I’ve never been in the habit of titling my sermons, but if I were to title this one, it would be “cleansed, cured and made whole.” This title is borrowed from Mark Davis, a Presbyterian Minister in southern California, who every week digs into the Greek of Sunday’s gospel reading and regularly unearths some absolute gems. I met him last year, and thanked him for this. In his translation of this reading from Luke 17, he sees a move from cleansing, to cure, to being made whole, and that move has helped me to structure today’s sermon.
First, some background. Today’s
gospel reading finds Jesus walking in an in-between place, between Galilee and Samaria. This may sound like a throw-away detail, but
it is anything but. In those days, the
long-held animosity between Jew and Samaritan was so strong that they would go
around each other’s territory when traveling, greatly increasing the distance. Capernaum
to Jerusalem, for example, is about 140 km by the most direct route, but 200 km
if you skirt around Samaria. In spite of
adding one or two days to the journey, virtually every Jew travelling from the
Galilee to Judea would take this bypass rather than risking interaction with
Samaritans.
But Jesus does not do this,
he walks right into this uncomfortable territory. I’m sure he would have had
both Jews and Samaritans shake their heads at his disregard of social
convention, but he ignored that cultural foolishness because (a) his life’s
work was all about dismantling old boundaries to prepare for the Kingdom of
God, where the old rules about power and prejudice will end, and because (b) according
to Luke, Jesus Christ was God incarnate… and God does not play our games of
labelling, judging and excluding those we regard as “other.” The hatred and
avoidance between Jews and Samaritans was not of God’s making, so Jesus ignored
these human constructs, and walked right in.
The ten men Jesus encounters
are described by various Bible translations as “men with a dreaded skin
disease” (Good News), “people with leprosy” (CEV) or just plain “lepers”
(Phillips). I “get” the desire of Bible
translators to soften the harshness of the language, but I’m going to assume
that these ten men had leprosy, a terrible, disfiguring bacterial disease of
the skin and nerves that still exists, and creates terrible physical symptoms and
devastating social isolation. In their
daily lives these men were seen basically AS their disease; their entire
personhood was shaped by the term, leper:
unclean, diseased, to be avoided. And Leprosy, or “Hansen’s Disease” is a cruel
disease, for the severity of its disfiguring symptoms, for the social isolation
it creates, and for the casual way that “leper” gets used to describe social
outcasts who have been “rejected or ostracized for unacceptable behavior,
opinions, or character.”
The ten men with leprosy
described by Luke, were in the land between the Jews and the Samaritans, partly
because nobody else would go there, which gave them the ability to move around
more freely, and partly because they were a mixed group of both Jews and Samaritans.
In a way, this group of ten understood God’s will in a way that the divided peoples
of Judea, Galilee and Samaria did not; they had to get past the differences,
because of the terrible disease which unified them. As required by religious/civil
law, they kept their distance and shouted, “unclean, unclean” but, according to
Luke’s recollection, they also recognized Jesus as someone who could help, adding,
"Jesus, Master, have mercy on us!"
And to that plea – and the plea of all who live on the knife-edge of
hopelessness – Jesus does not keep his distance. He cleanses them.
And here we are, at the first
of the three words put forward by Mark Davis: CLEANSE.
In order for these men to
re-enter society, they would need to be cleansed, then inspected by the priest
in order to be declared fit for re-entry.
Jesus, carrying God’s healing power but also knowing that he wasn’t
formally designated as a priest, cleanses them and sends them off for this next,
required step. And lest we feel unkind thoughts toward the nine men who hustled
off to the priest without giving Jesus a second thought, they were overwhelmed
by being cleansed and could not afford to mess it up by not following the
rules. To be cured, they had to see a
priest.
So Jesus CLEANSED them, but he
was not the one to declare them CURED. “Cure” [ἰάομαι] and “cleanse” [καθαρίζω] are
separate words in New Testament Greek; though Jesus clearly asserted some
spiritual cleansing here, cleansing implies something akin to disinfection, and
in the 21st century would also involve antibiotics which can,
thankfully, cure leprosy. The
proclamation of being cured or disease-free, however, was up to a priest, who
had been trained to inspect the lesions, if healed over, would allow the men to
re-enter mainstream society.
And this brings us to the
third term proposed by Mark Davis: MADE WHOLE [σῴζω]. Jesus cleansed and
initiated cure, the priests determined and declared that they were
cured, but they wouldn’t be fully healed or made whole until they were
re-integrated into their communities and families. Then, and now, it’s one thing to get rid of a
disease of the body, mind or spirit; it’s another thing to overcome the
relationships twisted or broken because of the disease and the societal
response elicited by it. But there’s
another thing that goes on in this gospel story, around being cleansed, cured
and made whole: while nine cleansed and cured men continue their journey of restoration,
one man pauses the process, and turns back to Jesus to express his
gratitude. it’s interesting that only at
this point of the story does Luke tells us that this one man who returned to Jesus
was a Samaritan.
Whenever the gospels refer to
Samaritans, imagine the word in big flashing lights. The animosity between Jews and Samaritans is not
hard for us to imagine in a world where genocide is a reality, a world where the
progressive political leaning of a city is enough to send in the National Guard
under false pretences. Raised amidst the
bad blood between their people, the Jews, and their traditional enemies, the
Samaritans, the disciples could not imagine that there was one shred of good in
Samaritans, so Jesus decides to break down this bigotry, regularly casting
Samaritans in a positive light, in his stories and in his daily interactions.
In Luke’s story, however, there
is an irony: the moment that one man turns back to Jesus – an exemplary moment
of giving thanks to Jesus and, through Jesus, to God – is also the moment where
the group of ten divides. When they lived together as a cluster of men with
leprosy as their unifier, their differences of ethnicity or religion did not
matter but now that they are moving to being restored to community, those
social separators kick in and matter a great deal. Now the Jews head one way,
and the Samaritan goes the other way. I recall
Indigenous soldiers in Canada who remember soldiers of all backgrounds fighting
as comrades in arms overseas, then coming back home and being segregated again:
white soldiers, back to the city or farm, and Indigenous soldiers back under
the thumb of the Indian Agents. In hard
times, the differences barely mattered, but in more normal times, the
separateness of societal norms is reawakened.
It our gospel reading, it is a sad sidebar that once the men are restored
to mainstream life, they are also restored to separation. We’d be completely
off-target in saying that life in a leper colony was nice, yet there is a
bittersweet loss of togetherness in this return to their two solitudes.
Debie Thomas, another of my
favourite authors over the past years, is an Episcopal Church leader in north
California. She was born in Kerala,
South India, and raised as a preacher’s kid in Boston, Massachusetts, and
reflecting on this scripture she writes, “Like many children of immigrants, I
grew up juggling a complicated and often confusing mix of identities: South
Asian, New England suburban, evangelical, and feminist.” As a woman of colour, as an American citizen
and a person of south Asian ancestry who is not Hindu, Muslim or Sikh, she
knows a bit about the kinds of complexities lifted up by the 17th
chapter of Luke and she writes,
“This week’s Gospel story is,
of course, about thankfulness. Ten lepers experience healing; one
experiences salvation. There is something about the practice of thankfulness
that enlarges, blesses, and restores us. The leper’s act of gratitude points to
the fact that we were created to recognize life as a gift and to find our
salvation at the feet of the giver.
“But this passage also speaks
to questions of identity—questions of exclusion and inclusion, exile and
return. This is a story about the kingdom of God—about who is welcome, who
belongs, and who stays. As a daughter of immigrants, I feel these questions in
my bones. They’re not intellectual or abstract; they’re emotional and urgent.
What does it mean to belong? Where is home, and what is my identity?”
These are key questions for
us to consider as Church, as we look into the future. It is my sense that even ten years from now, our
denomination and its local congregations will be much more diverse in ethnicity
and in gender expression than we are today. Churches that survive will be those
who have learned to see things from the standpoint of those not presently with
us yet who yearn for spiritual connection with others. We will learn to see
this as the gift of new and unfamiliar ways, rather than the loss of the more comfortable
and more familiar. Debie Thomas pushes me here, as she speaks from first-hand
experience; I hear her questions, “what does it mean to belong…where is home…
what is my identity?” as questions I need to understand, hard questions which
are being asked around me even now by people I do not yet have a relationship
with but who could, potentially, change my whole worldview. And when I imagine that, as I imagine
responding and building relationships, my worries about the future of our
Church don’t magically go away, but many of my worries are lessened and replaced
with a sense of wonder.
This is such a fine story
relayed to us by Luke, about a time when Jesus disregarded social convention,
walked into the scary place between two cultures, and initiated a process of
restorative wholeness. In this story, God
and Jesus shine, with their ability to enact change and their disregard for our
silly rivalries, and in this story a Samaritan’s behaviour (once again!)
teaches a lesson. Debie Thomas, furnishing
my closing words, describes it like so:
By returning to Jesus, one of
the men expresses gratitude, “but it’s also the expression” she writes, “of a
deeper and truer belonging. The tenth leper is a Samaritan, a ‘double other’
marginalized by both illness and foreignness… [and] it’s quite possible that
the Samaritan’s social ostracism continues even after the local priests declare
him clean.
“So what does he do? What
does his otherness enable him to see that his nine companions do not? He sees
that his identity—his truest place of belonging—lies at Jesus’ feet. He sees
that Jesus’ arms are wide enough to embrace all of who he is—leper, foreigner,
exile.
“Ten lepers dutifully stand
at a distance and call Jesus ‘Master.’ One draws close, dares intimacy, and
finds his lasting home, clinging to Jesus for a better and more permanent
citizenship. The tenth leper moves past obedience and finds friendship. He
discovers what happens when duty gives way to love”.
May these words, of the good
news of Jesus Christ, find a home in the hearts of our lives, our land, and the
Church. Amen.
References cited:
https://www.cdc.gov/leprosy/about/index.html
Davis, D. Mark. https://leftbehindandlovingit.blogspot.com/2013/10/cleanse-cure-and-make-whole.html
https://www.dictionary.com/browse/leper
https://www.ictinc.ca/blog/indigenous-veterans
Thomas, Debie. https://www.debiethomas.com/
and https://www.christiancentury.org/article/2016-09/october-9-28th-sunday-ordinary-time
© Rev Greg Wooley,
Osoyoos-Oliver United Church Pastoral Charge, 2025.
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