He redirects his entire life and goes back toward Christ, praising God all along the way - in the Greek, the word is doxazōn, which is the same word we derive doxology from.  And then when he falls down at Jesus’ feet, we see yet another familiar word - eucharistōn, used to describe the way in which the Samaritan man gives thanks.  It’s the very same form of giving thanks that shapes our own understanding of the Eucharist, or communion.  It’s a giving of our thanks to God with our whole hearts that stems directly from the deep realization of how incredibly God’s grace transforms us.

This is how deeply faith and gratitude are intertwined - that in being transformed by Christ, we are literally made well - not just cleansed of our sins and spiritual disease, but made well - we are made free to go and live out our faith in lives of gratitude.  And this is what worship is truly meant to be - we don’t come here each week just to receive something, to “be fed” in the Word, be assured that we have been made clean, and then to go on our merry way feeling that much better about ourselves; we come to give thanks and praise to the God who holds our very lives in God’s hands.  As one writer commented on this lectionary passage, “The basic Christian response to God is gratitude: gratitude for the gift of life, gratitude for the world, gratitude for the dear people God has given us to enrich and grace our lives.  The basic Christian experience is gratitude to God for God’s love in Jesus Christ and the accompanying gift of hopeful confidence and wholeness and wellness that comes with it, regardless of the worldly circumstances in which we find ourselves.” Church no longer becomes one more thing on the list of things we have to do each week, but becomes the very center of our lives, being led out in grace and gratitude from thankful hands and hearts.

     

Ten lepers were cleansed, but one was transformed.  May we, too, find transformation in Jesus Christ, to whom be all power, glory, and honor now and forevermore.  Amen.