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"Faith is Responding in Thanksgiving"
(for what God has done for us)
Pr. Paul Swartz - October 13 & 14, 2007
The Important Question to ask is not “What Do You Believe?” but “What Difference Does It Make That You Believe?”
Like any pastor, I spend a fair amount of time around sick people. Unlike some of you who are physicians or nurses, there is very little that I can actually do for sick people except to visit them and pray with them, which is fine as far as it goes. But as they would probably tell you, it doesn’t go too far. Even if one were a “Doctor” of Theology, what patients want is a “Doctor” of Medicine. Sickness is about the worst that life can do to us. Not only the pain, the physical misery, but the mental, spiritual anguish as well. You ask, “Why me?”
Sickness is the everyday, in-life experience of vulnerability, finitude, death. Sickness, at its worst, is a foretaste of what it is like to have the world go on without you, to be nothing. Sickness is a reminder that life is fragile, limited, vulnerable—in short, terminal. Sickness is a brush with death.
Is that why we, who happen now to be well, are so threatened by sick people. We send a card or make a call but find it hard to visit, difficult physically to confront a person who is seriously ill. Is that why we scurry desperately to find some reason for every illness, some virus that can be conquered, some new treatment? Is that why we isolate those who are ill in modern leper colonies called hospitals and nursing homes rather than risk caring for them ourselves? We touch them, but only with rubber gloves.
Out in
Samaria , on His way to
Jerusalem , Jesus met ten very sick people. Ten lepers. Why is He going to
Jerusalem ? You know what awaits Jesus there, in just a few months: Death.
That Jesus is an outcast in
Samaria and that He is on His way to death in
Jerusalem makes this an interesting location for Him to meet ten lepers. Here are ten people who have been cast out of family, home; made to wander helplessly because they are afflicted with a dreaded disease. Here are not only ten sick people but also, without stretching things too far, ten dead people. They are marked for death, not just in the future, but now... today! For as far as these lepers’ families are concerned, they are dead.
Now one of these ten is a Samaritan so he has two strikes against him. Samaritans were hated as another race, a corrupted, compromised religion. So these ten are dead people if not yet physically, then spiritually, socially. Dead.
Standing well away from Jesus as lepers were required by law to do, they cry out, “Jesus. Master, have mercy on us.” Jesus looks at them and tells them to “Go and show yourselves to the priests.” Jesus is referring to Leviticus 14:2-3 which specifies what the priest is to do with a leper who happens to get healed. A leper was not allowed in the temple because lepers were thought to be “unclean.” If cured, the leper must be ritually purified, certified “clean” by the priest in order to worship at the temple.
So Jesus’ command to them is a bit confusing. They have asked to be healed. But Jesus has done nothing to heal them. He’s only told them to GO and ACT as if they are healed. GO present yourselves to the priest as if you are whole, healed, accepted, living people. They GO, and they are healed on the way.
Nine of them just kept going. Apparently, they make no connection between Jesus’ strange reply and their recovery from leprosy. After all, Jesus didn’t do what they expected. He didn’t touch them with mud and spit as He once did a blind man. He didn’t command any demons to come out of them, as He did some sick people. He didn’t even say, “Be healed.” As far as they are concerned, Jesus had nothing to do with their healing.
But one leper, a Samaritan, made the connection. When he saw healing, he did not just celebrate his good fortune, he returned to praise God and fall on his face before Jesus saying, “Thank you, thank you, thank you.” Luke notes, “And he was a Samaritan.” So he was a two-time loser. And Jesus once again says the unexpected, “Hey, so what happened to the other nine” and then says to the Samaritan, “Get up and Go on your way. Your faith has made you well (whole, or Your faith has saved you).
So what do you make of this medical miracle? One Samaritan leper had faith and was healed. The other nine, who presumably had no faith were also healed. What’s the difference between the unthankful nine and the thankful one?
The ten lepers are all dead people. Whether you are talking physically, spiritually, socially, they are dead. They would love to get healed which, in this context, means they would love to get raised from the dead, resurrected, which they assume would send them back home to a “normal life.” That’s all they ever really asked for, just a chance to “be like other people,” an opportunity to go back home and be like everybody else, normal. They assume that’s what Jesus, is all about...a return to the normal, revival of the ordinary for people, who, because of their infirmity and illness, are abnormal and subordinary.
But one of the healed lepers, the Samaritan, realizes real resurrection. He alone comes back to say, “Thanks.” He realizes that his healing puts him in relationship to Jesus, and that relationship alone has made him whole and alive again.
All the other nine wanted out of Jesus was to be made well, to go back home and start all over again, doing what everybody else had been doing—going to school, driving to work, and eating yogurt. But that one Samaritan comes back not only cured but made whole because he alone saw that his healing, his “resurrection” wasn’t just something for the future. It was for now! He was made whole and accepted by Jesus now, while he was a leper, when he was still sick, untouchable, before he got well. He alone realized that Jesus didn’t just want to make people well, much less normal, He wanted to raise people from the dead. Easter is now!
We too are invited to experience salvation not only in terms of life after death, but also life in the face of death. In other words, the gift of Jesus in our lives creates for us an opportunity to become whole, to be who we are in Christ Jesus.
The other nine lepers go away, presumably to the priest and put their lives as lepers, as outcasts, and dead people behind them and went on to be nothing but normal.
The healing began for all of them, not when they were healed, but when they met Jesus who took them, all ten of them—leprosy, outcastness, deadness and all—just as they were. But only one of them knew it so he alone comes back to say, “Thanks, Jesus. I needed that.”
Nine get healed but only one got saved. Your faith—your relationship to My accepting, embracing, life-giving, extravagant love—has saved you. Not your clear, clean, whitewashed skin; not your good, Bible-believing, cleaned-up, boringly middle-class normality has saved you. I have saved you, just as you are. I am here only for the sick. And for that the Samaritan rightly said, “Thanks!” When we become convinced of God’s love for us and God’s desire for us to BE whole and healed, the proper response is gratitude.
Gratitude may be the purest measure of one’s character and spiritual condition. The absence of the ability to be grateful reveals self-centeredness or the attitude that I deserve more than I ever get, so I do not need to be grateful.
I’m sure all ten former lepers believed something about their healing. But the important question to ask is not “What do you Believe?” but “What difference does it make that you believe?” We see faith in the one whose beliefs made a difference in the way he acted.
Remember Jesus’ parable of the Pharisee and the publican who went into the
Temple to pray. Contrast the difference between that Pharisee who was a devout Jew with our Samaritan leper who was a despised, heathen, and a foreigner. Both men give thanks…..but there’s are major differences.
The Pharisee worked hard to keep himself religiously pure (clean). The Samaritan was a leper, which made him unclean.
The Pharisee was thankful that he wasn't like everybody else—he considered himself better than everyone else. The Samaritan leper was certainly not like everyone else. His nationality and skin disease made him less than everyone else.
The Pharisee offers his thanks in the temple—the most holy of Jewish sites. The Samaritan is out on a(n unclean?) road at the (smelly?) feet of Jesus.
The Pharisee's thanksgiving is about what he has done. The Samaritan is thankful for what Jesus has done for him. The Pharisee's thanksgiving was self-exaltation. The Samaritan's thanksgiving was exalting Jesus.
This comparison reminds us that faith is responding in thanksgiving for what God has done for us—we who are unworthy to receive anything from God because of our sinfulness.
It’s a gift. When will we ever get it through our heads? It’s a gift! When grace is offered, we are on our way to getting more than even a dermatologist can do for us, on our way to being saved, warts—even leprosy—and all.
Where are the other nine? Why aren’t they leaping and shouting for joy, partying with the Father and the son who was lost, having the time of their lives? Where are the other nine?
They are back at work, back to business as usual, nothing more than merely normal. Skin now clear and clean, lives all progressing along nicely, and everything so, so utterly, boringly normal.
What a shame, to have met Jesus, the Lord and Giver of Life, the One who loves to eat and drink with sinners, who takes us and embraces us just as we are, and to come away with nothing more than normal.
Are you sensing the pattern here as well as throughout Scripture, and especially with Jesus’ command, “GO!” When we have encountered the living God, we recognize—we “see” and “know”—who we are and who we are meant to be in His love, and He sends us forth with His loving embrace to “GO!” and “BE” who we are in Christ—sons and daughters of the Most High whom our Brother Jesus Christ has redeemed. At King of Glory we commit ourselves to BE the Heart, Hands, and Voice of Christ which emphatically implies we “GO” and “DO” what Jesus would do if He were physically present because we acknowledge that Christ has chosen to live within us so that we are His Body, His presence in the worlds in which we live. Having received the gift, there can’t help but be an expressive response. Gratitude will be demonstrated. There will be movement and progression, GO!... BE!... DO!... or, I think, we can legitimately ask whether one has really met Jesus!
What a shame for people to settle for Monday, when they could have had Sunday, Easter. What a shame, out on the road toward death (and aren’t we all?), to have met Jesus headed to the cross and to have come away cured but not knowing the abundant life now…to have come away only healed when we could have been saved. Amen!
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“King of Glory disciples are called, committed and challenged through faith to be the heart, hands and voice of Christ.”
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