Cleansed, and Made Whole

The law told a leper what to shout.

Torn clothes, uncovered head, a cloth over the upper lip. And when anybody came near, the person with the disease was to call out a warning: Unclean, unclean! Then came the line that decided the rest of their life.

He must live alone in a place outside the camp.

Outside the camp. For as long as the disease lasted, that was the address.

So when Luke says ten lepers met Jesus at the edge of a village, he adds a detail that tells you everything about how they lived. They stood at a distance. They knew the distance. They’d been keeping it for years.

Jesus was on the road to Jerusalem, passing along the border country between Samaria and Galilee. Two peoples who didn’t mix lived on either side of that line. Out on the edge of it, apparently, ten sick men had stopped caring about the difference. When you’re all outside the camp, the old lines don’t count for much.

They didn’t come close. They raised their voices across the gap.

Jesus, Master, have mercy on us!

Not a long prayer. Five words, shouted from a distance by people who weren’t allowed any nearer.

He didn’t go to them and he didn’t touch them. He saw them, and he gave them an instruction. Go, show yourselves to the priests.

That instruction needs a word of background, because it’s easy to miss what he was asking.

The same law that put lepers outside the camp also had a way back in. If the disease went away, the person was to be brought to the priest, and the law says the priest was to go outside the camp to examine him. If the priest saw that the person was healed, there was a ceremony, and then they could come home. Showing yourself to the priest was how you got your life back.

But you went to the priest after you were healed. These ten were told to go while they still had it.

And they went. All ten. They turned around and started walking toward the priests with the disease still on their skin, because he told them to.

And as they were on their way, they were cleansed.

On the road. Somewhere between the edge of the village and the priest, ten people looked down at their hands and saw clean skin.

It’s worth slowing down on what those first steps were like. Every one of the ten had to turn his back on the only person who’d ever made them well and start walking toward a priest with nothing to show him. If the skin hadn’t changed, they’d have arrived and been sent straight back outside. They went anyway. Whatever else the story says, it says ten people trusted a sentence enough to walk on it.

Luke doesn’t say how far they’d gone. It could have been a hundred yards. It could have been a mile. He just says as they were on their way, which means the healing didn’t come while they stood still asking for it. It came while they were moving, somewhere in the ordinary middle of the road, with nobody watching.

And it came to all of them. Nobody got a smaller portion. Ten diseases, ten clean bodies, ten roads home.

Here the story splits, and it’s worth being careful about how.

Nine of them kept going. That was the instruction. They were doing exactly what Jesus told them to do and exactly what the law required, and it led to the one thing they’d wanted for years: a priest’s word that they were clean, and the door home. The text never says a single hard thing about them. They obeyed, and they were cleansed.

One of them stopped.

When one of them saw that he was healed, he came back, praising God in a loud voice.

The same voice that had been shouting have mercy across the gap was now shouting praise, all the way back up the road. He didn’t stop at a respectful distance this time. He came all the way in and fell on his face at Jesus’ feet, thanking him.

Then Luke adds five words that change the scene.

And he was a Samaritan.

The one who came back was the one who belonged least. A leper, which put him outside the camp. A Samaritan, which put him outside the people. The text lets that sit a moment before anyone speaks.

Jesus asked three questions, and nobody answers any of them.

Were not all ten cleansed? Jesus asked. Where then are the other nine? Was no one found except this foreigner to return and give glory to God?

It’s possible to read those questions as a complaint about the nine. It’s also possible to read them the way you’d ask after family who didn’t come to dinner. Where are they? The text doesn’t tell us his tone. It tells us he noticed who wasn’t there.

Then he turned to the man on the ground.

Rise and go; your faith has made you well!

Read the whole story again and notice the words. All ten were cleansed. Only this one is told his faith has made you well. In English that can sound like the same thing said twice. In Luke’s Greek it isn’t. The word for the ten is the one for being made clean. The word for this one is the ordinary New Testament word for being saved, the same one used for people rescued from drowning and people rescued from their sins. Older English Bibles translated it made thee whole, which is why this chapter uses that word. The text doesn’t explain the difference. It just uses a different word for the one who turned around.

He’d been cleansed on the road, like the others. Something more happened when he came back.

The nine weren’t wrong. They went where they were sent. But the tenth did something none of the instructions covered. He saw what had happened to him, and before he went anywhere else, before the priest, before home, before the life he’d been waiting years to get back, he went back to the one who did it and said so, out loud.

The difference was a return, not a better obedience.

And then Jesus sent him on anyway. Rise and go. He didn’t keep him. The man still had a road, and probably still had to find a priest. He just walked it whole.

Where this meets your week

The healing that came on the road. Some things got better without a moment you could point to. The grief that used to take the whole day now takes an hour. The anger at the old place has cooled to something you can talk about. The worst season ended, and you were so busy getting on with life that you never stopped. Think back over the last few years for one thing that healed while you were walking. Name it, to yourself, with the date if you can find it.

The people who kept going. Maybe you’re the one who went back, in some part of your life, and you’ve watched others who didn’t. Be careful with them. The nine did what they were told. There’s nothing in the story that asks you to keep track of anyone else’s gratitude. If you catch yourself wondering where the nine are, let the question stay a question.

Being the outsider who belongs least. The one who came back was the one with the least reason to feel welcome. Maybe that’s how you’d describe yourself around anything to do with God right now: the wrong background, the wrong history, the one who left. The record put the outsider on his face at Jesus’ feet and gave him the only word whole in the story. Your distance isn’t the thing that decides this.

The thanks you never said. Somebody carried you through something. A doctor, a teacher, a neighbor, a boss who let you go early the week of the funeral. You were cleansed on the road and kept walking, which is what people do. It’s not too late to turn around. They’re usually still findable. And if they aren’t, if they’ve moved or died or you’ve lost the name, the thanks can still be said. Say it to the one who put them in your path, and tell him who they were.

Go back and say thank you.

Two times, this week. Once to God, out loud, for one specific thing that got better. Use the exact words if you can: thank you for, and then the thing. You don’t have to be sure who you’re talking to. The Samaritan didn’t have a theology of it either. He had clean hands and a loud voice.

And once to one person. A text, a call, a card. Name the thing they did and when. Don’t wrap it in anything.

The whole story takes nine verses, and the man who came back never says a word we get to hear. Everything he said was praise and thanks, shouted on a road.

What we get is the last thing said to him, and it sends him off whole.

Rise and go.