Sermon, October 14, 2007 -- Luke 17:11-19

“Ten Lepers Leaping” (Luke 17:11-19)
Rick Olson, October 14, 2007

Sorry about the title . . . I couldn’t resist . . . but if I were one of those lepers, I would have been leaping . . . leaping for joy, might even have taken off a few pounds, you never know, because it’s very much a wonderful thing that Jesus has done for them . . . he’s made them clean, they’re no longer outcasts in polite society, and make no mistake, they were that . . . anybody who had any one of the several skin diseases referred to as leprosy in the New Testament—and probably most weren’t Hansen’s disease, the disease we call “leprosy” today—anyone who had any one of those diseases was an outcast from society . . . they were unclean, unwanted, on the margins . . . the Hebrew religion had even codified this status . . . listen to what it says over in the book of the law we call Leviticus: “The one with the leprous disease shall wear torn clothes, and let the hair of his head be disheveled. He shall cover his upper lip and cry out ‘Unclean, unclean.’”¹

Oy vey. That’s the perennial cry of the outsider, marked with difference, whether it’s a flaking skin or a white armband, whether it’s a foreign accent or pigmented skin . . . unclean, unclean, the cry of the ostracized, the one who gets blamed, the scapegoat . . . and Luke embodies in our passage’s very structure what this sort of thing does to ministry . . . Jesus is moving, he’s traveling, he’s on the way. Luke uses no fewer than three verbs of motion in the first verse-and-a-half of this story; Jesus going-into Jerusalem, going-through the middle of the country, and he enters-into a village, he’s going-into, going-through and entering-in, and suddenly there’s these ten lepers, and everything grinds to a halt. Our translation doesn’t quite get it, it says they keep their distance, but the Greek says they “stand their ground,” they stand in the way of mission and it’s not the lepers themselves who do it, it’s their disease or, more accurately, their status as unclean. Jesus is going, going, going, motating right on through, and suddenly, his forward motion is halted, his mission is on “pause,” and he’s with the lepers, standing their ground.

It’s not an accident that it’s structured this way . . . one of the common early names for Christianity was “the way” or “the path,” the Christian life and mission was likened to a journey, to a moving, to a going. And so this “unclean, unclean” stopped that mission, it just shut it right down . . . it’s certainly like that in the modern church as well . . . one of the things that constantly happens is that church members say things or do things or just look in ways that clue outsiders in that they aren’t really wanted . . . I might have told you this story before, but in another church I was associated with, a woman who was living with a person without the benefit of a marriage certificate overheard a remark “not meant for her”—and please note the quotes around the “not meant for her”—about her living arrangements, and the person who made the remark—a member of session at the time—said “well am I just supposed to accept this sort of thing?” and I said “No, but you have a choice about whether to voice your opinion or not . . .” But the real reason is because the woman Wasn’t Like Them . . . she spoke in a rough-hewn manner, she’d been homeless for a while, living out of her car, and she wasn’t really like the solidly middle-class retirees that made up that congregation.

Why is it in our churches the very people who need to be there—the homeless, the misfits, the unloved—aren‘t really welcome? As is clear every year when we preach ordinary time—especially when the Gospel is Luke—Jesus preached an awful lot about welcoming the outsiders, about abolishing the category of “unclean.” In Christ there is no east or west, in him no south or north . . .

When Jesus sees the lepers, when he sees the unclean, he tells them to start moving, to get going, he says to “Go and show yourselves to the priests” and in case we don’t get it, Luke rubs it in “As they went,” he says “they were made clean.” In this story, at least, the making clean, the welcoming back into the community, is bound up in the journey . . . “As they went, they were made clean.”

But back to lepers, and their leaping, or their lack thereof . . . to be fair, we don’t know they weren’t leaping, but work with me here . . . if we don’t know they weren’t leaping, what we do know is they weren’t very grateful, and that’s another theme of this episode . . . One of the lepers, when he sees that he’s healed, he turns back, praising God with a loud voice. And he prostrates himself at Jesus’ feet and thanks him . . . and this talk of prostrating is not just something Luke threw in because it sounded good . . . in the Greek its literally that he “falls on his face at the feet” of Jesus, and that has great figurative weight . . . it’s the obeisance one gives to one’s Lord and master . . . and so the one out of the ten that falls on his face at the feet of Jesus is acknowledging that he is his Lord and master and shhhh . . . don’t tell anyone, but he’s a Samaritan!

That’s right, he’s one of those hated, almost-Jews descended from the ten lost tribes of Israel. Get it? Ten? Like the number of non-leapin’ lepers? Anyway, he’s a Samaritan, so that makes him doubly outcast, doubly outside the pale . . . but wait, there’s more! That’s not the only thing going on here . . . the whole thing carries great symbolic baggage. Luke—whom we believe to have been a Gentile, preaching to Gentiles—is illustrating the mission to the Gentiles that he so richly describes over in Acts, his second book . . . and he’s perhaps getting in an unsubtle dig at all the folks out there who, as in the time of Paul some 25 years before, thought you couldn’t be Christian without first being Jew . . . the leper who acknowledges Jesus as Lord and master, he’s saying, wasn’t even one of his own people.

“Were not ten made clean?” Jesus asks “Was none of them found to return and praise God except this foreigner?” And Luke’s audience would’ve known exactly what he was talking about, because they were likely Gentiles themselves, and they would have been maybe even feeling the heat just a little, ‘cause their Jewish brothers and sisters were increasingly ostracizing them, increasingly almost persecuting them, and so when Jesus says “Get up and go on your way”—and there’s that motion verb, again—when Jesus says “Get up and go on your way, your faith has made you well” they probably said “A-men, brother, that’s right! We Gentiles are made well, and it’s by our faith that we’re made well.”

And so you have a whole raft of people, included in the kingdom of God . . . first the folks with leprosy, made outcast by their disease, and even the Samaritan lepers, the Gentiles, outsiders within outsider . . . there’s a whole lot of includin’ going on.

But hold on . . . hold the phone something doesn’t quite add up, something doesn’t quite line up with our expectations . . . Jesus says that the Samaritan’s faith has made him well, but what made the other folks well? I mean, Jesus doesn’t rescind their wellness because they don’t bow down and worship

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¹ Leviticus 13:45