21st Sunday after Pentecost --- October 13, 2013

As he entered a village, ten lepers approached him. Keeping their distance, they called out, saying, "Jesus, Master, have mercy on us!"

• In the time of Jesus, no one was more an outsider, more rejected, more unwanted than lepers. They were not permitted to work, to live with their families, or to associate with anyone other than other lepers. Once the disease was discovered, they were immediately removed from all society. The fear of contamination and of becoming “unclean” was so strong that the leper had to live where no one else would live, such as in a cemetery. Their families could leave food for them but they were not allowed to see or speak to them.
• This leprosy could be the disease as we understand it today or it could be some other sort of skin disease; the Old Testament says a house could have leprosy. This could be the case for Naaman, the Aramean general mentioned in our first reading. He may have had some other sort of skin disease,which would permit him to rise to such a powerful office outside of Israel. Yet, in spite of this power and authority, Naaman remains an outsider and a lesser person who could never do what he might want to, because of his condition.
• The ten lepers in our Gospel reading are even further removed from society. They have to “keep their distance” and ask Jesus to cleanse them from far away. Jesus tells them to fulfil what the Law requires, namely to show themselves to the priests of the Temple and undergo the ritual cleansing that the Law required for them to reenter society.
• All ten were made clean, but only one – a Samaritan – returned to give praise to God and to thank Jesus. Jesus asks where the other nine are. He acknowledges that the grateful man is made well and sends him on his way.
• We don't know what happened to the other nine, except that they were made clean. Did they see the priests? Did they go home? Did they return later to find Jesus gone? Did they relapse? We don't know and we'll never know. Their fate is not what is the issue here.
• Jesus once again sets himself on the side of those who are rejected and set outside the borders of what is acceptable and righteous. He reaches out in compassion to those who are unacceptable in his society, even to those who are doubly unacceptable, such as the Samaritan leper living in Judea.
• Let's think for a moment. Who are the lepers of our own time? I think that very few of us here have met what would be considered true lepers, the sufferers of Hanson's disease. Yet we have all met those who are figuratively lepers – the poor, the lost, the less-than-clean, the foreigner, even those who don't fit in anywhere even in their own society. The list could go on and on.
• From this miracle story, we can understand something about the relationship of Jesus to those who exist on the margins and borders of our community, those who are not acceptable and so are invisible or disliked or avoided. These are the people who look or act or sound or smell strange and have no seat at the table. It appears that it is Jesus who would sit with them. It is just these people who most crave the Kingdom of God and it is to just these people that Jesus came bringing the Kingdom.
• There is another point of view to be added here. Just as Jesus preached the Kingdom of God and healed those around him to let them glimpse that Kingdom, so we too are in need of that Gospel message and that Gospel healing.
• Are there not parts of each of us – our lives, our memories, our ways of thinking or acting – that we would just as soon leave behind? Each of us have our faults and failings, so aren't there “lepers” in each of us? Aren't there out-casts within every one of us? Don't we have parts of ourselves that we rather leave invisible and disliked and avoided? I could list them but that's useless; we know ourselves well enough to acknowledge down deep what we'd rather not acknowledge. Like a piece of paper or on a larger scale, our society, each of us has margins into which we've pushed the unacceptable, the unwanted, those parts of us least often seen and most in need of healing.
• We can see from today's Gospel that Jesus is not afraid of the margins or those who live there. In the same way, he is not afraid of our margins or borderlands, those wild and wooly places where the most troubling and troublesome parts of us are made to live. He does not mind meeting us right there where we most need him and probably might be most troubled about seeing him.
• It just might be that meeting him right where we hide most and hurt most that we will find a new reservoir of love and gratitude and faith.
• The Samaritan leper returned to praise God, to express his gratitude to Jesus, and to experience once again the wholeness that Jesus had brought to him. In a way, this was his Thanksgiving Day. So it will be for us when we recognize that Jesus has come to our hurting places, our leprosy, bringing healing and support. Then all that is left for us to do is say “thank you.”

Then one of them, when he saw that he was healed, turned back, praising God with a loud voice. He prostrated himself at Jesus' feet and thanked him. And he was a Samaritan.