Then One of Them …
Sunday, October 14th, 2007
Twentieth after Pentecost
Jerusalem Baptist Church, Emmerton VA
Luke 17:11-19
Theme: How do WE express our gratitude towards God?

11On the way to Jerusalem Jesus was going through the region between Samaria and Galilee. 12As he entered a village, ten lepers approached him. Keeping their distance, 13they called out, saying, "Jesus, Master, have mercy on us!” 14When he saw them, he said to them, “Go and show yourselves to the priests.” And as they went, they were made clean. 15Then one of them, when he saw that he was healed, turned back, praising God with a loud voice. 16He prostrated himself at Jesus’ feet and thanked him. And he was a Samaritan. 17Then Jesus asked, “Were not ten made clean? But the other nine, where are they? 18Was none of them found to return and give praise to God except this foreigner?” 19Then he said to him, “Get up and go on your way; your faith has
made you well.”

Imagine being afflicted with any one of a number of skin conditions or diseases that were all, for lack of more exact knowledge, called ‘leprosy’ in first century Palestine.

Imagine that because of that, we are forced out of the city, town or village we’ve grown up in, away from our family and friends and into an existence that is marginal at best, devastating by any measure, and one that will quickly lead us to wish for a quick death rather than endure years of isolation and pain, loneliness and struggles just to get enough food to survive on, or find shelter, or even clothes to wear, as ours fall apart due to exposure.

We are only allowed to associate with others who have been condemned to the same fate as us, who are suffering from similar illnesses, who have likewise been exiled from their communities. And we realize that in our suffering, there is a common bond that transcends any and all previous barriers we’re used to placing between us and the people who surround us. Those come-here’s, those city slickers, those rednecks, those foreigners, those people who don’t think, act, speak, or worship God just like we do are suddenly the only people with whom we ARE allowed to speak or hang out with. And however odd it may seem at first, we end up forming some kind of sad, twisted, community; a mismatched, shabby, ragged, dirty, hardscrabble band of men and women who spend our nights huddled together for warmth and our days the prescribed distance away from the “blessed ones” – the ones whom God has NOT seen fit to condemn to this horrible existence, the ones who take EVERYTHING ENTIRELY for granted … little realizing how quickly and drastically their comfortable existence could change – just a passing comment from a family friend asking “what’s that spot on your arm?” could be enough to get the ball of THEIR doom rolling just like ours was that would land THEM out HERE with the REST of us.

Then one day we hear of this man who has reportedly been traveling around the countryside healing the sick – for real! Making the lame walk, the blind see, casting out demons, even raising people from the dead! And he’s coming up the road. He’s on his way to Jerusalem, and he’s accompanied by his disciples.

And there he comes! There he is! JESUS!! MASTER!! HAVE MERCY ON US!!

“What did he say? Did you hear him? Go and show yourselves to the priest? Is that what he said? Show ourselves … to the same priest who declared us unclean and cast us out of town??”

One has to wonder what went through their minds when they heard what Jesus told them to do.

There are a couple of things that come to mind when looking at the text. Just like in the parable of Lazarus and the rich man, there’s no transitional commentary on the part of Luke. No ‘grumbling among themselves, they still decided to do what Jesus said’. It goes directly from what Jesus told them to do to: ‘And as they went …’ the commentaries I studied each wrapped that question up very neatly: ‘They were obedient in faith that they would be healed, so they ALL alike obeyed.” Each scholar focused on the fact that the healing of all ten lepers occurred AS they engaged in the act of obedience, AS they walked down the road to see the priest to show themselves to him.

I don’t presume to be a Scholar. Yes, I passed Greek, and I have the books to use as a reference, but I go TO the books. That is what they are THERE for; to be used, to be consulted. I don’t know enough about the form and style of Luke’s writing to say definitively that he is telling us, “There’s something between the lines here. Pay attention.” But I can’t help but wonder.

Part of me would like to think that Jesus spoke to them with such authority and with such compassion that what little faith they might have had left in them blossomed into the kind of wonder-filled faith that took it for granted that, even as they began to take the first step in the direction that Jesus sent them, they WOULD be healed.

Another part of me wonders if the thought that first went through their minds was a world-weary “Let me check my agenda for the day, what else do I have going on … OH … NOTHING … what have I got to lose?!” And that first step got taken anyway.

But I stopped in the middle of that sentence. The rest of the sentence that began “And as they went,” is a simple statement of fact: “they were made clean.”

This is where the one story becomes two. Up to this point, the story has been one of healing. Jesus encounters ten lepers, they ask him for mercy – for God’s mercy to be shown through him – and he does just that – Jesus brings mercy into their lives in a way that they could hardly have conceived even in their wildest dreams: complete and total healing from their physical affliction.

Here the story turns, right in the middle of the paragraph.

15Then one of them, when he saw that he was healed, turned back, praising God with a loud voice. 16He prostrated himself at Jesus’ feet and thanked him.

The other nine kept walking. I’m sure they realized that they were healed, surely they would have felt their strength return, the feeling come back – surely they would have realized they weren’t shuffling along any more, dragging their legs and numb feet along the ground. Surely they would have noticed that they weren’t itching any more, the sores they had endured for so long had vanished, and they could close their lips and swallow with no parched feeling in their mouths.

And Jesus had TOLD them to go show themselves to the priest. So that is what they DID.

What ingrates! What gall! How RUDE!!!

Can you blame them?

After all, here was the reality that they had given up hope of ever once again attaining – of being reintegrated into their society. Of once again being surrounded by family and friends, of going back to their jobs and positions in their village, town, or cities. Of going back to the relationships they had been forced to leave behind.

Of going back to how things had been before.

But this one man was different. Yes, he was different in terms of his response to realizing he had been healed – that is obvious. He stopped heading to the priest’s place with the other nine and turned and came back to Jesus – and he didn’t just sedately walk back. He came praising God in a loud voice. And when he GOT back to Jesus, he didn’t just walk up to him and hold out his hand and say ‘hey, thanks man!’

No, he threw himself at Jesus’ feet and thanked him.

And here Luke throws the wrench into the works of the Hebrew mindset.

“And he was a Samaritan.”

Luke does that quite a bit in his Gospel. Jesus tells the parable of the Good Samaritan in Luke’s Gospel. He champions the role of the outcast, and their receptivity to the Gospel, more than any of the other Gospels. There is a prophetic element that we would do well to heed in the reading of those passages.

They foreshadow the rejection of Jesus Christ on the part of the majority of the Hebrew people, and the eager acceptance of the Gospel on the part of the gentile people in the rest of the world.

That may give us a hint of why the nine didn’t come back to thank Jesus. His question to his disciples speaks to the reaction he knew he would be receiving once he arrived in Jerusalem. Loosely put, he asks: “Correct me if I’m wrong, but … weren’t there ten of them? Where are the other nine? Couldn’t THEY have taken the time to come back and thank God for what they have been blessed with, or is this foreigner the only one who GETS IT??”

You see, the other nine had something to go back to … or so they thought. They had position. They had standing. They were part of the chosen people. They could regain that place in the world, and go back to feeling good about themselves. What had once been done out of a dutiful sense of humble gratitude among the Jewish people – the worship of God and the special relationship that entailed –had become, with the passing of time, a privilege to be assumed as inherent through the simple act of being born into the right family.

The Samaritan knew that, even though he was healed, he would still be viewed as a heretic and unclean by the priest by virtue of the fact that he had not been healed from his Samaritan heritage, and would still neither gain nor desire a place in Hebrew society. He recognized what truly mattered in the event of his healing. He had encountered God in the person of Jesus Christ, and that had changed him.

“Your faith has made you well.”

“Made well” seems a little odd for Jesus to be stating the obvious. “Yes, I healed you. Your faith made you well.” But here’s the thing about what Jesus is saying. When he says that, it’s the same word he used in his encounter with Zacchaeus that is translated as “to save”, when Jesus says that salvation has come to Zacchaeus and his house – “for the Son of man has come to seek out and to save the lost.” (19:10)

So … what does this mean for Jerusalem Baptist Church at Emmerton, on the fourteenth of October, 2007?

As we were reading the passage, as we were going through the story, who do we most identify with? Whose plight resonates with us most deeply?

Do we identify with those who, temporarily, it turns out, were suffering from their affliction, but were restored to their health and back into the society in which they returned to their place of privilege and importance in the world as it was, or does the revelation of the salvation of the Samaritan leper touch us more?

Do we understand our place in the world to BE that of outcasts, marginalized members of a society that would rather attempt to establish it’s OWN hierarchies of importance, with service, self-giving and love being somewhat FAR from the top of that list, and a sense of gratitude to God for the grace and mercy that we are so unworthy to receive being near if not AT the bottom?

How ready are we to recognize that what Jesus Christ has done for us is so radically new that it can do nothing OTHER than redefine who we are in the world, as servants, as slaves, as people who for the rest of our lives will strive to find ways to express our gratitude to God for what God has done – in the person of Jesus and through the presence of the Holy Spirit – both in each of us and through others FOR us, and THROUGH US for others. How long has it been since we ran back to Jesus, praising and thanking God in a loud voice, and fall at his feet?

Let’s pray.