Mercy For Lepers - 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 lesson from Luke, read earlier.

Leprosy. It was to the ancient world what Covid-19 was five years ago, or AIDS in the 80s, or polio back in the 1950s: a dangerous, debilitating, likely life-threatening disease. Thank God – I use that literally – leprosy is relatively rare, so we are rather unfamiliar with it. Without getting into terribly gory details, leprosy rotted the flesh while also disrupting the nervous system. Imagine the worst case of sunburn you could possibly have – that deep, burning, aching feeling, where nothing really eases the pain that radiates into the bones. It hurts to sit, stand, lay; it hurts to move; it hurts to be still. It’s always there. That was leprosy - except a sunburn, eventually, goes away. Leprosy rarely did, if ever. And, unlike a sunburn, leprosy was also contagious. As a result, a person who was a leper was banished from town, forced to live in the leper colony. There, among the lepers, the diseased would live while passers-by, family and friends remained at a distance, warned off by the dry, raspy cries (the throat and vocal cords were also impacted by the dreaded disease), “Unclean! Unclean!” Adding insult to injury, the disease made them ceremonially unclean: rotten, as it were, physically and spiritually, inside and out. Contact was forbidden, but lest the touched person also become guilty by association, contaminated by contact. So the lepers were de facto ex communicated. Ex communicated: literally, from community; even more literal, away from within the unity. Outside the worshipping community, unable to attend worship, unable to make sacrifice, they were the unatoned-for. They were doubly, triply damned. They were reminded constantly of this as they sat, stood, or laid on the outside looking in.

Leprosy bacteria hi-res stock photography and images - Alamy

In every sense of the word, these lepers were dead men walking. Or sitting. Or lying, prostrate, unable to stand to wave off unaware travelers. In a way, death would be a blessed answer to prayer – at least, the pain would stop. And, they would no longer be the “Unclean” outside of town.

It is no wonder, then, that when Jesus passed by, their sad, melancholy chorus changed lyrics. Their uncleanliness was without question; their need unparallelled; their lives and any hope of returning to community from their leprous exile were at stake. Did they know who Jesus was? I suspect they heard of Him. Could they confess with Peter, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God?” Maybe not, but they knew enough to call to Him by name, Jesus, and speak of Him as Master, recognized Him as the Miracle Worker. Where no one else could help, no doctor able to fix leprosy, perhaps He would. “Jesus, Master, have mercy on us!”

“Have mercy.” It’s the cry of God’s people: have mercy on me, a sinner. We pray this in church, still today: Lord, have mercy – Kyrie, eleison. Mercy: it means don’t give us what we deserve! It’s as if they were saying, “Humanly speaking, we know the terrible end result of our disease, but instead, have mercy – don’t let us die, don’t let us die out here, don’t let us die away from God’s house and blessing. Restore us to the community, to our families, to the house of God, to relationship with God! Don’t leave us in this life of misery or in the life of agony to come!” No debating about merit or worth, here. Death is the great equalizer. Whatever their status had been before, whatever their sitz im Leben may have been previously, they were equal as lepers: sinners all, dying, abandoned, excommunicated, outside the congregation, outside the people of God, begging for Jesus’ mercy on them.

“Go, show yourselves to the priests.” I wonder how Jesus spoke. Did He call out loudly, like He was the coach calling to the right fielder to back up? Did He speak gently, like a grandfather’s calming voice to a child who was convinced he was about to bleed to death from a scuffed knee? Did He speak with the force of a wife commanding her husband to give up and go to the doctor!  We don’t know. It wouldn’t surprise me if it wasn’t the same calm, gentle voice He used when talking to the prostitute who escaped being stoned, or to Lazarus who had shinnied up a tree, or to Peter who a few days earlier denied Him thrice. I wonder, too, if the lepers weren’t somewhat disappointed. Jesus didn’t do anything dramatic. He didn’t spit in the dirt and make a salve for their bodies. The lepers weren’t given anything to do. There was no preparation before presentation - nothing like Namaan’s river washing or the Pharisees ritual public scrubbing. Just “Go.”

To their absolute credit, they went. They didn’t stay in the dirt, complaining, “What’s the use…it’ll just hurt all the more to be rejected again, sent back here.” They got up and went, as instructed. Their cry of faith was met with action of believing. Those ten men, those dying men, those dead men walking, they got up and started walking to town. Remember the picture of the Revolutionary War soldiers, bandaged up and bleeding, marching, playing a flute, a drum, and with a flag waving? I imagine a much less glamorous dectet of raggedy men: stinky, bandaged, limping, staggering, fly-chased lepers making their way down the road. What else could they do? They had nothing to negotiate with, nothing to offer, nothing to present to Jesus. “Nothing in my hands I bring…”…As if their hands could hold anything, anyway. All they had was faith, faith clinging to the mercy of Jesus, the Master.  

That’s what mercy does – more to the point, that’s what God’s mercy does in Christ Jesus. Mercy, remember, means “don’t give us what we deserve.”  Jesus takes our place. God takes what we deserve and He places it upon His Son, Jesus. “While we were still sinners, Christ died for us,” the Bible says. He dies the sinner’s death, paying sin’s wages. He dies, satisfying God’s wrath against sin’s corruption. He dies, so we do not die eternally. The cross stands as the eternal monument of mercy: the cross is not our instrument of suffering and death; instead, it becomes the instrument of salvation. Mercy takes Jesus to the cross; mercy spares us from the cross; mercy rescues us from eternal hell. Mercy is Jesus taking our place so we are restored to the Father, the separation caused by sin destroyed by the life, death and resurrection of Christ Jesus. 

In His mercy, Jesus doesn’t make us clean up, first, making ourselves presentable to Him. In fact, He doesn’t even make us crawl to His feet. He comes to us – even here, mercy overflows…

I wonder when they realized they were healed. Did it take ten steps? A hundred feet? A thousand yards. How long did it take to make that sudden realization: “My feet…I can feel the gravel beneath them…my hands don’t hurt…I can grasp my fellow leper’s arm for balance – but I don’t need it anymore!” Mercy overflows…

Yet, the Nine didn’t turn around. To be fair, I wonder if they even connected their healing with Jesus. After all, “Go” was a far cry from some of the miraculous actions He did elsewhere. There was no touch, no spitting in the dirt to make mud. Even after crying out for His mercy, did they realize His mercy was what healed?  Mercy prayed for, mercy received…mercy missed.

We criticize the nine for not turning around, perhaps rightly so. But, be careful: how often do we forget to thank God for His mercy in our lives? We have a bad headache (allergies, you know) and take two Tylenol. When the headache goes away, how often do we thank God? When our bellies growl and then our appetite is satiated with a bag of microwave popcorn, do we thank God for the simple snack? We are quick to point out the error of the Nine, only to realize we are among the Nine – tooling along, oblivious to God’s rich mercy in our daily lives.

But Luke says one returned, noting he was a Samaritan, giving thanks to God, Immanuel, God-in-flesh, whose simple word was rich in mercy. I wonder what was different about him, besides that he was a Samaritan. Maybe his leprosy was worse than the others; maybe he was closer than the others to death’s blessed door; maybe his leprosy had only recently begun and he saw what awaited him.  Regardless, after going, he returned thanking and praising God, falling on his face, that beautiful, restored, luxurious, radiant skin that would cause a dermatologist envy, falling prostrate to thank Jesus for the mercy that had been extended to him.

“He gives me…all this out of Fatherly Divine goodness and mercy, without any merit or worthiness in me. For all which it is my duty to thank, praise, serve and obey Him.”

What else can a formerly dead man do but give thanks and praise to God?

Yours, dear friend, is the baptized life. You, too, were formerly dead and now alive to God in Christ Jesus. “Or do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? We were buried therefore with him by baptism into death, in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life,” (Romans 6: 3-4).

Yours is a walking in that newness of life, enlivened by the mercy of God. Reunited to God, restored to wholeness with the Father thru Jesus, He also calls and gathers you into His body, the Church, into the congregation of believers made whole and holy by God’s grace through faith in Jesus.

It’s funny, if you think of it. The lepers were gathered together because of their mutual misery caused by a disease. We are gathered together by the Spirit of God to receive the mercy of Christ, but also to walk alongside each other through this journey through the valley of the shadow. This side of heaven, we still struggle, and for some of us, with the various aches and pains, greater or lesser, and illnesses and diseases, lesser or greater, those are truly a terrible struggle – not all that dislike what those lepers faced two millenia ago. 

The longer I serve as a pastor, the more I understand the depth, and the yearning, behind St. John’s final words in the Bible: “Come quickly, Lord Jesus, come.” As much as I appreciate medical professionals and the skill God has given them, I yearn for the day when doctors and nurses are unemployed because in the resurrection, they will no longer be needed. I am eagerly awaiting the day when every cop, fireman and paramedic no longer has to see the worst that society has to offer, and when pastors no longer have to hold grieving mothers and fathers, sons and daughters, sisters and brothers, while they stand at the foot of a hospital bed, unable to do anything but pray, commending the beloved to the Lord. I am eagerly anticipating the day when Jesus voids the “lifetime warranty” of graves, caskets, and vaults when Jesus returns and raises the dead.

Isaiah speaks about the day when sorrow and sighing will pass away. To that, we add those things that cause sorrow and sighing – leprosy, Covid, cancer, AIDS, Alzheimer’s, you name it! – and they will all be gone. And, in that day of resurrection, we’ll join the former leper - whom we only know now as the Samaritan – in falling at the feet of Jesus, offering eternal thanks and praise.

Amen.