Ten Lepers
Today I want to talk about faith. It's one of those words that we use a lot as Christians but I'm not sure we're always completely clear on what we mean by it. In particular I want to think abut the connection between faith and the work of God.
How much faith do you need to see God answer your prayers? And can you expect God to answer your prayers if you don’t acknowledge him when he does?
These are the sorts of questions thrown up by this story today. Here we see 10 people who are healed by Jesus, yet only one who appears to show any response to him.
Jesus is travelling towards Jerusalem on his final pilgrimage to Jerusalem when he comes to a small town. Just as he’s entering the town he’s met by a group of ten men who are suffering from leprosy. As was the case in those days, they’re outside the town, keeping their distance from people. But when they see Jesus they call out “Jesus! Master! Take pity on us!” They may be outcasts but they know who Jesus is and they’re hoping he might heal them the way he did another leper at the start of Mark’s gospel.
Now in that incident, Jesus stretched out his hand, touched the man and says “Be clean!”. But here, all he says is “Go, show yourselves to the Priests.” There’s no direct contact, no touch that would communicate healing. Just the implication that they’re to show themselves to the priests because they’ve been healed. Can you see what he’s doing? He testing their faith isn’t he? If they believe that Jesus will heal them then they’ll go. And in fact that’s what they do, and as they go they discover that they’ve been healed.
Here’s the first thing for us to learn about faith. Sometimes you have to actually act on your belief before you see God at work. Sometimes it’s not until you take the first step, or the first series of steps that you discover whether God is indeed at work in you. [This is what we found with our first Messy Church service wasn’t it? We didn’t really know whether it was worth doing, whether people would come, until we tried it. And of course people did come. God did answer our prayers. So we’re going to do it again in a couple of weeks time.] Well that’s what happens here. These 10 men demonstrate their faith in God by setting out for the local synagogue to show themselves to the priests. And their faith is rewarded.
But then one of them, when he discovers he’s been healed turns around and comes back to Jesus to thank him. And notice what he does. First of all he comes praising God with a loud voice. He recognises that the power to heal him has come from God, that Jesus is working as an instrument of God’s power and he wants everyone to know about it. And when he gets to Jesus he throws himself to the ground in an act of obeisance, showing his awareness of Jesus’ closeness to God, as well as thanking him for his love and care. Then comes the sting in the tale, the WOW! moment. Luke adds: “And he was a Samaritan!” He was a member of a nation that had nothing to do with the Jews - and vice versa. Yet here he was returning to acknowledge his debt to this Jewish teacher and healer.
Well, Jesus looks around and asks “where are the other 9?” Was this foreigner the only one to come back and give praise to God? Presumably the others were Jews. Why hadn’t they come back as well?
Well, perhaps they were so overcome with the joy of being healed that the thought hadn’t crossed their minds that they should return to thank Jesus. Or perhaps they were afraid that if they came back before they carried out his instruction the healing wouldn’t be permanent. On the other hand they may have been so intent on completing the requirements of the Jewish law that they wouldn’t stop until they got to the priests and were declared clean again. Whatever the reason, the fact remains that only this one man, and he a Samaritan, returned to give thanks to God and to acknowledge Jesus. And so it was to this man alone that Jesus could say “Go, your faith has made you well.”
Now, as I said, it seems to me that this account raises a number of questions for us about faith. First of all what part did faith play in the healing of the ten lepers? That is, what caused them to be healed? Was it their faith that brought about the cure? Or was it like the case of the Gerasene demoniac, that Jesus simply decided to do it and it was his power, or God’s power, independent of their faith in Jesus that resulted in them being healed? Does the fact that 9 of them failed to return to thank Jesus indicate that they didn’t really believe in him? They just thought he was some sort of magician perhaps?
Well I’d like to think there’s more to it than that. The way Jesus performed the healing was in itself a test of their faith. You’d have to say that without a certain amount of faith in Jesus, they’d never have been healed.
You know, sometimes it’s good to look at the context of something like this. And it’s interesting that immediately preceding this account Jesus has been talking to his disciples about faith. They ask Jesus to increase their faith; and how does he answer them? He says “all you need is faith as small as a mustard seed and you’ll be able to say to this mulberry bush be uprooted and be planted in the sea and it will obey you.”
(Lk 17:6)
So it’s not by chance that this incident with the 10 lepers comes straight after that saying. Although it’d seem that 9 of the lepers had only a tiny amount of faith, still it was enough for them to be healed. We have to assume that if they hadn’t gone to show themselves to the priests they wouldn’t have been healed at all. So there’s clearly a correlation between their basic faith in what Jesus says and their healing.
But what about the other man? The one who returned to give thanks to God? He’s singled out for particular praise from Jesus for his faith, isn’t he? Was it that the faith that he exhibited was different from the others? Certainly he’s the only one who receives Jesus’ praise. The fact that he returned seems to indicate that he recognised in Jesus more than just a healer. He started out just like the other 9, primarily interested in being healed, but then when he realised what had happened he turned around, forgot the high priest and came back to offer his praise to God and his thanks to Jesus. So here was someone who deserved a special sort of acknowledgment. In fact the way the story’s told, there’s a close link between the man’s praise of God and his approach to Jesus, as though his throwing himself on the ground before Jesus is an act of worship. And he’s rewarded for his greater level of faith by Jesus’ acknowledgment of his faith. He’s not just been healed, he’s also come into a relationship with Jesus, and that new relationship is the source of healing not just of his leprosy, but of all that separates him from God. So when Luke reports Jesus saying your faith has made you well, the expression he actually uses is “Your faith has saved you.” It’s almost as if Jesus has in mind far more than just his disease.
Let me ask you another question that arises from all this. How does faith develop? Or to put it more personally, is your faith still developing? The faith of this one man has developed in the matter of minutes. And he was a Samaritan, a foreigner to God’s people. If that’s the case then how much more should we expect our faith to continue growing throughout our life when we have God’s Holy Spirit dwelling within us? Paul in his second letter to the Corinthians says: “Our hope is that, as your faith continues to grow, our area of activity among you will greatly expand.” (2 Cor 10:15) He expected that their faith would continue to grow, resulting in an expanded ministry of the gospel. And so should we. If our faith starts off like a mustard seed, we should expect it to grow like a mustard seed - into a large bush.
But of course the thing about seeds is that they have to be watered don’t they? I guess Jesus’ encouragement to the one man who returned was his way of watering that seed of faith. And in fact the man himself had watered it already in a sense, by the very act of returning to kneel at Jesus feet, of acknowledging the miracle that had taken place. It’s a bit like the parable of the sower and the soils. The seeds in that parable grew where they found soil that welcomed them and gave them nourishment. When he returned to kneel at Jesus’ feet, the man was nourishing his faith by focusing on the source of his healing, the one who represented God’s power on earth.
But how do we feed our faith so it grows? Well, like this Samaritan, by keeping our eyes on Jesus. Heb 12 encourages us to: “fix our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy set before him endured the cross, scorning its shame, and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God. 3Consider him who endured such opposition from sinners, so that you will not grow weary and lose heart.” (Heb 12:2-3)
Secondly, Paul suggests in Galatians that the only thing that counts is faith expressing itself through love. That is, love is the way that faith expresses itself. But isn’t it also true that showing love is a way of increasing our faith. Why? Because of the source of that love. “We love because he first loved us.” So as we show love to others we reflect the love of God towards us, and so each loving act reminds us of God’s love.
Similarly as we act to put our trust in God; as we step out trusting that he’ll look after us, we’re reminded of his care for us and our faith is strengthened. I guess it’s a bit like going into training. Each time you exercise you get a bit stronger.
Every couple of months I get a new workout program at the gym. The instructor is very kind to me. He always makes sure the weight he’s set for me to lift isn’t too much for my aging body. But of course once I start lifting the weights regularly it gets easier. After a week or so I’m able to add more weight to what I’m lifting until by the time I get my next program I’m way over what he set me originally. And it’s purely due to practice. It’s the natural process of building up fitness and strength through regular exercise of those particular muscles.
Well, we have to do the same thing with our faith in God. We have to keep on exercising our faith until it grows and becomes strong enough to sustain us no matter what we face.
Finally, there are two dangers I want us to be aware of. First of all there’s the danger that we read about this miracle of healing and think that healing is always directly dependent on faith. So if we pray for healing and it doesn’t come then we mustn’t have faith, or at least not enough. But this passage doesn’t teach that. All this passage says is that the men who were healed, particularly that one who returned, had faith and that faith was significant in their healing. But as we’ve already seen, the degree of faith they showed wasn’t necessarily the issue. For Jesus to heal these particular people only required faith like a mustard seed. In Mark’s gospel we find an incident when the disciples couldn’t cast out a demon, because, Jesus said, it was a type that could only be cast out through prayer. That is, it required more than just their faith to cast it out. And there are times when for some reason, God chooses not to bring healing no matter how great our faith is. Of course the other side of this danger is that when healing does come through our prayers, we can be tempted to think it was all because of our great faith, and start to feel puffed up by it. Well the previous section of Luke 17 seems to be addressed to that very danger. Jesus reminds his disciples that no matter what they’ve been doing, even if they’ve done great miracles of faith, at the end of the day, all they can say is “We are mere servants, we have only done our duty.”
The second danger is related to the first. It’s that we begin to feel that faith is the object of our Christian life. If you like, we begin to have faith in faith itself, rather than in God. So we work so hard at having faith that we forget that God is real and relates to us as real people: that what matters, as was the case with this Samaritan, is that we have a personal relationship with Jesus. If we remember that, we’ll be able to handle the times when things go wrong, as well as when things go right. Because in the end our faith is in a person, but a person who is so far beyond our understanding that all we can do is to trust him, whether or not we understand what he’s doing with us. In the end all we can do is acknowledge that everything we have is from God, that every good and perfect gift comes from above, coming down from the Father of the heavenly lights.
Like the Samaritan in this story, when we see God working, all we can do is to come with praise and thanks to his feet. That in itself will strengthen our faith for the next time we have to rely on him. The more we acknowledge God’s involvement in our lives, the more we’ll expect it, and the more it will become a natural part of life. This Samaritan, along with his 9 companions, was healed both by the power of God and because of his faith in Jesus. But what really made the difference in this story was that he returned to kneel at Jesus feet to begin a personal relationship with him.
Let’s pray that when God works in our lives, however that might be, that we’ll recognise it and show the same praise and gratitude that this man did.