The Lord Mercies the Broken: Luke 17:11-19

Grace to you and peace from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen. The text is the Gospel reading, Luke 17:11-19.

What do you do when everything you have, everything you are, everything you had hoped to be or become has been stripped from you?

What do you do when you are an outcast, literally pushed outside of town to a dump of a tent community where others as pathetic as you live off of the scraps of food, clothing and money that are tossed to you as you beg. But, you must beg from a distance; if anyone draws too close, if someone ventures too near your place of ill respite you must stand – or try to stand – and wave your arms – or try to wave your arms – and shout – or manage as loudly as you can – “Unclean, unclean!” so that the unwary and unobservant traveler doesn’t become contaminated and have to join you in your public isolation and shame. You have lost your business, your home, family and friends. Ostracized, you’ve lost your ability to be touched by the ones you love and, even if a fellow outcast does touch you, you might not be able to feel it anyway because your nerves, your muscles no longer register a sense of touch.

In Deuteronomy, Moses was given instructions for careful and deliberate restrictions on the one who is contaminated by leprosy. Over the years, a sense of superstition evolved around illnesses such as blindness, or being lame, or leprosy, the idea becoming that one who developed this disease must have done something to deserve it – or perhaps the parents or even grandparents were guilty of some great and magnificent sin against God that, in His wrath, He levied this terrible punishment against you. You’ve lost everything to the point that even God is against you. You are separated from the worshipping community: no priestly care, no pastoral presence, no presence of God. Just you and a burdened conscience wondering what God has against you to levy this terrible disease on your body that is slowly dying.

There is a word for this: excommunicated. Take this word apart, ex/communicated and you discover what it means: to be separated from the community. But, excommunicated sounds too academic, too theological. It’s something we talk about only in our constitution and bylaws, perhaps in our Catechism, a desperately severe move made by the church to lead a sinner to repentance. But, in this case, the word is too clean. We need a harsher word, a sharper word to help us understand the suffering of this separation that is caused by something you didn’t do. Your sin didn’t cause this; it’s the fallenness of the world, the fallenness of our bodies. Let’s use the word amputate – traumatic amputation. In the ancient world, when you are the one cut off from the body of believers is as dreadful to you as it would be to your leg if it were severed from your body. In the ancient world lepers were amputated, you were excommunicated, from the worshipping and living body of believers. You were cut off from the land of the living. You were condemned to be part of the pile of detritus, the living dead and the dying living.

Jesus was traveling through the no-man’s-land between Galilee and Samaria. In the Gahenna of lepertown, there were ten men. “Jesus, master, have mercy.” They’re at a distance, remember, and their voices probably aren’t much more than a whisper, but that mustard-seed prayer of faith is directed to the Great Physician. Not “heal us,” not make us whole so we can return to the community, to our families, to the worship life of Israel – no, simply “Have mercy.” Mercy is all there is to rely upon: the loving God in the person of Jesus Christ, and His inclination to show mercy.

Mercy is not getting the punishment that you deserve. It’s the accused’s plea to a judge in court. It’s not an argument from strength; you have nothing with which to argue. It’s a prayer made from weakness; you have no position from which to plead. Yet the prayer, itself, is grounded in the strength of the one to whom the prayer is addressed. There is only Christ and His inclination to be merciful to unclean ones, those struggling under and in the fallenness of the world.

This is the simple, mustard-seed sized and faith-laden prayer of God’s faithful people of all ages. It is prayed in boldness and confidence; it’s whispered in moments of fear and dread; it’s cried in moments of despair and loneliness. In the hallways of hospitals, in the solitude of nursing home beds, in the fearful closeness of a prison, in the silence of the widower’s kitchen, in the coldness of family court, in the silence of the empty nest, in the blinding lights of the emergency room, in the stone-laden cemetery, the prayer, “Jesus, have mercy,” joins in the ancient echoes of the lepers.

The prayer of the faithful isn’t merely prayed into the empty voids of nothingness. The prayer for mercy is prayed through faith in Christ.

Remember, Jesus is going toward Jerusalem. He is going towards the cross. The cross is the place from whence mercy flows – mercy finds its source in the throne of Jesus that stands on Golgatha and flows from nail-pierced hands and feet. It’s ironic: mercy is not getting what you deserve. But Jesus gets what He doesn’t deserve. He doesn’t deserve to be beaten, or whipped, or crucified, or abandoned or die.  

He comes to restore that which was broken in man’s fall into sin. He comes to make right what has been wrong since the world was cursed by Eve and Adam’s action. He comes to heal the broken, diseased bodies of the world and to make them whole. He comes to re-establish the relationship between man and God. He comes to bind up the broken.

He takes the brokenness of the world into Himself and in His flesh and in His blood, carries it to the cross. With your cries of Lord have mercy, your kyrie eleisons confess your hope and trust, in faith, in the power of Christ to restore.  Christ mercies you until your beggar’s sack overflows. In the empty cross is a picture of the restoration that will take place in the resurrection of all flesh. Love, without end; forgiveness, without limit; hope, without fear; joy, without tears; peace, beyond understanding.

The He, who enters into humanity, answers. His answer is simple and direct: Go. Show yourself - to the priest, to the family, to the world! Show them what it is to have been mercied. Show them what is to receive pardon, to have a life sentence commuted, to have a death penalty absolved. Show them what it is that faith, in Christ, saves.

There is an interesting play on words, here: our translation says, “your faith has made you well.” It is better, more accurate, to say “Your faith has sanctified you,” that is, “Your faith has made you holy.” Here is why this is important.

In today’s world, it is popular and easy for a preacher to conclude a sermon on this text by saying, “So, if you have faith like this Samaritan leper, you too will be made well of all of your illnesses.” It’s a glory answer; more than that, it’s a chicken answer because it’s unfair. If you are made well from your illness, then obviously you have great faith, right? But what if you’re not healed? Does that mean you lack faith? It places the burden on you, the repentant child of God, that it’s somehow your fault you weren’t healed.

This isn’t what the text is saying. It’s a narrative; part of the story – part of the story that leads to the cross. That’s where Jesus is going: to Jerusalem, to the cross, to die. This side of heaven, we still live under that cross. Yes, it is an empty cross – to be sure, Christ has died; He is risen, risen, indeed! Alleluia! – but it is still a cross. This narrative does not promise you will be made well temporally, in the now. It does not promise, to use a very specific example, that an accident victim will be made whole and well again because of her faith or the mustard-seed prayers of this body of Christ interceding for her. That is the “Thy will be done,” remember – holding on with both hands to the promises of God, but doing so loosely so that whatever the answer, we are content with what the Lord gives. This narrative does promise that, regardless of the wholeness of the body, one is made holy now by the mercy of God given abundantly in Christ Jesus. And, in that last and great day, there will full and complete restoration and all sorrow and sighing, all cries of “Lord, have mercy” will disappear.

That is to come. Now, this is life under the cross. It is not easy, but it is light. It is not comfortable, but it is a comfort that we follow the one who showers mercy on us.  When life narrows down, there in the middle is Jesus.

So, go – show yourself to friends and family, to coworkers and neighbors. Let them see you have been mercied by Jesus. In your living, wherever that might be, give thanks to God for all He has done for you.