|
First
Reading
|
Psalm |
Epistle |
Gospel |
| Jeremiah 29:1, 4–7 |
Psalm
111 |
2 Timothy 2:8–15 |
Luke 17:11–19 |
In today’s Gospel, Jesus and the disciples are traveling in the border area between Samaria and Galilee. Galilee was Jewish territory. It was home for Jesus. The disciples all had friends and relatives in the little fishing villages surrounding the lake. When Jesus preached at the local synagogues, just about everyone knew each other. Samaria, on the other hand, was foreign and unfriendly soil to a Jew. Samaritans believed themselves legitimately descended from those Jews of the Northern kingdom of Israel who somehow survived deportation when Assyria conquered the area in 722b.c. But Jews believed that the Samaritans were descendants of foreign captives whom Assyria forced to settle in the region after destroying northern Israel. The historical truth was probably somewhere in between, but nevertheless in Jesus’ day, the years had not lessened the hostility between the two groups, and most Jews regarded the religion of the Samaritans as a bizarre syncretism of pagan superstition with a bit of superficial Jewish culture mixed in.
This border area between Galilee and Samaria served as sort of a trash dump of tension, where one was always on guard, where one was never sure of meeting friend or foe. It was here that Jesus met the lepers. Now as back then, lepers are not only those who have a defined illness. They may be those who don’t fit in, those who have been pushed out or who left of their own choosing, those who are sorely troubled and need to be healed, those who are living, but also forgotten and dead, Today, lepers often inhabit back alleys in the cities of our land, where dumpsters shelter them, the air of putrid waste and dereliction hangs heavy, and where we feel unsafe to walk. Yet the Gospel tells us that Jesus deliberately chose this sort of route.
Usually the story of the lepers is used as a springboard to say something about gratitude. Only one leper out of the ten who were healed, came back to give thanks, and that one leper was a Samaritan. But maybe at another level, the encounter is a revelation about new life in the risen Christ. After the lepers asked Jesus for his mercy, Jesus told them to go, act as if they were no longer sick and outcasts and show themselves to the priests. Presumably the Samaritan would have gone to a Samaritan priest. The Gospel is curiously silent over the lepers’ immediate response, but it was after they had left Jesus, that they discovered they were healed. The nine lepers may not have been ungrateful, but unable to make the connection between Jesus and their healing.
New life in Christ is often a process of making connections, and making connections can take time. All ten lepers disappear from the Gospel record, but we feel that the one leper who returned will be o.k. no matter what the world throws at him. We feel less easy about the fate of the nine who might have kept going on their merry way, never reflecting on their encounter with Jesus again. For the Gospel gift of new life is not so much a one-time experience, but a continuing experience that offers healing and wisdom again and again. . The one leper knew he would never be the same since he had met Jesus. He wouldn’t simply return to the old life before he contracted leprosy, he had to find Jesus and acknowledge what had happened. New life in Christ is neither a denial of what has happened in the past, nor does it involve simply returning to the past and then taking up where we had left off. Resurrection and renewal for people of faith today doesn’t mean that some day we we’ll go back to whatever is the ideal era for us. Resurrection and renewal means an encounter that leads to a response and an acknowledgement that connects our death, our failures, and our unhealthiness to the continuing gift of God’s life.
Last Sunday Jesus told the disciples that even if their faith was as tiny and vulnerable as a mustard seed, God could do wonderful things with it. I suspect the Samaritan leper perhaps had very little knowledge of Jesus as a promising rabbi. The Samaritan leper never would have heard Jesus preach and teach in a synagogue or out on a hilltop among the village people. His knowledge would have been very sketchy at best. Jesus knew that, accepted that, and welcomed him into God’s fellowship again.
The church’s mission may take us to certain critical areas between boundaries where there is flux, where dislocation and quakes occur, where there is a great deal of vulnerability and we would prefer not to walk alone. But new life in Christ will never be just a once and for all easy fix. New life in Christ promises that we will never go on our merry way, and that even when we do return home and to our familiar and safe surroundings, neighbors, strangers, and lepers won’t seem the same any more. God is always revealing to us more of the harvest of the mustard seeds of grace.
And I offer this to you in the name of the Living God, Amen.
