The Ten Lepers

Beloved in Christ,

The Gospel today takes us to the border country between Galilee and Samaria. It is a place between places, and the men whom Jesus meets are themselves living between places. They are lepers. They cannot live at home. They cannot enter the synagogue. They must keep their distance from healthy people and call out, “Unclean, unclean.”

They are not simply sick. They are rejected. Their illness has taken away their health, their work, their families, and their place in the community. They are alive, but they are living as though they have already been forgotten.

And yet, when Jesus comes near, they lift up their voices. They do not come close, because the law will not permit it. But they cry out from a distance: “Jesus, Master, have mercy upon us.”

That is a prayer we can all pray. It is short enough for the lips and deep enough for the soul: “Lord, have mercy.”

Our Lord hears them. He does not turn away. He does not treat them as a nuisance. He does not ask whether their illness is their own fault. He simply sees them in their misery and answers with compassion.

He tells them to go and show themselves to the priests. And as they go, they are healed.

Notice that they are healed while they are on the way. They take the first step in faith, and the mercy of Christ meets them upon the road.

But then the Gospel gives us a sorrowful detail. Ten are healed. Only one turns back. Only one kneels at Jesus’ feet and gives thanks. And this man is a Samaritan—a foreigner, an outsider, someone whom many of Jesus’ own people would have regarded with suspicion.

The rejected man recognizes the mercy of God.

The others receive the gift, but they do not return to the Giver. Perhaps they were eager to get home. Perhaps they were overwhelmed with joy. Perhaps they thought only of all they had lost and all they now hoped to recover. We should not imagine that they were necessarily wicked men. But they forgot to give thanks.

The Samaritan did not forget.

If we are honest, we know something of that forgetfulness. We ask the Lord for help when we are afraid, and rightly so. We ask Him to heal, to provide, to guide, and to protect. But once the danger has passed, we can hurry on with life. We can enjoy the blessing and forget the One who blessed us.

We may remember our troubles more readily than we remember our mercies.

And yet our Lord’s compassion is not limited to those who remember perfectly. He healed all ten. His mercy came to the grateful and the ungrateful alike. That is good news for us, because none of us has thanked God as we ought.

But the one who returned received something more. He received not merely the restoration of his body, but the joy of returning to the presence of Christ. Jesus says to him, “Arise, go thy way: thy faith hath made thee whole.”

The man came to Jesus carrying his shame and his exclusion. He leaves not merely cleansed, but restored. He has found that the mercy of Christ is greater than the rejection of the world.

This is especially precious to remember. There are many kinds of leprosy in human life—not only sickness of the body, but loneliness, grief, failure, poverty, addiction, old wounds, and the memory of things we wish we could undo. There are people who feel pushed to the margins, and sometimes we ourselves feel that we are standing at a distance, unable to come near.

But our Lord is not repelled by the rejected. He draws near to them. He hears the cry that others have stopped hearing. He looks upon the person whom others have learned to overlook.

And He asks us to become compassionate in the same way. We cannot heal as He heals. But we can notice. We can listen. We can refuse to treat another person as invisible. We can make room for those who feel that they have no place.

As we continue in the prayers of Morning Prayer, we come before God as people in need of mercy. In the Confession, we do not pretend to be whole. In the Creed, we confess the Lord who came down among us. In the prayers, we bring before Him those who are sick, lonely, grieving, and rejected.

And in all of it, we learn to turn back.

The Samaritan’s thanksgiving is the pattern of the Christian life. We come to Christ because we need mercy. We remain with Christ because His mercy has made us whole. And we return again and again to kneel at His feet and give thanks.

Let us therefore pray, “Lord, have mercy upon us.” And when mercy comes—as it always does, though not always in the form we expect—let us remember to turn back and say, “Lord Jesus Christ, thank Thee.”

Let us now pray together, asking God to make us merciful toward the rejected and thankful for every gift received from the hands of our compassionate Lord.