Restoration at a time of division
Proper 23C | Luke 17:11-19
Imagine the moment he found out. A mark on the surface of his skin or a strange tingle underneath it. A sense that was unfamiliar. Maybe he noticed something a few days ago, three perhaps. How long does it take before we decide it is something worth paying attention to? I think that’s the fourth day, personally. The first three days are normal, right, but on the fourth it becomes an extended period of time. So let’s say it is day four or five, and now there is a second sore, or a third. The tingling causes him to drop a cup; it falls to the floor and shatters in embarrassment. Which is why he realizes what he has avoided thinking about. He put it into the back of his mind for the most obvious of reasons.
There isn’t time to prepare, of course. It is too late to warn anybody. His mind jumps between two obsessions: minimizing his infection of others and interrogating the last week of his life to find the moment when this happened. Who did he come in contact with? The mind goes to the usual sorts — the sense of the stranger, the darkness, where he might have picked it up just through proximity to the wrong sort. Except, of course, there wasn’t such a moment to isolate and contain.
He draws his mind back to the thing he has to do first, which is to get out. Cover up and leave town, leave the community forever.
The Borderlands
It isn’t long before the man finds that isolating himself puts him in places he would never go. The borderlands in his place and time were not like our own, with fences and guards maintaining firm boundaries. People gathered in the cities and towns as the only places where there was safety and community. The borderlands were the opposite of that. Wild and desolate. The places one avoided or moved through quickly.
Two days alone now, keeping distance. Unsure of how he’ll survive even the night. He plops down in the dust, leaning against a stone to close his eyes. Maybe it would be better if God just took me — put me out of my misery, he thinks.
An odd sound nibbles at his mind with a whirring, followed soon by a clacking and a kazoo? He wills his eyelids open, cracking apart the crust holding them shut as he looks toward the odd assortment of sound, like God’s poverty orchestra, seeing nine people frightening the few travelers away from them. They try to frighten the man away, but one notices, pointing to him and starts whispering to the rest of the band and the noisemaking stops with a whimper. Then he shouts across the road to the man, still resting his head on the rock “Hey, are you one of us?”
The man had never seen another leper before, not that he knew anyway, let alone nine, but he’d heard of this practice. You use noisemakers to keep people away. It is a way of communicating that you aren’t safe to be around. But if there are a few of you in the same boat, there’s a greater chance you’ll all survive.
Isolation
There are few words more associated with alienation throughout history than leprosy. Like the plague, black death, and in the last half century, ebola, HIV/AIDS, COVID-19. Diseases so infectious, so dangerous, that isolation is necessary. There is a cruel, both/andness to this isolation, which is particularly alive for us when we know about a disease, but not enough to understand it. That we know just enough to be afraid of the unknown. Because we will push away the infected as much as they will seek to isolate.
The diseases themselves are isolating, even isolating people from their own bodies. There is synergy to this isolation and community, too. That people who are isolated from the community can make community together. And often do.
It is essential to remember where Jesus encounters these people. This isn’t a streetcorner or on the porch outside the church. As much as our laws might seek to other some of the people in our midst, they are still neighbors living in our community. Jesus, on the other hand, is where so-called good rabbis never go. He is in the margins between two peoples, in the space where outcasts end up. And not just any borderlands, but the borderlands good Hebrews particularly avoid because it is the land shared with Samaria. And we all know how evil those people are. So Jesus is in a space he’s not supposed to be on the border with a land he’s not supposed to visit and he encounters a group of people he’s not supposed to be anywhere near.
And here is where I want you to sit with me in this and not jump into our modern partisan means of disassociation or metaphysically explaining away the realized, physical truth of Jesus being here. There is no measuring appropriateness or worrying about the rules or who gets what or why. He cures their leprosy and commands them to seek restoration back into their community. He gives them their very lives back.
And because they believe him, because they have faith, they obey.
Of course, there’s a twist.
One of these former lepers isn’t a Hebrew. And he responds differently. As Chelsey Harmon describes it, the nine go off to present themselves to the priests saying “look at me!” while the man turns to Jesus and says “look at God!”
Jesus’s response seems to be in delight, not because he is being thanked and these other good-for-nothings are supposed to thank him. No! It is delight in this person outside of the community bearing witness to the glory of God. And this is in deep contrast to the insiders who seem quite oblivious by comparison.
Jesus isn’t trying to disrespect the people he has just healed or trying to get us to be more grateful now. In a sense, he highlights the curiosity of this difference — that the question isn’t about which one is right, but in how faith comes out of us. For the nine, it was in obedience and for this one, it was gratitude. And I suspect that Jesus wanted to ensure this man hears him — I see you.
Faith and the real world
Jesus has been teaching his followers that the smallest speck of faith means we are full of faith. And right before this, he said that faith as small as a mustard seed could rip a mulberry tree out of the ground and throw it into the sea. Having any faith at all is enough for God to transform the world.
But do we receive these teachings as a both/and? That it is about a physical and spiritual reality?
It often seems as if we treat it as metaphor, as symbolism of something more, greater, but also out there away from us. Or else we treat it like a literal prediction of super powers. As if we have two choices: Jesus is talking about something real, akin to telekinesis, or something metaphysical and, let’s be honest, fake. In short, faith can do incredible things: as long as we’re willing to suspend our disbelief. These are both narrow and rhetorically naive ways of reading scripture.
What Jesus offers is an elemental way of talking about the real effects of faith and our commitment to the physical well being of ourselves, our neighbors, and our community. Faith and works can’t be separated.
These people can’t be restored to community if they aren’t healed. Their physical and spiritual health go hand-in-hand. And caught up in this is a man who doesn’t belong. One who wouldn’t heed the command to present himself to a priest in Judea because that isn’t his home. That isn’t his community.
And yet…
Don’t we get the sense that it could be? In Jesus. Not otherwise, of course. But somehow, here and now, with him, things change? These lines get blurred, this nationalistic division is erased, and we find ourselves called to a greater command: to love God and our neighbor as ourself? This could be his life, too.
Borders and Faith
It seems like we are so prone to find the borders and stake them out. Boundaries are a great way of knowing what we can get away with. How far we’re really allowed to go. Borders can, in a clever way, be a place of freedom for us, as we place ourselves in relationship to them, suss them out, and know where we, in fact, stand. Clarity.
And yet it is the fuzziness of borders that can be so difficult for us, the more we seek to define them. The bright lines that get squishy when we have to defend them; going from black to charcoal, to a kind of heather gray the more they get smudged, like batters kicking the chalked back line of the batter’s box.
At the centerpiece of this story, though, is faith. Not faith in borders, but in God. Faith in the way of love Jesus reveals and teaches. Faith in the beloved community he shares with us and creates out of us: out of our hands and feet, our love.
This is a story of faith in the real world. Faith in borderlands among the outcast and the priestly caste. Faith and restoration to community those who could not be a part of it any more. Their faith doesn’t die, flake off, carried on the breeze like autumn leaves. It restores and commits itself to compassion and love.
Do we see ourselves so called? To be restored? Here? In this broken world so hungry for salvation? So needing of community and faith? Even a restoration with people from before there was a border there? Before they were enemies? When they were neighbors? The same people. In Jesus, are we not all neighbors now?
With faith, friends, we are. In love. With love. For love.