Perspective: No Mere Healer

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No Mere Healer

Then Jesus asked, "Were not ten [lepers] made clean?  But the other nine, where are they?  Was none of them found to return and give praise to God except this foreigner?"

Luke 17:17-18 (NRSV)

Woe to me, I am unclean

A sinner found in Your presence

I see You seated on Your throne

Exalted, Your glory surrounds You

From "Ruin Me" by Jeff Johnson

In the Gospel of Luke, we read that one day, while Jesus was journeying toward Jerusalem with the Disciples, He was met by ten people with leprosy as He approached a village.¹  From a distance, the lepers yelled out to Him, "Jesus, Master, have mercy on us!"  Jesus said to them, "Go and show yourselves to the priests."  In Jesus' day, one of the duties of a priest was to verify whether or not someone was healed of leprosy.²  When these ten people were examined by priests, they were all found to be free of leprosy.

Nine of the ten lepers were Jewish like Jesus, but the tenth was a Samaritan.  Typically Jews and Samaritans did not get along with each other, but these ten individuals had found common ground in their skin condition, in their shared stigma, and in their isolation from society.³  When the Samaritan was found to be healed of his leprosy, he ran back to Jesus, shouting praises to God.  When he saw Jesus, he threw himself at His feet and thanked Him.

Jesus wondered out loud, "Were not ten made clean?  But the other nine, where are they?  Was none of them found to return and give praise to God except this foreigner?"  He then said to the Samaritan, "Get up and go on your way; your faith has made you well."

Typically this story is told as a lesson in gratitude, and the Samaritan in the story is lifted up as an example of someone who practices the oft-neglected virtue.  Ten people are healed of a dreaded disease, but only one of them returns to his Healer to say, "Thank you."  The importance of gratitude in a culture of ingratitude is a good lesson to glean from this story.  It is important that we be thankful for the gifts we receive in this life, and it is important that we express our gratitude to the givers of these gifts.  That said, I think that there might be other lessons we can glean from this story.

Notice that Jesus asked, "Was none of them found to return and give praise to God except this foreigner?"  The Samaritan did indeed express his gratitude to Jesus, but Jesus called attention not to his gratitude for being healed but to the fervent praise his healing had evoked in him.  Apparently, Jesus was not troubled that nine of the ten former lepers did not come back to thank Him for healing them.  Rather, He was troubled that only one of them was inspired to joyously praise God because he had been healed.

The story of the ten lepers is an example of a story in which the supposed outsider gets the picture, while the presumed insiders don't quite get it.  Earlier in the Gospel, Jesus tells the Parable of the Good Samaritan, in which two "holy men of God" leave an injured man to bleed to death by the side of the road, while a hated Samaritan helps the man, demonstrating what it means to follow God's command to love your neighbor as yourself.⁴

I wonder if maybe the joyous praise of the Samaritan suggests that he realized something about Jesus that the other healed lepers didn't quite understand.  Later on, after Jesus was crucified, resurrected, and taken up to Heaven, the apostle Peter spoke to a large crowd and referred to Jesus as "a man attested to you by God with deeds of power, wonders, and signs that God did through him among you."⁵  The healing of a dreaded disease is amazing in it's own right, but, in Jesus' case, miraculous healings are meant to point to a greater reality, that Jesus was sent by God for a particular purpose.

Still speaking of Jesus, Peter went on to proclaim that "God has made him both Lord and Messiah."⁶  Jesus is not merely a healer.  He is the liberating King who was sent by God to save humanity from all that oppresses us, from the stigma of a skin disease to the fear of death itself.  I wonder if maybe the Samaritan was driven to praise God because he saw past what Jesus did for him and caught a glimpse of who Jesus is, the very embodiment of God's love for us.

I suspect that, for many of us, Jesus is little more than a means to an end - a ticket to Heaven or a name we invoke at the ends of our prayers to get God to answer them.  May we see past what we want Jesus to do for us so that we see Jesus for who He is, our liberating King who is worthy to be praised and followed.


Notes:

1. Much of this perspective is based on Luke 17:11-19.  Quotations from this passage are taken from the New Revised Standard Version.
2. Leviticus 14:2-3a
3. William Barclay.  The New Daily Study Bible: The Gospel of Luke.  2001, Westminster John Knox Press.  p. 258
4. Luke 10:25-37
5. Acts 2:22 (NRSV)
6. Acts 2:36 (NRSV)

The Healing of Ten Lepers was painted by James Tissot in the late 1800s.