So
here we find Jesus walking the line between Galilee and Samaria on
his fateful trip to Jerusalem. For a little background information,
we should know the stigmas the people in Jerusalem and Judea placed
on Galileans and Samaritans. Jerusalemites looked upon Samaritans as
being half-bred or impure, part Jewish and part Gentile in blood.
When the Assyrians conquered that part of Israel in 701 BCE they
carried away a large portion of the Israelite population and imported
peoples from other parts of the Assyrian Empire. The remaining
Israelites and the imported population intermarried. In Jesus’ day
a faithful Jew would have never associated with a Samaritan. A
Samaritan leper was the lowest of them all.
Galileans
suffered a similar stigma in the eyes of the Jerusalemites. Greek
culture came to Galilee in the 300’s BCE and the Galileans, because
of their distance from Jerusalem, became quite influenced by Greek.
The Jerusalemites despised Greek culture. You
see, the Greeks liked nude sporting events, gymnasiums, and public
bathhouses. They brought foreign gods into
the land and their worship usually became a drunken orgy. So,
the Jerusalemites looked at Galilean Jews as being tainted due to
this influence from Greek culture.
So
anyway, Jesus is making his way to Jerusalem along the border between
the “half-bred” and the “tainted” and up comes this group of
ten lepers. Well the Jerusalemites had a stigma for leprosy too.
They saw lepers as unclean outcasts whom God had cursed with a skin
disease that made them look like walking corpses. To be unclean
meant they were cut off from all society and not allowed to come near
any place where the Lord God might be worshipped; certainly not
Jerusalem. They were not allowed to touch or be touched by someone
non-leprous for they would pass on this uncleanness.
Well, Jesus had a different sort of
authority when it came to matters of faith. He had prophetic
authority and everybody recognized that fact. Yet, as the Gospels
tell us Jesus spent most of his life, time, and ministry not among
the “good religious people” down in Jerusalem, but rather with
those whom the Jerusalemites considered to be the dregs and outcasts
of the Jewish nation, the “sinners”. It is in these lands and
among these people that Jesus healed and cast out demons while he
proclaimed the Gospel “The kingdom of God is at hand. Repent and
believe the Good News.” So, it was not unusual that a small leper
colony would come to Jesus asking for mercy.
So, that”s what these lepers did.
They came to Jesus the one whose power and authority didn't come from
robes and rules but from God. Jesus, was their only avenue to the
LORD God who could be moved with compassion towards them and heal
them. They were tired of being treated as social pariah. They want
this curse of death gone. They couldn't go to the priests. They
can't go to the temple because the ancient Israelites believed that
death could not come into the presence of God. These lepers looked
and smelled like death. Jesus was their only avenue to the God of
Israel to make their request.
Jesus' means of healing them was a bit
odd. He told them to get on as if they were healed, to go and show
themselves to the priests; go and face the ones who had the
“authority” to make the declaration that they were clean and
could return to normal life. So, they set out and as the go, they
are made clean. Their leprosy heals. Well, one of the men when he
notices that he has been healed turned back to Jesus and began
praising God loudly. He falls on his face before Jesus worshipping
Jesus and giving him thanks. Luke makes a point of saying, “This
man was a Samaritan.” It is ironic that a half-bred leper knows
that Jesus is the LORD God in their midst when the religious
authorities, the priests, who had the power to declare Jesus Lord and
Messiah did not.
Well, the twist in the story comes
when Jesus notes that the other nine did not return. So Jesus asked,
“Were not ten cleansed? Where are the other nine?” One could
even wonder if they even went to show themselves to the priests. We
shall never know. Finally, Jesus says to the man “Stand and go!
Your faith has made you well.” Another way of saying that is,
“Your faith has delivered you onto salvation.” In Greek the word
for to be made well is the same as to be saved.
Now, I want to draw out hear that
there is a distinction between being healed as in cleansed and being
made well as in saved or delivered into the Kingdom of God. The
cleansing made the leper able to be in the presence of God but his
resulting act of faith, of actually turning back to Jesus to worship
him because he knew the LORD God of Israel was working in, through,
and as this Jesus of Nazareth, a Galilean, that's what actually saved
him. That turning and worshipping Jesus was his salvation meaning
that he was now a resident in the realm of the Kingdom of God
delivered from the realm of sin and death. Being cleansed at a word
from Jesus of those things that we are ashamed of and which separate
us from God and make us feel cut off from God and from others is one
thing. Turning to Christ in worship and following him is another.
The Gospel that Jesus preached was
“The Kingdom of God is at hand. Repent and believe the Good News.”
To be saved was to be delivered from this sin infected world into
the Kingdom of God. That’s what is to be saved. The wellness that
this man was experiencing by his faith in Jesus, his recognition that
Jesus is Lord that came as the result of his cleansing and healing
was the wellness of the certainty of being delivered into the kingdom
of God, i.e., the gift of the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit was
working in the healed Samaritan leper. If one knows oneself to be
cleansed or set right before God and cannot help but to turn to Jesus
to praise and thank him knowing that he is God, then one knows
oneself to be saved, delivered and experiencing now through the Holy
Spirit a small taste of Kingdom of God wellness that will be when God
makes all things anew. Faith is the result of knowing you’ve been
cleansed and healed and its most true-to-heart expression is turning
to Jesus to praise and thank God.
This passage is not about the
ingratitude of the other nine. The underlying message is about
cleansing, healing, and being delivered into the Kingdom of God by
Jesus Christ. So, what about those other nine; why does Jesus seemed
so shocked that they are not there? I do believe Jesus is quite
surprised that they did not turn back to him in faith. I really do
not think that Jesus is flipping out on their ingratitude. Rather,
it is that they don't realize the full implications of their having
been cleansed. They do not realize who he is. It is the work of the
Holy Spirit to show us who Jesus is. The Holy Spirit was not showing
them. I think that surprised Jesus quite a bit. Where did they go?
What did they do? I reckon they just get on with life and did what
they wanted to do giving no mind to the fact that their new life is
not because of Jesus but in Jesus.
So how does this apply to us today?
Well. because God the Son by the power of the Holy Spirit became
human as Jesus Christ and bore in himself all of humanity’s sin and
died with it on the cross and in turn God the Father by the power of
the Holy Spirit raised him from the dead every human being there ever
was, is, and will be has been cleansed. There is nothing that can
keep anyone ever from turning to Jesus Christ in praise and
thanksgiving and by and through him experiencing the wellness of
being delivered into the Kingdom of God. This wellness is nothing
other than the gift of the Holy Spirit who unites us to Jesus Christ
and in, with, and through him we experience God the Father’s love
for all people as his children. There is nothing that can separate
us from the love of God in Christ Jesus. We Christians know this by
faith because we are united to God in Christ through the Spirit.
Moreover, nothing can prevent every other person there is from
knowing this too because they also have been cleansed in the one act
of Jesus Christ. There is nothing that can separate them from the
love of God in Christ Jesus. Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection
is the cleansing, i.e. the forgiveness of all peoples, universally
so. Everybody is forgiven. A blanket of forgiveness now covers the
sins of all peoples because of the love of God in Jesus Christ. He
is the Lamb of God who took/takes away the sin of the world. What is
surprising is that all peoples do not realize that they have been
cleansed by Jesus Christ and thus do not turn to him in worship and
instead put their faith in other things and therefore miss out on the
wellness of being delivered now into the Kingdom of God. The “other
nine” just don’t get it.
We are like the Samaritan leper. We
know Jesus is the Lord. We know our lives are incomplete without him
and his reign in our lives. The Holy Spirit is genuinely at work in
our lives, changing us to be more and more healed and cleansed so
that we live as the image of Jesus Christ, the reflection of Jesus
Christ forth into the world. Our task as Christians is to live
authentically in his image, to be a loving community of his disciples
who love one another and our neighbours sacrificially as he has loved
us expecting nothing in return so that the “other nine” who
surround us will see in our love the Lordship of Jesus. The church
in North America has tended from day one to carry on like
Jerusalemites who sit in judgement of the moral purity of others all
the while having forgotten that we are at heart leprous Samaritans in
need of Jesus, his healing power, and his reign. Loving one another
and our neighbours authentically as our worship of our Lord is our
responsibility knowing who we know, Jesus. As far as the other nine,
only the Father knows. Our task is to reach out as the living proof
of the love of God in Jesus Christ. Amen.
