28th Sunday Ordinary Time
2 Kings 5:14-17
2 Timothy 2:8-13
Luke 17:11-19
What I love about the gospels is that no matter how many times I read them, I am always discovering new ways of understanding them. I had always read today’s passage from Luke as a moralistic lesson in the virtue of gratitude. This is no doubt part of the message, but I have come to believe the story has a deeper point to make.
We all need appreciation and gratitude at times. But God is not like us—God does not need anything from us. Let’s not make the mistake of creating a God in our own image. It is good for us to express gratitude for the many gifts God us. Good health ought to be at the top of the list. But I do not think the main point of this story is the importance of giving thanks for our blessings.
“And it happened that, as they went, they were cleansed.” How did this “happen”? Unlike other accounts of Jesus’s healing power, this story never clearly states Jesus cleansed anyone. The lepers stand “far off” and ask Jesus to have mercy on them. Usually, Jesus not only says words of healing, he needs to touch those he heals, making it clear what he is doing. In one case, a woman believes she needs to put her hands on his garments to receive his healing power, and Jesus notices the healing power leaving him (Mark 524-34). It seems as though people understood physical contact with Jesus was a necessary part of the healing process.
Jesus does not tell the lepers he has healed their leprosy, but only to show themselves to the priests. Jewish Law required lepers to live apart from the community because of the fear of contagion. This was why these lepers stood far away from Jesus. Jewish Law also required healed lepers to show themselves to a priest to verify they no longer had the disease (Leviticus 14:2-32).
These lepers found themselves in a situation we may well be familiar with. We ask God for something, and then “it happens.” Perhaps not immediately, there may be a delay, as in this case, and that makes a difference. The delay may make us wonder if it was our prayer, or some other cause, that led to the desired effect.
The key to this story is the word “seeing,” in Greek, idṑn. This word means not only bodily vision, but as in English, it connotes to take heed, to be aware, to experience. It also means “to take care” of something, as when we give an order to someone and say, “see to it.”
The lepers stand far off and need to raise their voices so Jesus will hear them. He then “sees” them. This means he not only becomes aware of them, he also experiences their situation and moves to take care of them. It is this deeper sense of seeing that sets our story into motion.
All the lepers are “cleansed” of their disease. Is it significant that we are told that Samaritan is the one leper who “sees that he is healed”? I think the words seeing (idṑn) and healing are important here. It is hard to imagine the other lepers did not become aware their leprosy had left them. But the Samaritan is the one who really sees what is happening. He experiences his new reality at a deeper level, as not only a cleansing, but a healing. He seems to have had a greater awareness of what was happening, why it was happening, and because of this was moved to action—to take care of it. What does he do?
He returns “glorifying God with a loud voice.” This loud voice echoes the raised voices of the ten lepers when they asked Jesus for mercy at the start of the story. Notice also his first move is to give glory to God. There is no reason to believe this leper saw Jesus as God. He later fell on his face at Jesus’s feet and thanked him, evidently for his role in procuring God’s healing action.
Why does Jesus then say, “your faith has saved you.”? The leper has showed us one way faith operates.
We are familiar with the cliché “seeing is believing.” This episode sheds light on the paradoxical truth that, conversely, “believing is seeing.” And not only “seeing” but also experiencing our reality with greater awareness. What we perceive, experience, and take care of is already shaped by what we believe. Jesus understands this and it is why, after he observes the Samaritan’s words glorifying God for his healing, Jesus praises the Samaritan for his faith. Jesus realizes that the Samaritan, unlike the other nine, “saw” that God had healed him and was therefore moved to praise and thanksgiving. The Samaritan’s “seeing” of God’s healing further strengthened his faith, so in this way seeing was also believing for him. The other lepers apparently lacked the faith necessary to “see” God at work in their lives.
The story is instructive for us because we may sometimes be misled about how biblical miracles work. We may sometimes wonder why there are so many miracles in the Bible, and so few in our time and place. The record of this healing reveals that is not the right way to think about miracles. We can see here, as elsewhere, plenty of people “see” God’s or Jesus’s “mighty works” yet are not moved to faith by these miracles. Alternative explanations are always available, then as now. If you believe God is at work in your life and the lives of others, you will come to “see” many miracles happen.
Faith invites us to “see” reality in a fundamentally different way from a faithless perspective. You might even say, “believing is seeing!”
