To be truly healed

In our gospel lesson from Luke this morning we have the story of Jesus healing 10 lepers. Leprosy is a serious skin disease involving a slow developing infection by bacteria that leads to damage of the nerves, respiratory tract, skin, and eyes. Today if it’s treated early, antibiotics can stop the disease progression, prevent complications, and make the patient non-infectious. Interestingly, 95% of people cannot actually catch leprosy and it isn’t easily spread. But in Jesus’s day there were of course no antibiotics and no one knew the condition couldn’t be easily spread. So lepers were understood to be a threat to people and were usually shunned following the laws and customs, as we read in Leviticus 13:46, Numbers 5:2 and 2 Kings 15:5. 

This group of lepers - obviously made up of “foreigners” Samaritans in this case, and Jews - banded together. Their differences - religious, cultural, what have you - were all forgotten in the face of their basic struggle to survive forced isolation. Recall that some of these lepers would have been Jews. To approach another Jew - Jesus - would have violated Jewish laws and customs. Yet this is precisely what this group does. They maintain a respectful distance from Jesus and yet cry out to him: “Jesus, master, have mercy on us.” 

Jesus responds to them: “go and show yourselves to the priests.” At this point, we need to draw on the story of the great soldier Naaman from 2nd Kings. He too, of course, has leprosy and when he’s told to go and wash in the Jordan 7 times to be cured, he is initially rather pride filled in his response: why won’t you come and cure me Elisha with a simple wave of your hand over my wounds; why do you only send your messenger to me. So he actually walks away from the potential cure. God’s intervention didn’t look like what Naaman wanted or expected, so he turns his back on God, he literally walks away in a rage that God does not conform to his expectations of how things should work, at least initially. But his servants approached and said to him, "Father, if the prophet had commanded you to do something difficult, would you not have done it? How much more, when all he said to you was, 'Wash, and be clean'?"

Moving back to our 10 Lepers from Luke, we hear that all of them decide to go to the priests and so all of them are cleansed or cured of their leprosy. Yet only one of the ten returns to Jesus and prostrating himself - an act of humility, thanks, and praise - he praises and thanks Jesus. And Jesus says to him, “were not 10 made clean, where are the other 9? Did none of them return to give glory to God except this foreigner?" Interesting that a marginalized foreigner - someone with the most to lose in this world, according to the standards of this world, one of those whom Jesus will call, “the least of those who come to me are the greatest in the kingdom of God,” - is also the only one to recognize that it is not because he is good or right or just by the law (he’s not, as I indicated above), or by the standards of his society, that he is cured. Rather it is solely because God has freely chosen to exercise his power to heal, that he is cured of his leprosy. He drops the presumption that he is deserving. He drops the prideful belief that because he is deserving, God must do things his way. His response to this sheer gift of being undeservedly healed is thanks and praise.

So too, when Naaman is cured, his pride is squelched; despite potentially looking foolish for his earlier walking away in rage, he returns to the man of God - the servant of Elisha’s - and with acknowledgement and thanks says, “Now I know that there is no God in all the earth except in Israel.”

The healing of Naaman and of our lepers points to a much deeper spiritual reality. It is one thing to be physically cured of a painful disease that marginalizes you from society. But you will still eventually die. So then it is quite another to be healed, not of an earthly disease, but the disease that kills the soul and body both: sin. Naaman and the Samaritan are both healed physically, yes; but it is their responses to this healing - their obedience in following God’s way of healing them, of following a way that isn’t easy, or necessarily affirming of what they believe, what they think, and how they think God should work in the world, and their ensuing letting go of these things, of this hubris and presumption, and giving thanks and praise to God for his sheer gift of life. 

Ultimately then, this is not simply a story about physical disease and miracles of physical healing. To presume this would be to miss the point God is driving at in this self revelation of who he is. These are stories about God’s healing a disease that cuts off our spiritual lives, our eternal life with him. It is a story about the ways sin marginalizes and disfigures all people, equally. It is also a story about how God offers eternal life to all who desire it; that God did not come for the healthy, but for sinners who are willing to let go of their self righteousness, their rage at not getting their way, their demand for certainty, their manipulation of other people through customs and laws of a nation; he came for those willing to let go of those things so that God can heal them; transform them, work through them to be relationships of encounter between Jesus and those most in need of God’s healing grace. AMEN