Luke 17:11-19

On the way to Jerusalem Jesus was going through the region between Samaria and Galilee. As he entered a village, ten lepers approached him. Keeping their distance, they called out, saying, “Jesus, Master, have mercy on us!” When he saw them, he said to them, “Go and show yourselves to the priests.” And as they went, they were made clean. Then one of them, when he saw that he was healed, turned back, praising God with a loud voice. He prostrated himself at Jesus’ feet and thanked him. And he was a Samaritan. Then Jesus asked, “Were not ten made clean? But the other nine, where are they? Was none of them found to return and give praise to God except this foreigner?” Then he said to him, “Get up and go on your way; your faith has made you well.”

I was going to show you a picture of a leper this morning, until I realised that the same was done to me during a sermon of my childhood, and the image became a part of my nightmare repertoire. I dreamt of lepers living in caves, out of which they would creep out like vampires, shielding themselves from light, their heads hooded, their whole bodies hidden under tattered clothes. As they would approach me, they would cry out in eery voices, “unclean! Unclean!” They would stretch out their hands for food – hands missing thumbs and fingers. The nightmare would end as I looked up into their hungry, eaten faces.

So I won’t subject you to such fodder for nightmares, though you only need to head to India to look a leper in the face. In the time of today’s passage, leprosy was a much more common affliction, so common, in fact, that lepers had a prescribed social role, and a religious one too. The book of Leviticus spends two whole chapters teaching priests how to diagnose diseases of the skin, how to pronounce lepers ritually unclean, how to perform rites of purification should they be healed. As for the lepers: the one “who has the disease shall wear torn clothes and let the hair of his head hang loose, and he shall cover his lips and cry, “unclean, unclean.” He shall remain unclean as long as he has the disease; he is unclean; he shall dwell alone in a habitation outside the camp.” That’s Leviticus 13:45-46.

Leprosy was not seen, however, as a punishment for sin. It was understood instead as an inexplicable act of God, which made it even more frightening. If there was nothing you did to deserve leprosy, then it followed that there was nothing you could do to avoid it, and so lepers were shunned – because their disease was contagious, certainly, but it was more than that. It was their pain, their loneliness, their unspeakable fear no one wanted to catch, and so they were kept at a distance, barred from the religious community, and declared unworthy of God. They were the unclean outsiders, not to be mistaken as having anything in common with the healthy insiders. They live over there; we live over here. We are not like them. God knows we feel sorry for them, but you have got to be sensible about these things.

It’s difficult to image what this might have felt like for the lepers, but actually, the system wasn’t really challenged by the lepers themselves. They could not work, after all, and they depended on the charity of the insiders for their livelihood. So they dressed as they were told, and spoke as they were told, and did not cross over the line that had been drawn to separate them from those with unblemished skin. They were obedient. They followed their orders, and even when Jesus, that renowned healer of lepers, came to town they did not break rank. They stood at the proper distance, and said the proper things. “Jesus, Master,” they said, calling him by his messianic title, “have mercy upon us.”

So Jesus looked at them and saw what anyone could see, that they were eaten up with leprosy and needed all the mercy they could get. He did not touch them – there was no mud, no spit, no talk of faith this time, just an order: “Go and show yourselves to the priests,” Jesus said, and they did, disappearing as obediently as they had appeared in the first place.

None of them asked why, but there was only one reason to go see the priests and that was to receive a diagnosis, a verdict: clean or unclean, insider or out, member of the community or beggar on the outskirts of town. None of them asked why, but as they went to do as they were told they were cleansed – the scabs went away, the colour returned, the feeling came back into limbs that had been numb for years. And nine went on to do as they were told, to have the priests in Jerusalem certify their cures and restore them to society.

But one did not do as he was told. One, when he saw that he was healed, cried out, turned back, and did not rest until he lay on his face in the dirt at Jesus’ feet, praising God and giving thanks. He made a spectacle of himself, all the more so once he was recognized as a Samaritan, a Gentile and foreigner as far as the Jews were concerned. He was, in other words, a double outsider – once by virtue of his leprosy and twice by virtue of his non-Jewish blood – a double loser lying at the feet of Jesus and thanking God as if God were somehow present in a man, and somehow revealed in the presence of that man. He was one of the unclean who saw what the clean could not see, and who refused to be separated from what gave him life.

It is hard to say what effect the tenth leper’s response had on Jesus. Something happened, because all of a sudden he started asking questions: “weren’t there ten lepers here a minute ago? Where are the other nine? Is this foreigner the only one who knows how to say thank you?” And then he turns to the tenth leper. “Rise and go your way; your faith has made you well.” Or straight from the original Greek: “your faith has saved you.”

Let’s be honest: this is all very odd. Didn’t Jesus tell all ten to go show themselves to the priests? And didn’t nine do what they were told? Didn’t this one, in fact, not do what he was told, and even flaunt his disobedience with a great sloppy show of emotion? And weren’t all ten healed? Then how come this one got special treatment, got told his faith had made him well? Weren’t all ten made well? What is the point of this story?

Ten were healed of their skin diseases, but only one was saved. Ten were declared clean and restored to society, but only one was said to have faith. Ten set out for Jerusalem to claim their free gifts as they were told, but only one turned back and gave himself to the Giver instead. Ten behaved like good lepers, good Jews; only one, a double loser, behaved like a man in love. That is the point of this story. How do you respond to God’s love? With obedience and obligation and duty, or something more?

This story is some 2000 years old, so here’s a story I heard from a minister friend of mine who ministers close to the CBD. His church doors are left open five days a week during business hours, like the banks and businesses that surround it. He keeps the sanctuary dim and cool inside, like an oasis in the middle of the city where passers-by can stop and be quiet for a while, stop and look, stop and listen. But as you know, our city is full of all kinds of people, and not everyone comes in with godly intentions. So the church has installed closed circuit TV cameras to keep an eye on the place, to make sure nobody runs off with the Bible or does anything unseemly in the pews, like drink or sleep or embrace. You have got to be sensible about these things.

The monitor sits beside the receptionist’s desk in the office, where the receptionist can keep watch over the sanctuary. One day, this minister narrated to me, the receptionist became concerned, and came in to talk to the minister. “There’s a man lying face down on the altar steps. I wouldn’t bother you, but he’s been there for hours. Every now and then he stands up, raises his arms towards the altar, and then lies down again. Do you think he’s alright?” After some conferring, the minister decided to go check on the man, who told him he was praying.

This went on for days. Every morning around 11am, the receptionist would look up from her desk, and there he would be, prostrate before the altar, his hair in knots, his worn clothes covered with dust and grime. On the fourth day, the flowers lady asked the minister if she should leave the flowers somewhere else, but the minister said no, just step over the man and put them where they belong, on the altar.

Finally, it came to Sunday, and the minister was to celebrate Communion at the 8am service. The man was there when he arrived, blocking his path to the altar. This minister didn’t know what to do. Was he drunk? Was he crazy? What would he do if the minister asked him to move? Approaching him gingerly, as if he were approaching a land mine, he tapped him on the shoulder. He was so skinny, so dirty. “Excuse me,” he said, “but there is going to be a service here in a few minutes. I’m sorry, but you’ll have to move.”

He lifted his forehead from the floor, and spoke with a heavy Kiwi accent. “That’s okay,” he said, rising and dusting himself off in one dignified motion. Then he left that church, and never came back.

The minister continued the story: the service started on time at 8am; the faithful took their usual places and he took his. They read their parts well, speaking when they were supposed to speak, and staying silent when they were supposed to be silent. They sang in unison, they offered their symbolic gifts, they performed each part of the liturgy, and there was nothing wrong with what they did, nothing at all. They were good servants, careful and contrite sinners who had come for their ritual cleansing – but in the words of this minister, one of them was missing. The foreigner was no longer among them; he had risen and gone on his way, but the place where he lay on his face for days – making a spectacle of himself – seemed all at once so full of heat and light that the minister stepped around it on his way out. The tenth leper was missed when he was gone.

We are a good middle class, affluent, easy-listening group of people here. We sing well, we pray well, we listen well. But I wonder: we know how to be obedient, but do we know how to be in love? Do we ever act like the tenth leper: overjoyed and effervescent in response to God’s goodness? Theirs is nothing wrong with doing what we know how to do, as well as we know how to do them; to read our Bible, say our prayers, present our offerings. There is nothing wrong with that, nothing at all. It is that kind of law-abiding, steady discipleship – the discipleship of the nine lepers – that has kept the church afloat for over 2000 years. I admit, I am one of the nine. And yet, it is the tenth leper who is saved, who is redeemed, who knows for sure that God loves him. It is the foreign, different, rule-breaking, odd former leper who is particularly blessed.

Jesus asks, “Where are the nine?” But I know where they are. Where is the tenth leper? That’s what I want to know. Where is the one who followed his heart instead of his instructions, who accepted his life as a gift and gave it back again, whose thanksgiving rose up from somewhere so deep inside him that it turned him around, changed his direction, led him to Jesus, made him well? Where is the disorderly disciple who failed to go along with the crowd, the impulsive one who fell on his face in the dirt, the fanatical one who loved God so much that obedience was beside the point? Where did that one go? Is he here? Is he you?

If he is here, it’s unlikely that any of us would go after him. It is safer here with the nine – we know the rules, we know the protocols, we know who does what. We are the ones upon whom the institutional Church depends. But abundant, overjoyous, embarrassing, over-the-top faith saved the tenth leper.

If this is a church in which tenth-leper tendencies are frowned upon and seen as too emotional, too extroverted, too abnormal – then let’s stop that judgment right now. If God’s amazing love and grace cause you to react like the tenth leper, my prayer is that you will feel free to react in that way. Faith in Jesus Christ is the least boring thing conceivable. There is nothing wrong with being one of the nine. But the tenth leper is the one we all need within and beyond us. May your faith save you. Amen.