Convert Vision
One day the boss called one of his employees into his office.
“Rob,” the boss said, “you’ve been with the company for a year now. You started off in the mailroom, one week later you were promoted to a sales position, one month after that you were promoted to district manager of the sales department, and just four short months later you were promoted to vice-chairman. Now it is time for me to retire and I want you to take over the company. What do you have to say to that?”
Quickly the employee looked at his boss and said, “Thanks.”
“Thanks?” the boss replied, “Thanks?! Is that all you can say?”
The employee looked down sheepishly at the ground and stuttered, “Okay, okay – thanks Dad.”
Today we find Jesus healing the ten lepers – with only one unlikely person returning to give thanks - the Samaritan. This text is often interpreted as the importance of giving thanks to God – though there is more in the text than the importance of proper etiquette. It is about how - when Jesus touches our lives we are inevitably changed and then the responsibility that is laid upon us to go out and live that change.
Luke tells us that Jesus is heading south toward Jerusalem. Though, at the point of this story, Jesus is seen working the east-west border between Samaria and Galilee. Geographically this does not make much sense. It is out of the way. With rocky ground, it is not the most convenient path either. Yet, we find Jesus going out of his way through this unnamed village. The chaplain from Lutheran Theological Seminary in Philadelphia preached once in our college chapel service: “Luke places Jesus in the breech, in an unclaimed region, in between the rock solid rules of tradition and the chaos and anarchy born of a socially unacceptable illness.”
Now, leprosy in the Bible is a little different than what we tend to think of when we hear leprosy today. We think of Hansen’s disease, which is a serious disorder caused by bacterial infection. One of the effects is loss of feeling in certain nerve regions. Our nervous system serves as a wonderful warning device – for instance it tells us when we pick up something hot or if we are standing too close to a flame – things we take for granted, though with loss of feeling in certain areas, people with Hansen’s can severely damage their body without even realizing it.
While Hansen’s would have been categorized in the bible as leprosy - the biblical term of leprosy is a little broader. It denotes simple blemishes, to serious rashes to more fungal and bacterial infections. So if we have any teenagers with acne problems, or people who have eczema, or anyone like me that has psoriasis – well we are considered by Levitical law as leprous. Lepers, therefore, were somewhat common. Moses and Miriam are both recorded as suffering temporarily from leprous afflictions. Though, there were techniques for quarantine, healing and ritual cleansing of lepers found in Leviticus 13-14. The primary concern Leviticus has is about keeping lepers away from unafflicted people and objects. Leviticus 13:45 commands:
“The person who has the leprous disease shall wear torn clothes and let the hair of his head be disheveled; and he shall cover his upper lip and cry out, “Unclean, unclean.” He shall remain unclean as long as he has the disease. He shall live alone; his dwelling shall be outside the camp.”
The ancient Jewish understanding of ritual purity stated that lepers had to be kept at a distance, “outside the camp”, so that the ritual purity of the others could be maintained. The author of Luke, though, uses Jesus’ healing of lepers as a sign that he is the messiah. When the disciples of John the Baptist come to Jesus and ask if he is the one who is to come in Luke 7, Jesus answers: “Go and tell John what you have seen and heard: the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, the poor have good news brought to them. When the messiah is present radical change occurs. What Jesus touches will never be the same again.
Martin Bell, an Episcopalian priest, reflects on this passage in his story Where Are the Nine?. He writes, “But where are the nine? They are on the way home, hiding in fear, refusing to believe, offended at what they call cheap grace, so happy they forgot, lost without their leprosy, unable to say thank you ever again, publishing the news of the Kingdom. Who know where they are! The point is this: Jesus does. He knows where they are.” We are touched – we are changed – yet we are given a duty to transform our lives. We come on Sunday as we are, we read our bibles as we are, we go to studies are we are – and this is fine – we are called as we are – blemishes and all, yet so often we continue to live our lives as we were.
I wonder what the ten lepers expected when they approached Jesus. Certainly they hoped for change. We know that at least one was a Samaritan and Samaritan’s were not Jewish. In fact the Jews despised and distrusted Samaritans – sort of the racial profiling of the day. So, the Samaritan was probably not looking for the Jewish messiah, though ironically it is the Samaritan that would discover the messiah. The lepers wanted to be healed and Jesus was known as one who could heal the sick.
The healing of the ten lepers echoes Jesus’ healing of the leper in Luke 5:12-14: 12 Once, when he was in one of the cities, there was a man covered with leprosy. When he saw Jesus, he bowed with his face to the ground and begged him, “Lord, if you choose, you can make me clean.” 13 Then Jesus stretched out his hand, touched him, and said, “I do choose. Be made clean.” Immediately the leprosy left him. 14 And he ordered him to tell no one. “Go,” he said, “and show yourself to the priest, and, as Moses commanded, make an offering for your cleansing, for a testimony to them.” 15 But now more than ever the word about Jesus spread abroad; many crowds would gather to hear him and to be cured of their diseases.”
So Jesus was known as one who could heal. As one who would risk the purity laws by reaching out and touching those who were labeled as untouchable – as unclean. Jesus laid his hands upon lepers, touched the blind, he commands the dead to stand. Yet, this story is a little different. Jesus is approached by the ten lepers and – well – sort of blows them off. He doesn’t reach out to touch them – in fact he stays distant from them. He doesn’t even tell them to go and that they are healed. He simply tells them to go see the priests. It is back in Leviticus that commands people to go see a priest if they have a spot on their skin. The priest examines the person and then pronounces them clean or unclean. This is something the lepers had either done already and had been labeled as outcasts, or avoided doing because they knew they would be labeled outcasts – either way going to the priests was not the most appealing answer. Certainly they were disappointed, maybe even upset with Jesus. Yet in doing so the nine missed the joy of their experience.
There was one comic I really liked from Art and Chip Sansom’s comic strip The Born Loser. The three boxes show a mother leaning on the back of her husband’s chair, where he is sitting with his young son sitting on his lap. In the first frame the son asks, “Have you ever had a near-death experience, Pop?” The second frame shows the father’s response, “Can’t say as I have, my boy.” And the final frame the mother speaks: “The question is, has he ever had a near-life experience?”
What a great question for each of us here today who are traveling this Christian journey. How often do we go about our day the same as we have always been – unchanged/ing. Tired of the same answers life seems to provide, yet oblivious to the hope and touch of Jesus in our lives. Yet, we are called to have a near-life experience – to be changed and to go out changed.
I’ll close with this one story – it is about Pastor Rinkhart, who was a pastor for thirty years of the same congregation. He was a pastor from 1619 to 1649 at a church in Prussia, which our history buffs know that was also during the Thirty Years War in Europe. Prussia was a walled city – so refuges flocked to the city to find safety as battles raged on the outside. The town was overrun with the perils of war, as well as poverty and the plaque. Rinkhart was the only pastor in Prussia alive by the end of the Thirty Year War, so he carried the responsibility to bury all the cities victims of plague and war. Somewhere amidst all this suffering, he wrote a wonderful hymn - “Now, thank we all our God; with hearts and hands and voices; who wondrous things hath done; in whom this world rejoices/ Who from our mother’s arms, has blessed us on our way, with countless gifts of love and still is ours today.”
You see, the greatest miracle is not to be healed of leprosy – the greatest miracle is the change that occurs in our life – it is the joy and excitement that can fill our lives when we recognize that change. May we learn from the vision of the Samaritan convert – may our lives be touched and may our daily walk be changed. Amen