Down the road and back

Christian Century, Sept 27, 1995 by Paul D. Duke

THERE IS SOMETHING about the story of the lepers that recalls being in church. Ten people face Jesus, and ten voices call his name and cry, "Have mercy!" and ten people hear the news of cleansing. One of them sings a doxology and bows for euchariston at Jesus, feet. Then comes a benediction: "Rise and go."

The story of the lepers moves like an order of worship, which is odd, since no house of worship would have them. Like the culture, the congregation doesn't want the unclean. The ten lepers stand for all who have lost membership; they wander outside the village, outside the norm, in "the region between." Their exclusion drives them to one another. Covered in the same sickness, all ten, Jew and Samaritan, are part of a fellowship of suffering. Pain puts them past the old divisions. It also puts them in the path of Jesus, who improvises church in "the region between."

To their "Have mercy!" he answers "Go!" He skips the pastoral care. Instead, with a shock of sternness, he honors their petition with a command, conferring on them the dignity of a partnership in their own healing. So it has always been: the law was never anything other than grace.

They accept, they obey, and somewhere down the road of their obedience they find they are wearing new skin. This is closer to our own experience than most of the Gospel stories of healing. Transformations almost always occur somewhere down the road, somewhere between hearing the command and reaching its destination. In Pilgrim's Progress, when Christian arrives at the Wicket Gate, he complains that his burden is still on his back. His host replies, "As to the burden, be content to bear it, until thou comest to the place of deliverance, for there it will fall from thy back itself." Further down the road, it does. The Word doesn't heal us; it commands us down a path to where healing overtakes us.

It happens to the ten, this healing on the highway. As they go, their ruined hands, feet and faces put on new flesh, perfect as a child's. Naturally they are ecstatic, and do what any of us would do if headed down a highway with a brand new life: they accelerate. Jesus told them to go, and in the going they were healed. What are new feet for if not to sprint to the finish of what we are commanded to do? To the priests, then, and step on it!

But one of them drops back, stops, turns around. Something wilder than compliance comes into his mind. He is a new man, and that calls for a new voice. He runs back, "praising God with a loud voice," then falls at the feet of Jesus, pouring out the gladness of his thanks. It isn't a tidy little thank-you speech but a stammering babble and a puddle of tears in the dust. It has been said that praise is "the jazz factor" of faith. This man's freedom has found its voice and is having its proper play at Jesus, feet. Praise is love improvising its answer to Love.

"And he was a Samaritan," says Luke. Cleansed of one stigma, still wearing another. The outcast is the one who has turned back for doxology and euchariston. Why is this? Why is it that so often the marginalized live closer to the freedom of praise than do those with unquestioned membership? This is what Jesus would like to know. Or would like us to ponder.

"Weren't there ten?" he says, sounding a little playful. "Where are the nine?" Well, it's perfectly obvious where the nine are. The nine are doing what Jesus told them to do. They are literalists, God love them; they are doing their duty. They have taken the road as commanded, found their cleansing on it, and seem to think that staying on the road is the thing. Like Forrest Gump with a football, they have crossed the goal and go right on running, clear out of the stadium, where the celebration happens without them.

Maybe part of what keeps them running is their eagerness to be certified. That's what the priests will give them: certification of cure, with all of their membership privileges reinstated. Maybe a Samaritan knows better than to put too much value in these. Maybe this is why he's free to pour out praise. He has already received all that will matter, and he knows it. So he also knows what time it is: it's doxology time--time, as Gerard Manley Hopkins said, to "deliver it, early now, long before death/Give beauty back, beauty, beauty, beauty, back to God."

Barbara Brown Taylor says that the question among us is not "Where are the nine?" but "Where is the tenth?" "Where is the one who followed his heart instead of his instructions?" Doesn't the church resemble a dutiful procession of cleansed lepers who are "doing the right thing by the temple"? Where is the one who wheels round to return the wildness of love?

Jesus requires obedience, but he loves the jazz of our answering gladness. So he says to the one at his feet, "Your faith has made you whole." Up until now in Luke, Jesus has spoken this sentence to two persons (7:50; 8:48), both of them outcasts, both of them women, one shedding l ears, one finding her voice, and both of them doing so, strikingly enough, at Jesus, feet. Where else do you find this music?