One of the
principles of reading and hearing the Gospel is that we should be surprised
each time. Now this may be a surprising
statement to you. After all we all have
heard the four Gospels read in church all our lives or for many years in any
case. How can it be that we will be
surprised when we hear a Gospel passage that we have heard many times
before?
I believe
that this principle is valid because if we have ears to hear and eyes to see
God’s truth will be revealed to us in new ways each time we hear the Gospel. This will happen as we will be changed in
some way each time we hear the Gospel proclaimed in our lives. This will not happen
automatically. As part of what God does
in and for us it helps for us to be involved.
This may not be required but it does work better if we are open and to
pay attention to how God is working in our lives and to listen and hear what
the message is that God has for us and respond to it. That is why there were many people when
Jesus walked among the people of Judea who did not recognize Jesus as the
messiah. They were not open to his
message. They were not prepared to
receive the truth he was offering - the truth of eternal life.
What then is
the surprise for us in this Gospel message we have heard today? You may have been surprised by any number of
things in this passage. It may be that
Jesus was on his way to Jerusalem, Jesus then had his focus on what he knew
faced him when he arrived in that place.
He was on his way to meet his destiny – everything that would be the
culmination of all that he taught and had done in the last three years. It could be that the lepers that he
encountered only had to ask for mercy and they received it immediately. Jesus did not always respond so quickly to
those he encountered – such as the resurrection of Lazarus when he delayed
responding to Lazarus’s’ death for two days. It could be any number of aspects in this
passage. That would depend on your
particular circumstances and how the Gospel speaks to you.
For me the
surprise was that the tenth leper was a Samaritan. Now I probably was aware of that previously
but it had not made a lasting impression because it did surprise me. Perhaps it is because this lesson comes
directly after the story of the Good Samaritan and I preached on that passage
last week at St. Alban’s in Souris. You
could say that this is the parable of the Good Samaritan part 2.
As you
didn’t hear my sermon last week I will summarize what I said about
Samaritans. They were close relatives of
the Jews. However, there was no love
lost between those two branches of the family.
They were engaged in a family feud that ran long and deep. You know what a family feud can be like – it
can be very nasty. The Samaritans
claimed to be direct descendants of the Northern Israelite tribes of Ephraim and Manasseh, who survived the destruction of the Northern
Kingdom of Israel by the Assyrians in 722 BC.
They continued to identify themselves as Israelites
rather than descendants of Judah - or Jews.
They did not worship at the Temple.
There were in effect despised and seen as outcasts and not part of the
chosen people of God.
So this man that Jesus heals has one strike against
him. The second strike is of course he
is a Leper. Lepers - those who suffer
from leprosy - were also considered ritually unclean. They could not participate in the religious
life of the community and they would contaminate anyone they came into contact
with. They could not worship at the temple. They remained outcasts until they were healed
of their leprosy – which was not the same as the disease we know today. According to the Levitical code there were
many things that made someone unclean such as a woman who was menstruating, or coming
into contact with a corpse, or anyone
with a skin condition such as psoriasis which was considered Leprosy. Someone who was unclean remained so until a
priest declared he or she no longer suffered from the condition. Therefore this Leper was doubly unclean –
doubly an outsider and outside the covenant with God.
The next
thing that was a surprise to me is the declaration by Jesus when the Leper
returned to give thanks to Jesus for being healed of his leprosy. Did you note what Jesus declared? Well it easy to missed. He declared, ‘Arise, go thy way, thy faith
has made thee whole.” Note that he did
not say that the Leper was healed or cured – he said the Leper was whole. All the lepers were healed of their
leprosy. They were made clean and Jesus
sent them to the priests to fulfill the requirements of the law and enable them
to reenter the life of the community fully.
The central
issue here is what does it mean to mean to be whole? For this leper who was doubly outcast – a
Samaritan and a leper – it meant that God’s grace was also available to
him. He was just as much a part of God’s
kingdom – he was as much able to receive God’s grace as was any Jew. He was whole because he saw that to live
fully as a child of God he must know – truly know in his heart and mind and soul
that he is loved by God and that love was shown to him through the person of
Jesus Christ. At that point he had been
in today’s language saved. We know that
he knew that because he showed that in his action. He showed that through the gratitude that he
expressed spontaneously not on the instruction of the priests and not following
the example of one of the other lepers.
He acted because he could not do anything else. That expression of gratitude flowed from his
very being. It was an essential part of
who he now was.
What does
all this mean for us? If we are to be
able to live a life a gratitude - to
have a life that will truly be one that is grateful for all that God had graced
us with - we must truly believe in our
hearts that that is true. Does that mean
that we despair if we don’t truly feel that at present and therefore that there
is nothing I can do? No – as I said at
the beginning of this sermon – we can have ears to hear and eyes to see what
God has done for us. We can see and hear
how God is working in our lives. We can
see and hear the evidence that we are children of God and that as His beloved
children we have Jesus as our savior and redeemer. We can respond to that. We may not fully believe that but when we
respond we will begin to see and hear the truth of that. It does not have to happen is one great event
as it did with the Leper. It can happen
little by little. One day it will be as natural as breathing. Gratitude will be an integral part of who
were are. Thanks be to God.
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