Grace without boundaries and preconditions

 ‘…Get up and go on your way; your faith has made you well...’ (Luke 17:19)

Pic:  discilplebits        

Luke 17:11-19 (Year C: Trinity+20)

Hanging out with the other side

Jesus was skirting the borders of Samaria and Galilee. This was troublesome territory on the borders between two very similar but ethnically, religiously and politically hostile communities. It was as if Jesus were walking up the Garvaghy Road in Portadown Northern Ireland or along the international frontier at Aughnacloy some miles to the West! We humans, like to mark out our territories, our identities and our values.  Boundaries offer security, clarity and a sense of place when anxieties and lack of familiarity with the ‘Others’ press in upon us. And, in case we were to stereotype our sisters and brothers in the ‘North’ we might reflect on the significance of Jesus walking today, along one of the major dual carriageways here in the ‘South’ around Dublin and Cork that mark out diverse social communities by virtue of income, wealth, employment and status.  Witness the postal numbering controversies over the years! And, as is widely known, ethnicity and migrant status is often correlated with concentrations of wealth and status in the labour market.

Healing of leprosy is referred to many times in the scriptures. In today’s ‘advanced economies’ leprosy has been abolished.  A few centuries ago leper hospitals and colonies were common.  Here, in Dublin, Townsend Street is translated as ‘Sráid na Lobhar’ where, it is believed a place for lepers (lobhair) used to be.  Note that when the new arrivals took over they just named it ‘Town’s End’. That sounds better. Further east the natives were removed to, literally, ‘Irishtown’ beside An Rinn – land’s end.  All societies, tribes and in-groups know how to include and to exclude.

Leprosy has been abolished in most parts of the world today. Yet, needlessly, large numbers suffer from this disease notwithstanding the dramatic improvements in recent decades according to World Health Organisation statistics here.  The horrors of leprosy both in Jesus’ time and in the current world provide some of the most disturbing images to us. This is a preventable disease.

What is the point of this story about Jesus walking the border where a group of lepers approach him and yet kept their distance?  In the first place, Jesus was not supposed to be hanging around people like theies and in places like that. In the second place it appears that among the lepers were people from ‘the other side’. Yet again we see and hear Jesus going beyond the boundaries of acceptable religious custom and regulation. As might be heard in respectable ecclesiastical, administrative or political circles today, Jesus was a ‘troublesome sort’.

A troublesome sort

Being regarded as ‘troublesome’ did not stop Jesus from reaching out to the stranger and the outcast. Yet, one is struck time and time again in the gospels, including that of Luke which was probably written for the new gentile Christians of the 80’s, that Jesus very much sticks with custom and tradition when the occasion demanded it. Hence, he follows the counsel of Leviticus 14:1-9 in saying to the lepers to ‘go and show yourselves to the priests’ (v. 14).

We may note that the lepers followed this advice instantly even though they had leprosy. It was in going along in trust that the healing happened. The lepers had to make that move first in response to the call and grace of Jesus. First, there was a call of despair (‘Jesus, Master, have mercy on us’ in v. 13) followed by a brief exchange in which Jesus bids them to show themselves to the priests. Then came the miracle ‘as they went’. We might add ‘as they went in trust and faith’. Nine of them continued on their way while one turned back to say thanks (translated from the Greek word eucharistōn). This was more than a mere courtesy.  The ‘so what’ of this story was the way in which a ‘foreigner’ and a leper at that was filled with praise and thanksgiving for God who had worked in and through Jesus (a echo of this episode may be found in 2 Kings 5:15 where the foreign leper Naaman visits the Israelite prophet Elisha). Luke seizes the moment to make an important theological point: healing and salvation are for everyone – everyone.  The grateful Samaritan leper took it upon himself to prostrate himself at the feet of Jesus and thank him.  Later on, others would find themselves prostrated at the foot of the cross where the feet of Jesus were raised above them on high. ‘Truly this man was the son of God’ as John Wayne once said in quotation of the Roman centurion in the gospels!

In Luke we find a special place for prayer in the life of Jesus and of his disciples. The prayer of the lepers is what, today, is called the ‘Jesus prayer’. The Jesus prayer – ‘Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner’ is on the lips of many outcasts, excluded and sick persons. In the times and culture of Jesus, sickness was sometimes understood to be a sign of sinfulness (if not on the part of the sick person then on the part of someone else from whom the sickness was inherited or deserved as the thinking went). How fitting that a simple and powerful prayer such as the ‘Jesus prayer’ so popular among Christians in the East, today, was first composed by the excluded including, in this story, the marginal and outcast ‘stateless’ persons in a wilderness beside a border somewhere.

In the saying ‘Get up and go on your way; your faith has made you well’ we are encouraged to rise from our worries and lows and be ‘on our way’ – a way that is unique to each of us who is called.  It is faith and trust that make this possible and we are the better for it.

Many are those from diverse backgrounds and conditions of life entering the kingdom of heaven today with hearts of praise and thanksgiving. We do well to make a list of 10 things to be genuinely thankful for every day before breakfast starting with ‘I am alive’ and hopefully we can say ‘I am healthy’, etc., etc.

Two words

Might we find ourselves just some of the time as types of ‘inside-out lepers’ – all squeaky and shiny on the outside but all wounded and deeply hurt on the inside and excluded from the normal society of normal persons and far from God – so it would seem? This is a time of healing when Jesus sees us from what seems afar. At this time two words suffice: ‘Jesus Mercy’. A glance, a breath, a pause and go on our way. It is enough…