Oct. 14, 2007

By Harry T. Cook

Luke 17: 11-19

Anybody who had parents like I had or went to a Sunday School like the one I attended learned that one of the cardinal Christian virtues is supposed to be gratitude.

When I was a kid and extended family members came to my birthday parties, I could hardly get a present opened before either Mom or Dad turned to me with raised eyebrows and said, “Harry, aren’t you going to say ‘Thank you’ to Aunt This or Uncle That?” And it wasn’t really a question. I was always on the point of saying ‘Thank you’ but couldn’t get the words out fast enough to suit my resident super-egos.

If a gift had come in the mail, the dinner dishes would scarcely be cleared before pen and paper were set before me to write the obligatory ‘Thank You’ note. I had already figured out that the sure way to keep getting Christmas and birthday presents was to express prompt thanks for the ones that had already come. I fear that my supposed gratitude may have been a tad calculating.

Preachers all over what’s left of Christendom today will make a big deal of gratitude, making negative examples of the nine lepers depicted in today’s gospel as being miraculously healed but failing to express gratitude and a positive example of the one who came back, as the text said praising God.

Gratitude is important, and there’s nothing inherently wrong about praising an imagined deity if that’s what thrills a person. Neither gratitude nor praise, though, is the point of this story of the 10 lepers who approached Jesus whom they call “Master,” or in the language in which Luke wrote, Epistata, meaning “one who stands over, one who makes things happen.”

As the story goes, the lepers are told to follow the extant religious law pertaining to such things, and go and show themselves to the priests who would, supposedly, decide if some sin or another had rendered them unclean or whatever. As they go, Luke says, they were cured. – This may be Luke saying in a gently snide kind of way that the priests were useless in such matters, and that mere attention given by his hero, Jesus, did the trick.

But other details are more important. Luke says there were 10 lepers – 10 being a minyan, that is the minimum number of males needed to constitute a Jewish community. So Luke may be saying that an entire community of outcasts summoned sufficient chutzpah to confront an epistata to ask for … for what? For treatment? For healing? No, for mercy, that is for “compassion.”

“Feel for us. Feel our pain,” is what Luke imagined them saying. The Jesus of Luke’s imagination does, indeed, feel their pain. And therein is an amazing thing all in itself. A person Luke deliberately describes as the Great Master, the messiah, even, is depicted as being accessible to a community of outcasts. This is the central point of the story. It is one of the things that causes the liberation theologians to say that “God is on the side of the disadvantaged.”

Everything we know about how the world works makes people pushed to the margins by economic and social injustice absolutely out of sight and out of mind insofar as of those in power are concerned.

Luke’s story is telling us that the baptismal covenant under which we operate requires us to be fully accessible to outcasts – to the lepers of our time, that is, to those whom society in general marginalizes or shuts out. Is it really necessary to say who they are? We know who they are.

The wonderful twist at the end of Luke’s leper story is that the one who returns to the epistata, thinking perhaps he was the source of his healing, is a Samaritan – an outcast among outcasts. Residents of Samaria were considered by their Judean neighbors to be unclean because their ancestors had generations earlier intermarried with Assyrians.

The Samaritan leper’s journey to wholeness began with his being taken seriously in spite of who he was and what he was, maybe even because of who he was and what he was.

Those in the Anglican Communion and the Episcopal Church U.S.A. who continue to marginalize gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender persons solely on that basis will never understand the point of Luke’s story. And it is they who insist that the Bible is the primary authority for the Church. Ignoring the obvious point of the story of the lepers and the Samaritan, they fish around for proof-texts that support their own narrow homophobia, and in so doing prove themselves to be anything but Christian.

My mother would say that they are “more to be pitied and certainly not condoned.”

© Copyright 2007, Harry T. Cook. All rights reserved. This article may not be used or reproduced without proper credit.