Posts Tagged ‘leprosy’

Gratitude or salvation – the thankful leper

October 11, 2025

Pentecost 18 – 2025

Luke 17:11-19

Marian Free

In the name of God who leaves no one out and no one behind. Amen.

Ward 13 is the last remaining structure of the former Dunwich Benevolent Asylum on Stradbroke Island in Morton Bay. Stradbroke Island is 62 Kilometres from the mainland and 2 hours 8 minutes by boat. The Benevolent Asylum housed many different groups of people particularly those who were unable to support themselves for a variety of reasons – age, unemployment, illness or mental or physical disability. Immediately next to the Asylum and beside a swamp was a Lazaret – which housed men who were diagnosed with leprosy – a disease which, rightly or wrongly was deemed an incurable, communicable disease.

A visit to Ward 13 and the associated information centre reveals just how isolating and cruel the treatment of lepers used to be. A person, once diagnosed, was sent to Stradbroke (and later Peel) Island with no hope of ever returning home. A married man would never set eyes on his wife and children again. A child would be separated forever from her siblings and a mother from her children. Though the care of such people seems to have been reasonable, nothing would ever have made up for the stigma, the shame, the self-loathing, the pain, but above all the isolation and the sense of loss.

Leprosy which leads to the damaging of nerve endings and the disfigurement and subsequent loss of digits, hands, feet and even limbs is a dehumanising disease which for millenia created fear and disgust in the wider community. A leper not only had to deal with the disease and its consequences, but also with the reaction of those around them. In order to protect themselves, communities from ancient times have secluded and excluded not only those with the disease that we know to be leprosy, but also those with any form of obvious skin disease[1]. This is why the lepers in our gospel story this morning are keeping their distance from Jesus.

For obvious reasons, Jesus’ healing of the lepers is most often interpreted as a story of gratitude – the gratitude of the Samaritan in contrast with the apparent self-absorption of the nine. There are a few problems with this simplistic approach, perhaps the most serious of which is the implication that gratitude is an obligation. The idea that God demands our gratitude turns gratitude from a freely offered reaction to God’s love to a formal, superficial response. Gratitude that is not freely given is not really gratitude but rather the rote observation of a code of conduct. It does not come from the heart but is simply the fulfilment of an expectation. 

Another problem with an emphasis on gratitude is the implied judgement of the nine who did not return and the belief that Jesus’ comment is pejorative and judgemental. Certainly, Jesus expresses astonishment and perhaps disappointment that nine of the ten did not return, but after all they were doing what Jesus told them to do. 

Luke’s first readers will have noticed a number of other surprises that are at least, if not more, significant than gratitude or lack of it. Firstly, the one who did return was a Samaritan, a person who was doubly burdened by the disease and by his race, who was considered doubly unclean because of the leprosy and his exclusion from the religious practices of the Jews.  He was an outsider. He did not, could not belong.

Readers would also have been surprised that it was the Samaritan, a man who not Jewish by heritage, who was the only one of the ten to identify the hand of God in his healing and therefore the only one to recognise that Jesus was God, that is, the only one of the ten to demonstrate that he truly belonged in the family of God[2]. 

A third and perhaps the most important surprise for the first readers of this gospel would have been Jesus’ response to the Samaritan’s declaration. Here, unfortunately, our translation lets us down. The English usually reads: “Get up and go on your way; your faith has made you well.” This leads us to the conclusion that faith and wellness are connected and to the misconception that if only we have enough faith we will be made well. In fact, it is only after the Samaritan notices that he is healed that he understands that the one who made him well is God – his healing has led to faith, not the other way around. 

The Greek text makes more sense of this order of events. Jesus actually says: “your faith has saved you”. By identifying Jesus as God, the Samaritan has been saved from exclusion and has earned the salvation previously associated only with the Hebrews. In other words, the Samaritan’s faith has earned him a place in the people of God. The one who was doubly excluded – from his community and from God’s family has been doubly saved – restored to his family and friends and saved in the sense of becoming a child of God.

In my experience, it is much easier to construct a faith based on rules and expectations. Many of us want to know what to do and how to behave so that we can be sure to get it right.  Such a view can lead to rote performances of gratitude and praise, a desire to please instead of a wiliness to be pleased.

The Samaritan shows us that our sense of belonging depends not on timidly, fearfully doing things that might earn us God’s good favour, but by recognising that God’s abundant love is already poured out on us and responding freely and spontaneously with joyful gratitude and praise that springs from our wonder and delight at all that God does in and for us.

Let us not be tied down by rote observance of rules, but liberated to joyfully and gratefully praise the God who has already saved us.

[1] That “leprosy” included diseases which could be cured or could be temporary, is evidenced by the fact that those who were “healed” could be reinstated into the community if the priest gave them the all-clear.

[2] In fact, the Samaritan has a unique role in this gospel as he is the only one apart from Peter, who identifies Jesus as God, a point that is often overlooked. 

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“Socks or the Cinema?”

October 8, 2022

Pentecost 18 – 2022
Luke 17:11-19
Marian Free

In the name of God, Creator, Redeemer, and Sanctifier. Amen.

When we downsized, I gave away most of my library knowing that should I need to refer to any of my books, they would almost certainly be easily accessible in digital form. Failing that I would find them at the College Library. There are some books though, that I find impossible to give away. These are usually books with deep wisdom or insight, books that have enriched my life and to which I return again and again. I am particularly careful with such books and if I lose them I will search everywhere until I can replace them. One such book was recommended to me when I was still in theological college. Poor in Spirit – Modern Parables of the Reign of God by Charles Lepetit . It is probably irreplaceable.

Poor in Spirit contains fifty stories which recall encounters that have changed the lives of their writers. Some are set in a western urban setting, but most tell of experiences in third world countries, of people who according to Lepetit : “are hungry, marginalised, handicapped. They make a living by working too hard. They all have one thing in common: that of the heart.” The stories tell of generosity to a stranger, being blessed by a beggar and of receiving a gift from another, of praising God with an empty stomach and nothing to feed the children. Above all the stories tell of joy and gratitude and of the grace and hope that can coexist with the most dire poverty and in the most desperate of situations.

One story, “Socks or the Cinema?” comes from North Africa and was shared by Lisa. She begins: “They found him one morning lying by his bike under a leaden August sky. Death must have come suddenly. It was him alright in his usual blue work trousers, shirt, grey woollen cap and orthopaedic shoes. He had been struck by leprosy and cruelly. Most of each foot and all ten fingers were gone. It was torture for him to walk. His face was disfigured, but an extraordinary smile transfigured it. Yet those same eyes had stared at leprosy face to face. At the most terrible moment of the disease our friend had tried to drown himself. ‘But even the sea didn’t want me, and I was washed up on the beach.’

“Our friend would wear stumps of his hands raw, filling his customer’s bags with charcoal. He said: ‘Hunger is a terrible thing. Once I had no work, and nothing to eat. At last I said to myself: ‘I will just have to start begging.’ I had never learned how. I sat by someone’s door and tried to think what to call out, but all that came out was a cry because I began to weep aloud. I left in a hurry and walked all night. Then I saw a freshly baked loaf of bread that someone had forgotten on top of a little wall. I understood that God was watching over me.”

“One day he announced that he had a guest, someone with the same disease who cuts grass for sheep and sells it at the market. ‘Yesterday he returned with three beautiful coins. He had found them on the pavement.’ ‘What shall we do with them he asked?’ We thought about it. Then I said to him, ‘It is true that you need new socks. But this money here, we haven’t earned it. God has given it to us. Why don’t we go to the cinema? One needs a change of scene sometimes.’
“’So we went to the cinema, and we had a very nice evening.’”

My heart is always warmed by the extravagance and simple joy of the visit to the cinema – of the ability, from a position of desperation, to be able to show gratitude for an unexpected gift and to use that gift to bring joy and to be lifted out of one’s situation even for a few hours.

Luke’s account of the ten lepers provides few details, but those that are included are tantalising. Jesus is between Galilee and Samaria – in a sort of no man’s land. The ten leprous men also exist in an in-between place. They are separated from home, family, and community and from any means of earning an income. Their presence causes fear, even revulsion and if, like the man in our story they have leprosy proper, not another skin disease, their bodies may be slowly rotting, and their lives may be lives of constant pain.

One imagines that the situation may be even worse for the Samaritan – why else would he find himself among a group of Jews here on the edge of nowhere? Unlike the Jews he would not be welcome in the Temple in Jerusalem. Is it because he is the most marginalised of the ten that he returns? Is it because his people have no Temple that he must worship God where he finds him – in Jesus? We will never know. What we do know is that nine did what Jesus said, and went to the Temple and one, the outsider, came back gave thanks.

Much as we don’t like to admit it, typically, we are the insiders. For most of us everyday life is not a constant struggle and while the system is far from perfect, we at least know that there is some sort of safety net if the ground is pulled from under us.

I imagine that few of us know the sort of poverty experienced by those who comb through the refuse dumps outside of Manilla, those who are forced to beg on the streets of India, or those who are so desperate to feed their families that they will sell their daughters (or indenture themselves) into slavery. Many of us take for granted that we are housed, clothed and fed. In this country we are rarely confronted by the horrific conditions in which a majority of this earth’s population lives.
I suspect that if we had even the smallest idea of how the other half lives that nearly every moment of everyday, we would, like the leper, want to praise God with a loud voice and to prostrate ourselves at the feet of Jesus.

For what are you grateful and how often have you thanked God today?

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