For Sunday, October 9, 2016 – Luke 17:11-19
Jesus is walking through an unidentified region between Samaria and Galilee. Where is your “in between” these days? What ideas, beliefs and attitudes are you walking away from and toward? How does Samaria—all that seems foreign, unknown, less desired—confront the familiarity of your Galilee? Again and again, we find ourselves in between who we have been and who we are becoming, what we have known for sure and what we are just beginning to learn, our confirmed perceptions and our shocking discoveries. Jesus was not afraid to explore the unidentified regions in between. Watching him, we learn the way.
As Jesus enters a village in the land of in-between, ten people with leprosy confront him. Perhaps we cannot relate easily to the scourge of leprosy, but we can imagine other isolating afflictions—fierce temper, blaming and shaming, brutish pride. What keeps us on the fringes, afraid to be ourselves, afraid of others? From a distance, they call out to Jesus a prayer that many of us also have cried: “Jesus, Master, have mercy on us!” Who knows how long they have been imprisoned by their condition, trapped in the in-between. Who knows how long they have wished and hoped and lost all hope and yet dared to hope again when there comes a moment that hoping and wishing become words, and words open the way for action, and suddenly they discover a shocking reality—healing is closer than they dreamed.
Jesus tells them to leave their old story, their familiar positions, and to go where they have never dared to go before—out on the public paths, all the way to the priests. Their wider community—neighbors and shop owners and beggars and priests—all need to see what hope-becoming-words-becoming-action looks like. On the way, they are healed. Not before they go, but as they go, they are made clean. In the turning and the crying out and the going lies their salvation. Only one of the ten notices and returns to give thanks. Do the rest of us continue to live chained to our past, convinced of our leprosy, unable to live into our healing? We can wander forever in the in-between spaces—feeling uncertain, unwanted, unheard—or we can name our need and turn and walk another way. Healing awaits us. Will we recognize it when it comes?
