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Scripture: Luke 17:11-19

Prayer of Preparation: We give thanks, O God of sacred stories, for the witness of our holy scripture. Through it you nurture our imaginations, touch our feelings, increase our awareness, and challenge our assumptions. Bless we pray, our hearing of your word this day. Speak to each of us; speak to all of us; and grant that by the power of your Spirit, we may be hearers and doers of your word. Amen.

A film directed by Federico Fellini depicted the life of lepers in biblical times quite graphically. They lived in caves. They crept out of them like vampires, shielding themselves from the light, head hooded, bodies hidden under tattered and torn shrouds. The first sound they made was the tinkle of the bells they wore around their necks. And the closer they came on screen, one could hear them crying out, “Unclean! Unclean!” They were be reaching out their hands for food—missing thumbs, fingers. Their faces were hungry and eaten up by the disease. It was a haunting, effective image. Anyone who has seen the film, probably can remember the lepers. The scene is so powerful.

Leprosy was a dreaded affliction in the days of the Bible. It was common enough to have a prescribed social and religious role. The book of Leviticus has two chapters (13 & 14) dedicated to teaching priests how to diagnose diseases of the skin, how to pronounce lepers ritually unclean, how to perform rites of purification if by chance they were healed. The instructions for the lepers in Leviticus are: The one “who has the disease shall wear torn clothes and let the hair of this head hang loose, and he shall cover his lip 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” (Lev. 13:45-46).

Leprosy was not seen as God’s punishment. However, it was believed to be an act of God, which meant that even the innocent and righteous and good were not able to avoid the disease. In fact, there was nothing you could do to avoid it which made it even more frightening. So, lepers were shunned and placed in isolation—because their disease was contagious, yes, but even more than that. Their pain, their loneliness, their fear was what no one wanted to catch either. They were kept at a distance, excluded from religious community, and declared unworthy of God. They were unclean outsiders. They had nothing in common with the healthy insiders. Do you understand? They live over there! We live over here! We are not like them! God knows that we have compassion for them. But it would not be a good idea at all to have anything to do with them—not unless you wanted to be like them—and no one did.

Maybe you are wondering why there wasn’t some kind of leper uprising, a revolution, a protest. But none of this treatment was challenged, it seems. They could not work, so they depended on the charity of the insider healthy ones for their livelihood. Consequently, they did everything they were told to do and did not cross the line that had been drawn to separate the blemished from the unblemished. They were obedient. They followed orders. And even when Jesus walked by, a well-known healer, they stood at the proper distance and said the proper things, “Jesus, Master, have mercy on us.”

Jesus looked at them and saw what others avoided looking at. They were slowly being eaten up and needed all the mercy they could get. So Jesus did not touch them. He did not mix mud and spittle. He did not talk about their faith. He just gave them an order, “Go and show yourselves to the priests.” And they did, disappearing as obediently as they had appeared.

None of them asked why because there was only one reason for them to see a priest and that was to receive a diagnosis or a verdict of clean or unclean, insider or out, member of the community or outcast. Not one of them stopped to ask why. And as they went to do as Jesus ordered them to do, they were cleansed—the scabs went away, the color returned, the feeling came back into limbs that had been numb for a long time. Of the ten, nine of them went on to do as they were told, to have the priest at the temple declare and certify their cure and restore them to community.

One of them did not do as he was told. When he saw what had happened, he cried out, turned back, and did not rest until he lay with his face in the dirt at the feet of Jesus, praising God and giving thanks. What a spectacle he made of himself! Especially when everyone realized he was a Samaritan, one of those a double outsider—once by virtue of his leprosy and twice by virtue of his race—a double loser laying in front of Jesus and thanking God as if it were possible that God would be revealed in the presence of such a 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 a new lease on life.

We are not sure what effect the tenth leper’s response had on Jesus. Something happened though, because all of a sudden Jesus started asking questions, “Weren’t there ten lepers here a minute ago? Where are the other nine? Is this foreigner the only one who know how to say thank you?” he said, and then turned to the tenth leper and said, “Rise and go your way, your faith has made you well.” Or, more accurately from the Greek, “Your faith has saved you.”

It is an odd story. Didn’t Jesus tell all of them to show themselves to the priests? Did the other nine do as they were told? Didn’t this one, in fact, NOT do what he was told, and even flaunt his disobedience with a dramatic and sloppy show of emotion? And weren’t all ten healed? Then why did this one get special treatment? Why did Jesus tell this one that his faith made him well? Weren’t all ten made well? What do you think is going on here?

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 Jesus. Ten behaved like good lepers, good religious people; only one, a double loser, behaved like a fool for the healer. There is a lot going on here. A whole lot.

A twist in this story is that this particular leper colony was located near a village on the border between Galilee and Samaria, two deeply divided communities. Jews considered Samaritans ritually unclean, and no priest was able to purify them. However, in the leper colony, it did not matter which side of the border you were from. Stigmatization is a great leveler. Differences of class, education, race, religion were wiped away by the taboo of leprosy. They had forged their own community on the margins. But once they were healed, the old divisions quickly shifted back into gear. Ten were healed, but only nine would be accepted; the tenth would always be unclean according to the Jewish law because he was a Samaritan. The Samaritan knew just because he was healed, he still could not join the community on the Galilean side of the border. The division was much deeper than the skin. Perhaps that’s why he didn’t go see the priests but turned back to find Jesus.

As a consequence, only the Samaritan received the message from Jesus, “Your faith has made you well.” Maybe Jesus was talking about more than the Samaritan’s leprosy. Maybe he was talking about the deep and broad chasms between human communities. Maybe he was saying that our souls can be seriously ill—more so than our bodies and yet most of us don’t do much to heal our souls. Maybe Jesus didn’t comment on the nine who didn’t return at all, instead his concern was for a religious system that would accept them and reject the Samaritan.

I would love to be able to stand here and tell you exactly what Jesus meant. What I can tell you is, that although the love and grace and healing of Jesus Christ is a gift that only needs to be received, it does bring consequences and responsibilities. Jesus healed people with compassion and generosity. At the same time, he drew people’s attention from their own problems to the bigger picture. You see, we are healed, NOT to stay the same, for that is not being healed at all. We are healed to live differently.

I tend to be more like one of the nine. I know how to be obedient. I am a pretty good steady, law-abiding disciple. I’m a pretty okay marathon runner disciple—slow and steady—and faithful enough to hang in there when the going gets tough. Not that there is anything wrong with that. The discipleship of the nine lepers has kept the great ship of the church afloat for a couple thousand years. But I’m beginning to believe that it is the tenth leper who is going to save the church—the outsider, the double loser, the one who captures my imagination, the one whose disease I fear, whose passion confounds me, the one I may not see at all because he does not need a priest to certify his cure.

“Where are the nine,” Jesus asked. But we know where they are. “Where is the tenth leper?” That is 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, and made him well? Where are the nine? Where is the tenth? Where is the disorderly one who failed to go along with the crowd, the impulsive one who fell on his face in the dirt, the crazy one who loved God so much that obedience was beside the point? Where did that one go?

Not that I’m one of those who would be likely to go after him. It is safer here with the nine—we know the rules and who does what, at least most of the time. We are the ones upon whom the church depends. But the missing one, the one who turned back, or was turned away, or turned against—where did he go? Who is he? Who is she? Whom is he with? What does she know that we do not know? Where are the nine? We are here, right here, thanks be to God. But where, for the love of God, is the tenth?

Amen.