The Fourteenth Sunday after Trinity 2024

St. Luke 17:11-19 + September 1, 2024

“Dear God.” With these words many prayers begin. But when the desired outcome is achieved, God is no longer so dear. He was a means to an end.

Many people treat each other like that. Relationships are transactional. So long as one gets something valuable from the relationship, he’ll maintain the pretext of friendship. It’s painful to learn someone was never truly your friend.

What about the ten lepers in today’s Gospel? They cry out to Jesus in their need. When the need is met, they skedaddle.

That’s how we treat our own physicians. We go to the office when sick; he writes the prescription; we leave. Rarely is there anything human about the interaction.

It’s not that way when you put a bandage on your child. The wound hurts you. You see the blood and wish it was yours rather than his.

That’s what’s going on when the Lord Jesus sees these lepers, loathsome and malodorous. He sees these men not as problems to be solved, but brothers—children—to be healed.

This is the implication of the incarnation: Not merely that God became man, but that the Word of God, the Son of God assumes humanity into His person. And He does this precisely for these diseased men, and all diseased men. The purpose of the incarnation is for the healing of the human race. And you’re implicated in that. God becomes man for your healing.

Now we would like healing for this or that – to make the eyes, or the liver, or the heart, renewed; to live better, another decade or two.

But a human being is not a set of parts. It’s not like getting a new water pump for your car, or a new screen for your phone. Swap it out, good as new. We are not simply a collection of organs and bones and blood vessels. We have bodies, but we are more than our bodies. We are embodied creatures: body, mind, soul, all in one constitutive whole. So the healing humanity needs is more than an upgrade to our parts. It runs to the core of the person, wounds that ibuprofen or acetaminophen cannot address. One can numb the pain, self-medicate with intoxicants or edibles, but these cause other problems without addressing the source of all maladies.

When God said to the first man, “The day you eat of it, you shall surely die,” He wasn’t saying the apple was poisoned. The hubris of rejecting God’s command cut man off from God who is life. Thus “the wages of sin is death.” Man dies because in the act of rebellion he rejects the source of his life. Our entire existence becomes misdirected. We have a life that isn’t living, but merely surviving – and only for a short time. Rich, poor, popular, reviled, beautiful skin or oozing pus: mortality equalizes all.

But sickness—when it visits you with cancer, or a problem with your eyes or heart or thyroid or whatever—the sickness is a gift. One author puts it this way:

In a special way, sickness belongs to God. The Bible reproaches us not for going to the doctor with our sickness but rather for not going to God with it. It is no accident that Christ lived in striking proximity to the sick, that the blind, the lame, deaf-mutes, lepers, the mentally ill felt irresistibly drawn to him and sought his company. Why didn’t Christ send these people to the doctor? It was certainly not in order to harm the reputation of doctors or to make a display of his own skill or suggestive power. Instead, it was in order to make clear that God and sickness, Christ and the sick, belong very close to each other. Christ wants to be the true physician for the sick. [Bonhoeffer; DBW vol. 16, p500]

This is why the Psalms teach us to pray, “Lord, be merciful to me; Heal my soul, for I have sinned against You” [41:4]. This is in Ps. 41. Immediately preceding it, the psalmist describes being on a “sickbed.” In other words, he confesses that his sickness has its origin in man having turned away from God. Confined to his bed, the Psalmist asks for a medicine not to be found in any pharmacy: “Heal my soul,” he prays. That’s followed by a prophecy of Christ being betrayed by His friend Judas. “Even my own familiar friend in whom I trusted, Who ate my bread, Has lifted up his heel against me” [41:9]. His close friend turns away from him. It’s like Job’s wife, who tells him in his sickness, “Curse God and die.” The soul and the body are bound together; our entire person is sick.

So Jesus enters the sickness, He comes to a leprous, disease-ridden world, where friends betray us, and breath finally leaves us. The Bible says He who knew no sin becomes sin for us. Jesus comes both to enter into our own suffering and be the physician for the suffering.

So when things go badly for you, revealing the weakness of your body or the turmoil of your mind, it’s all designed to put you in the position of the lepers, saying, “Jesus, Master, have mercy!”

But the leprosy was never the ultimate problem. The problem is an inhuman life, creature not in communion with Creator.

The nine skedaddling lepers have healed skin, but at the core remain unchanged.

By contrast, the Samaritan leper prostrates himself before Jesus the incarnate God, and worships. To this one Jesus says, “Your faith has made you well,” or, more literally, “Your faith has saved you.” Made well in his body, the healed man submits his body and his entire person to the One who made him—the Lord Jesus by whom all things were made. Healed temporarily, he anticipates the resurrection, the complete restoration of the human person.

You do the same. In your suffering, hand yourself over to Jesus. Give Him the sins, entrust to Him the things that worry you, ask Him for mercy for every trouble. Prostrate yourself before Him, for He will save you.

In the Name of + Jesus