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The Tenth Leper From Nowhere
By Administrator | October 15, 2007
a sermon based on Luke 17:11-19
Palm Bay, FL October 14, 2007
by Rev. Scott Elliott
The verses you just heard (Luke 17;11-19) have Jesus traveling in a region between Samaria and Galilee and ten lepers being healed because Jesus told them to go and show themselves to priests, and they went to do just that.
I love this story!
There are probably a lot of pastors preaching that these verses are about Jesus’s use of supernatural power to cure lepers in a region between Samaria and Galilee. And to be fair that’s what the story says if you see it as an accurate historical account. Although I love this story I won’t be preaching about Jesus’s supernatural powers or even lepers between Samaria and Galilee. I just can’t. I can’t see that angle as accurate.
First of all there was no region between Samaria and Galilee for Jesus to visit. Those two regions bordered each other and Samaria was located between Galilee and Jerusalem. To read this story as literally true means believing Jesus and ten lepers were in a non-existent place. That’s hard to believe.
It’s also hard to believe that a human being could cure ten lepers of their disease by telling them to go and show themselves to priests.
Many Christians, though, see Jesus as a man who possessed the supernatural powers of a supernatural God. They are able to embrace today’s story as historic fact. Perhaps some of you understand Jesus this way. That’s okay. I’m not trying to change how you see Jesus.
But there are Christians (like me) and even non-Christians (like I used to be) who read and hear the story and find that as literal fact it does not work for them. To many Biblical stories such as The Ten Lepers are, in a word, unbelievable– at least as history. It makes no sense Jesus would’ve been in a non-existence place doing the impossible.
Many folks in our culture are taught to think of the Gospels as inerrant, literally accurate factual stories– as if they are affidavits by the writers which recount events God personally caused them to write, then notarized and validated by allowing them to be placed in the Bible. Consequently every word of a Gospel like Luke is claimed to be quite literally true.
To doubt the Gospels as history and the inerrancy of the words is to doubt not only the veracity of the saints, but, God’s own writing and stamp of authenticity.
Taken to extremes, to claim Luke is mistaken about the region between Samaria and Galilee (like I just did) is impermissible, heresy and a sin – geography, history and common sense notwithstanding.
To claim it’s unlikely the man Jesus cured ten lepers of their physical ailment with words is equally impermissible, heretical and sinful– science, medicine and common sense notwithstanding.
If understanding the Bible as the inerrant word of God and as literally true works for you, you don’t have these worries. But some of us do.
To those of us who have trouble accepting that the Bible is inerrant and its stories are accurate history, I want to make it clear that you can be a good person, you can be a Spirit-filled person, you can be a Christian and you can even be a pastor and not think of the Bible as inerrant and literal fact. It’s okay to rely on reason, have doubts and to be religious too.
In fact from a modern standpoint those who doubt the Bible are on solid ground. If you look in the Bible you won’t find God’s notary stamp anywhere. You won’t find a single verse that claims the Bible is inerrant or that the words were dictated by God. The Bible makes no claim of inerrancy. It makes no claim to be filled only with literal facts.
We don’t even have originals of the Gospels authors’ works, only bits and pieces of hand copies of hand copies of hand copies of oral statements of recollections of stories. Which in modern jurisprudence would be highly questionable evidence, a form of hearsay upon hearsay upon hearsay.
Today’s short story from Luke is not the only bit of the Bible that is questionable as fact. For example let’s just take the first chapter of the first book of the New Testament, Matthew. Matthew sets out a specific genealogy for Jesus that goes back nearly two thousand years to Abraham and leads up to Joseph a fellow we are later told was not even Jesus’ father. Records of birth and lineage for peasants like Joseph and Mary and Jesus just were not kept.
It defies reason to think that Matthew written some seventy years after Jesus’ birth would have had evidence of Jesus’, let alone Joseph’s, lineage going back some two thousand years. Matthew was not taking care to set out historical fact as we would expect a historian to do today. When it comes right down to it he blatantly plagiarized much of Joseph’s genealogy from the Old Testament and then massaged it here and there even cutting out generations (See, 2 Chron. 22).
And it’s not just Joseph Matthew messes with, the prophet Isaiah is misquoted in describing Mary. In Matthew 1:23 he quotes Isaiah as saying “Look the virgin will conceive” when in fact what Isaiah says is “Look the young woman is with child. . .” (Isa 7:14).
Many of you know I spent sixteen years as a lawyer before going to seminary. Lawyers are trained to go through documents and witnesses’ accounts and find the discrepancies, punch holes in their stories. Which is kind of what I quickly just did to the Luke text and the first chapter of the New Testament.
On a witness stand or at a deposition the authors of Matthew and Luke would be soundly thumped and discredited if “facts” were at issue. My point is not to show off lawyering skills, but, that the New Testament is fraught with problems when the application of modern reasoning is used to explore the text as inerrant history.
And lawyers are not the only ones who view things critically. Americans are by-and-large raised to employ critical reasoning in their thinking. Generally speaking we don’t accept things without viable proof.
It would not surprise me if one reason attendance at churches has dropped off in our day and age is because of the perception that churches demand a belief that the bible is inerrant, that not one word is factually inaccurate. Many educated people find that requirement unacceptable.
But as people of the Bible, as members of the United Church of Christ, we don’t have to see the Bible as inerrant or as about literal facts – we can choose to, but, we don’t have to. Such teachings are not even in the Bible.
In fact such teachings are relatively new. They arose in response to The Age of Reason’s use of empirical evidence and reason to prove things. Worried about challenges to their faith, about a hundred years ago fundamentalists began claiming the Bible was written by God, was inerrant and therefore was undeniable as proof.
This literal way of seeing the Bible, however, is literally not in the Bible. It’s manmade doctrine and you don’t have to believe in it if it does not help you experience or understand God.
It may surprise some of you to hear that what I am saying is not new or radical. Mainstream biblical scholars have long asserted and taught seminarians that the books of the Bible, and in particular the Gospels, were not intended by their authors to be a strictly historical account of what literally happened.
What these scholars, and pastors like Alicia and I, teach is that the books of the Bible were intended to reflect the community’s experiences of God. In other words the Gospels aim not to contain historical truths, but rather to contain theological truths.
This means that while the Bible may not set out inerrant factual accounts of events, it nonetheless contains truth. Truth. Now you may be scratching your head and asking “Can a document with untrue facts speak truth?” The answer is, of course, “Yes!”
First of all no one is claiming the Bible is void of historical information. The claim is that the bible was not meant to be taken as a word for word historic account of historic events. Scholars can and do comb through the bible to find echos of history and they are there.
For example the text in today’s story is stuffed full of useful historical information. Like Luke’s unfamiliarity with the geography of Palestine indicates he was probably not from Palestine, and the writing itself suggests the author was otherwise educated and aware of the make-me-clean-leper story in Mark 1:40-45 as well as the Old Testament story about Naaman the foreign leper that Elisha heals.
We can also see in the text the ancient near east custom restricting lepers to the outskirts of town and requiring them to call out to non-lepers as a warning. And we can see they were required to go to priests to receive an official okay to return to the community. We can also see that Jesus was known to travel between Galilee and Jerusalem.
And this is very interesting – one of the things I love about the story– we can hear that Jesus was known and remembered as a healer. Our modern ears, though, generally hear healing stories as asking us to believe Jesus performed supernatural events, that is miracles which are otherwise unbelievable. This seems to give us three basic choices with the healing stories (1) believe what is unbelievable (2) disbelieve what is unbelievable or (3) believe the unbelievable has metaphoric, that is symbolic truth.
I already revealed I love this story but find it unbelievable, so you know I have to be going with the metaphoric symbolic meaning option. You could, I suppose, do a lot with the story just as it stands to find symbolic truth. But it helps a whole bunch to understand that the term “healing” has a different meaning in Luke and Jesus’ context.
Today we tend to hear “healing” as the sustained and complete cure of a bodily or mental ailment. John Dominic Crossan, a renown Jesus Scholar asserts there is another meaning— that we need to understand there are “two aspects of sickness: disease and illness” and there is a difference between curing a disease and healing an illness (Ibid.).
A disease is caused by an abnormality in a biological function which is best cured by a medical practitioner (Ibid.).
Healing, on the other hand, addresses the experience and meaning of being perceived or seen as diseased. How others perceive and see a person as ill is best remedied by a Spirit person (Birth,294), a Holy man or woman.
Applying all this to Jesus’ healing the lepers stories might go like this: lepers had a skin disease (perhaps something as common as acne or psoriasis) which in Jesus’ day made them unclean and outcasts from society – think of this extreme undesirability as their illness.
Since uncleanliness is a label derived from social constructs, what Jesus did was remove the labels. He altered the perception by declaring the unclean clean and then treating them as such (Birth 293-304, Jesus, 78-84).
We can see this in Luke 5 (12-16) where a leper says to Jesus “[I]f you choose you can make me clean.’[Jesus] stretched out his hand and touched him, saying, ‘I do choose. Be made clean.’” Jesus heals the leper’s illness of being seen as an untouchable-unclean-outcast. He does this by touching him, declaring him clean and making him an acceptable member of his community. As a consequence the leper is no longer untouchable, an outcast or unclean. He is healed of his outcast status– his illness– though not cured of the underlying physical disease.
Crossan calls parables “a made up story with a powerful theological punch.” He thinks that the Gospel writers like Luke were not afraid to create parables out of Jesus life to make their own theological point. 2 This comports with others who think the writer of Luke expanded the Mark story and Jesus’ reputation as a “healer” to create his own lesson.
What could be the theological point of ten lepers being healed and only one, a hated and despised Samaritan–the lowest of the low– responding by thanking God and falling before Jesus in gratitude?
Another Jesus Scholar, Marcus Borg, writes that metaphors are about seeing, not believing. “Metaphor is poetry plus, not factuality minus. . . .metaphor is not less than fact but more.”3
If we see today’s story as metaphor we can see more than just facts, more than Jesus making ten lepers well and only one saying thanks.
We can see Jesus being remembered as a Spirit person, a Holy man, who on one level transformed lives by in essence saying: “You are not an outcast in my community. I hereby heal you of the social declaration that you are ill by denying its validity. I do not perceive you as ill, so be healed.”
When we see the story like this the good news is that like Jesus we are capable of the same type of healing powers:
“HIV sufferer you are not an outcast in our community. Be healed.”
“Alcoholic, drug abuser you are not outcasts in our community. Be healed.”
“Anyone with a disability you are not outcasts in my community. Be healed.”
And we know that Jesus did not just limit this healing power to those who were seen as ill. He healed all outcasts. There is a memory of this in today’s scripture Can you hear Jesus communicate “Samaritan you are not an outcast in my community be healed?” We can hear similar memories elsewhere in other Jesus stories: “Tax collector you are not an outcast in my community, be healed.” “Prostitute you are not an outcast in my community, be healed.” “Women and children you are not outcasts in my community be healed.”
There is, then, more good news: we can do this type of healing too.
“Red, yellow, black and white you are not outcasts in our community be healed.”
“Homeless, lonely, rich and poor, you are not outcasts in our community. Be healed.”
” Lesbian, gay, bi, transgendered you are not outcasts in our community. Be healed.”
Seeing the story in this light Jesus’ supernatural power is transformed to a power we can all wield for good – for God– as Holy men and Holy women .
That insight alone is amazing. But, there is more. Jesus tells the ten to comply with the purity laws and go to the priests. The nine who left did nothing wrong by piously following the law, but, they missed out doing the one thing that could transform not just their outcast status but their very being.
Beyond following the rules and regulations is the power of personal response to Grace. Grace is free, it’s given with no strings. Anyone even the lowest of the low, even a lawyer, even a non-Christian, even a foreign Samaritan leper, even any one of us can be saved from our lesser self by personally responding to God’s gift of Grace. Not because we have to–we don’t– but because turning to God makes us better, makes us well.
As metaphor this story proclaims the ultimate good news in every sense of the word. No matter who you are, no matter what you’ve done, no matter how low in life you or others may see you, if you turn toward God – just turn to God– you will be exalted and you will be better.
You will, in fact, be well.
Amen.
——————-end notes————————————-
1. Most of these ideas come from Funk, The Acts of Jesus: What Did Jesus Really Say? HarperSanFrancisco, 1998, 328-329.
2.Crossan, John Dominic, “Sermon Delivered on December 2, 2001 at Trinity Episcopal Cathedral,” from an unpublished copy of the sermon.
3. Borg, Marcus, Reading the Bible for the First Time, 41.
The notes in the parentheses refer to two works by John Dominic Crossan: The Birth of Christianity, San Francisco: HarperSanFranciso, 1998 and The Historical Jesus, San Francisco: HarperSanFranciso, 1992.
Copyright Scott Elliott © 2007
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