A Sense of Urgency (Sermon)

A sermon for Trinity XIV (BCP)
Galatians 5.16-24, Luke 17.11-19

The story of Jesus’ cleansing of the ten lepers (surely a sort of parable rather than an actual account) is a story of people utterly beyond the pale, brought back in from the cold. Jesus is travelling south through Samaria and Galilee. Luke doesn’t trouble to give us an address: it’s just ‘a certain place’ on the way to Jerusalem; a long way north of the Watford Gap, among people scorned and dismissed by the metropolitan and religious elites of the capital. Justifiably or not, Galilee had a deep-seated reputation as a hot-bed of foreigners and immigrants. Samaria fared even worse: they were condemned for being half-breeds, descendants of the great population-swirl of an Assyrian invasion centuries before: Jewish, perhaps. But still not quite our type, dear.

For lepers, life is immeasurably difficult wherever they are from. We find them here, standing well back from the crowd, physically, socially and religiously ostracised. But they believe that Jesus can help them. And as he hoves into view, they call out to him. ‘Jesus!’ they shout. Our Lord is addressed by name only five times in St Luke’s gospel, always by people in extreme sickness or dire need. We might remember this when you come to him in our own dire need. We are in some fairly interesting company, and he welcomes us as he welcomed them. For his name, Jesus or Ieshuah, means Saviour. The lepers know it, and so do we.

Then they shout ‘Master!’, a word otherwise reserved for active disciples. For one of them, this will prove to be the case. Then they ask for ‘mercy!’ This isn’t just an overexcited way of asking for help. Mercy is specific, associated with the activity of God on earth, as Zechariah famously indicates at the birth of his son John the Baptist, when he celebrates ‘the tender mercy of our God.’

And Jesus, Master, Saviour, the Merciful Son of the Father, tells them to go and show themselves to the priests. It’s an undramatic instruction, like that received by another famous leper, Naaman the Syrian. And off they go, these ten, in faith and obedient hope, witnessing the restoration of their flesh with every step.

Their cleansing, however, is not the crux of the story. The focus rather is on the return of the Samaritan to give thanks to God. And this is not to show what a well-brought-up boy he is, but in order to show us all who Jesus is, the divine Son of the Father. It is this faith, says Jesus, that has healed him, made him whole, saved him. Indeed, although all ten are cured, only one receives salvation.

This is one of those stories, like the healing of the Centurion’s slave, or the Canaanite woman’s daughter, which shows that faith in Christ is not only for ‘the lost sheep of the house of Israel’, but for the whole wide messy world, way beyond the confines of Temple and Torah. And the nine lepers had faith enough, fair enough. And they showed themselves to the priests, as instructed. But when it came to it, once they were cleansed and back on the inside, they preferred to remain in the old familiar dispensation, with those who would continually work against Christ, ‘his own people who received him not’. But the Samaritan knows he has crossed a Rubicon, and will worship neither on Mount Gerizim with the Samaritans, nor with the Jews in Jerusalem. He will worship God in Christ, ‘in spirit and in truth’. Unlike the Nine, once more in good odour with their religious authorities, he remains a Samaritan, a perpetual outsider. But he knows that, since his encounter with Jesus, nothing will ever be the same again.

It is this same conviction that the old ways are behind us and that the new ways of the coming Kingdom lie ahead of us that must motivate us to put aside what St Paul in the Epistle calls ‘the life of the flesh’ and embrace ‘the life of the Spirit’. This does not simply mean that we must ‘lay off the sausages’ and ‘avoid the ham’, as Bertie Wooster once advised Gussie Fink-Nottle in a celebrated telegram. It means principally that we must no longer give free and uncritical rein to those appetites and passions which belong to the fallen life original sin. As those living in Christ, we must no longer exercise our indomitable will over others, or an angry dividing of our communities, or a murderous destruction of anyone with the temerity to oppose us. We certainly get the impression that Paul was dealing with some pretty high-octane individuals.

We are to live rather in faith, hope and gratitude; nourished by – and seeking ourselves to bear - the fruit of the Spirit, that Love – Joy - Peace and the other abundant qualities which both bring about, and are signs of the present reality, of the Kingdom of God.

And as is always inevitably the case, we face the urgent evangelical choice – to be with Christ, or to be opposed to Christ. Like Robert Frost, we stand before a great divergence of the roads, knowing that we cannot travel by both, for the flesh and the Spirit ‘are contrary the one to the other.’

The Samaritan is no doubt helped and motivated by his sense of being an outsider. We, on the other hand, are pretty much kings and queens of all we survey, and it is unsurprising that many or most in the rich, technological West, have turned their back on Jesus our Master, preferring to rely on various combinations of sex and drugs and rock-and-roll to provide glimpses of eternity, and get them through the long dark watches of the night.

But by God’s grace we have been blessed in knowing our need of God, and in coming to his Christ for further grace and mercy. We are not outsiders, neither does society much care about what we believe, or whom we worship. Yet we know that it is in Christ that we find our place, our purpose, our wholeness and salvation; and so it is in that urgent quest that we pray afresh the Collect, with its desire that, in order for us to gain what God promises, we will learn to love all that God commands.