Listen to the audio of today’s Reflection:
https://soundcloud.com/hapearce/reflection-for-november-21-2024
Luke 17:11-19
Ten Healed of Leprosy
11 Now on his way to Jerusalem, Jesus traveled along the border between Samaria and Galilee. 12 As he was going into a village, ten men who had leprosy met him. They stood at a distance 13 and called out in a loud voice, “Jesus, Master, have pity on us!”
14 When he saw them, he said, “Go, show yourselves to the priests.” And as they went, they were cleansed.
15 One of them, when he saw he was healed, came back, praising God in a loud voice.16 He threw himself at Jesus’ feet and thanked him—and he was a Samaritan.
17 Jesus asked, “Were not all ten cleansed? Where are the other nine? 18 Has no one returned to give praise to God except this foreigner?” 19 Then he said to him, “Rise and go; your faith has made you well.”
Most of us in the modern world only know about leprosy from what we see in movies. The hero’s mother and sister had it in Ben Hur, although the filmmakers chose to minimize the disfigurement off the victims’ lesions. Robert the Bruce’s father had it in Braveheart, and so did one of the Japanese regents in Shogun. So we know it’s a horrible and disfiguring disease, but that’s about it.
Actually, the word that’s translated as “leprosy” in the Bible was also used for any persistent skin condition – including ones like eczema and psoriasis. But in our time, the actual disfiguring form of leprosy is known as “Hansen’s Disease, and it’s very rare. In fact, it’s almost unknown except among the poorest people in some very hot countries, and it’s also easily treatable if people have access to routine healthcare. Which is why it’s extremely rare in developed countries.
Of course, until the advent of modern medicine, actual leprosy was absolutely terrifying. It was inevitably fatal, and its symptoms were just as grotesque and horrific as it seems from the movies. And leprosy brought suffering that went beyond its physical symptoms. People with leprosy were forced to leave their homes and villages and live in isolation. In the Hebrew world, lepers often lived in cemeteries, because they were considered ‘unclean,’ and so were cemeteries. In that culture, people with leprosy had to cover their faces, and they were only allowed to come close enough to others to cry out for alms.
And if the disease and the isolation weren’t bad enough, among the Hebrews, leprosy also carried a religious stigma. The Hebrew word for leprosy literally means “smiting” or “striking.” People thought that those with the disease got it as a punishment for some terrible sin. So along with the sickness and isolation, lepers lived with the guilt of thinking they somehow deserved all the suffering.
So it’s no wonder people were so horrified by leprosy, and that they tried so hard to avoid it.
All of which is the background for our reading for today. Jesus comes upon ten men with leprosy. Nine are apparently Jews, but the tenth is a Samaritan. As you might remember, Samaritans were people from an area that had once been the kingdom of Israel. But when the Assyrians conquered that kingdom centuries before, they had moved gentiles into the area from other parts of their empire. That led to the Samaritans becoming an ethnically-mixed population. So the Jews regarded the Samaritans as “impure,” and they refused to have anything to do with them. In fact, the Jews wouldn’t let the Samaritans worship at the temple in Jerusalem.
In our reading for today, the ten lepers cry out to Jesus for mercy, and Jesus heals them of their disease. He tells them to go and show themselves to the priests, which was how a person could be declared cured or “cleansed” of leprosy. And on the way to the priests, the men notice they have been cleansed. But only one of them, the Samaritan, comes back to throw himself at Jesus’ feet and thank him.
People who saw this happen would probably have been struck by a certain irony that escapes us: The Samaritan ex-leper was the only one who would still be considered unclean. Even though he had been cured of his leprosy, he was still a Samaritan – so the Jews would still consider him unclean.
One way to interpret this story is as an illustration of how most people – nine out of ten, in the story – aren’t really as thankful as we should be for what God does for us. That’s true enough, I suppose, although the real truth is that almost none of us are as thankful as we should be for our blessings.
But it seems to me this story is also an illustration of how a sense of entitlement affects our response to our blessings. The Jews of Jesus’ time thought that being descendants of Abraham, they were entitled to God’s blessings. So maybe the point of the story is that this sense of entitlement kept the Jewish ex-lepers from experiencing the deep and profound thankfulness that would make a person throw himself at the feet of Jesus. It took an “unclean foreigner” – presumably one with less of a sense that he was entitled to his healing – to be truly thankful for what God had done for him.
We Presbyterians are part of the Reformed church. And the heart of Reformed theology is that our salvation, our new life in Jesus, isn’t something we can ever claim to be entitled to. Our new life in Jesus is a gift out of God’s grace – which means God’s un-earned favor. So this story seems to confront us with the difference between the thankfulness that comes from embracing God’s grace, and the lack of thankfulness that comes from a sense of entitlement.
This story closes with Jesus telling the Samaritan, “Rise and go; your faith has made you well.” But the word translated ‘well’ here actually means ‘whole.’ And it seems significant that the ‘being made whole’ came after the healing of the leprosy. The other nine were healed of leprosy, but had less faith, and were thus less than whole. It was the thankfulness the man showed for what God had done in his life that really allowed him to be made whole spiritually, in a way that the others were not.
So that’s why I think this story is sometimes used as the text for ‘Thanksgiving sermons’ – it’s such a good one for us to think about in this season of Thanksgiving.
Let’s pray. Lord, we ask you to touch our hearts and minds with the truth of your grace – the truth that your love and our new life in Jesus are gifts we could never claim to deserve. In this season, make us more and more thankful for your gracious love, and call forth from us thankful praises in response. Amen.
Grace and Peace,
Henry
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