Bible Text: Luke 17:11-19 | Preacher: Pastor Christian Preus | Series: 2020, Trinity 14 | There are several places in the Old Testament where God gives people leprosy for specific sins they commit. It happens first to Miriam, Moses’ sister, when she goes to Moses and tells him she’s just as good of a leader as he is and she wants more recognition. God doesn’t like that, so He gives her leprosy as punishment and it’s only when Moses intercedes and prays for her that the leprosy goes away. Then it happens again to Gehazi, the servant of Elisha. God strikes him with leprosy because he asks for money from Naaman after Elisha turned the money down – because God’s mercy can’t be bought. And it happens to King Uzziah too, because he dared to go and offer incense in the Temple, something God allowed only priests to do. I tell you this because in Jesus’ time it was common belief that the reason people had leprosy is because God was punishing them for some specific sin. This, in fact, is what most of the Rabbis of the day taught the people, and they’d use Miriam and Gehazi and Uzziah as examples. That’s why, if you remember, Jesus’ own disciples ask Jesus about a blind man, Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind? They simply assume that since something bad has happened to him, he must have brought it on himself somehow. And so in the case of these ten lepers everyone would assume not only that they needed healing of their leprosy, but that they also needed forgiveness for whatever sin brought this disease on them.
Now that’s a horrible, heartless way to think. It’s certainly true that certain sins will have their consequences. We all know that. If you sleep around you’ll get gross diseases and have all sorts of emotional problems and issues with commitment. Homosexuals and drug users make up almost all cases of HIV in America. Drunks and druggies suffer with depression and broken relationships. Some sins will give you very predictable consequences. Some punishments you can bring on yourself. But it’s also true that people suffer all sorts of horrible things not because they did anything, but because they were born a sinner into a sinful, corrupt world. The child who gets cancer didn’t do anything to get cancer. The mother who can’t have babies or suffers miscarriage after miscarriage didn’t do anything to deserve it. Jesus’ answer to his disciples remains our answer in the face of senseless suffering, “Neither this man nor his parents sinned, but these things happened to him that the works of God might be revealed in him.” In other words, the only answer to suffering is God’s mercy in Jesus Christ. Now, it’s a sign of our times that as Christianity has become the brunt of academic and elitist attacks, the Eastern religions have enjoyed growing support. Eastern religion knows nothing of mercy. Hinduism teaches that the kid who gets cancer got it because he got what was coming to him. He must have done something in a previous life to be born this way. That’s Karma. And it’s utterly merciless. Buddhism is even worse, if that’s possible, it blames the child for thinking what is bad is bad at all, since everything is nothing. These are merciless religions. And they fit very well with a merciless generation that goes into hysterics when a virus has a slight probability of killing them but then happily votes for politicians who produce laws that mercilessly slaughter unborn children. Instead of chasing after faddish, primitive religions, this generation should listen to the words of Jesus: Unless you repent you will likewise perish.
The ten lepers didn’t do anything, they didn’t commit some sin, to get leprosy. But their leprosy was still proof that they were sinners living in a sinful world. And this is the way we Christians need to approach all pain and suffering in our lives. Don’t ever think God has it out for you because you’re suffering something beyond your control. Why the suffering? In the case of these lepers it was so they could run to Jesus and find mercy in Him. If this doesn’t seem to the world like the most satisfying answer to human suffering, I defy them to find a better one. Or anyone There is none. Jesus is the only answer. The answers of the world are nicely summed up by Hinduism and Buddhism. Either suffering is utterly meaningless and your only comfort is that you will soon be nothing (that’s Buddhism and evolutionism), or we need to find someone to blame for your suffering, like systemic racism (that’s Hinduism and cultural Marxism), and it leads to the slaughter of innocent children and innocent cops, as we saw last night in LA.
But the suffering of these lepers found its end in Jesus. That’s why God allowed it. And I don’t mean simply that their suffering ended when Jesus healed them, but that their suffering has a goal, if not in their minds, at least in God’s heart, a goal of bringing them to Jesus to find in Him not simply relief from pain and loneliness and ostracism, but their everlasting peace and purpose, the forgiveness of their sins, and a life worth living on earth and in heaven. And this is precisely what is hidden to the world but known to Christian faith, because faith peers into God’s heart and leans not on its own understanding. I don’t know why I have to suffer this pain, while others don’t, I don’t know why God gave it to me to have tragedy in family and at work and all around me, I don’t know why He seems to pile it all on at the same time, but I do know God knows why, and I’ve seen God’s heart, I’ve seen there’s no reason to doubt Him, I’ve sworn to trust Him no matter what, because He has sworn Himself to me and suffered for me, and He knew the goal of His own suffering. He knew what His pain and His loneliness and His tears and bloody sweat would bring for me, what joy and peace He had in store for me, so how can I doubt that He knows the end of my suffering too and will work all things for my good?
Now the wonder of our God is that He also knew that nine out of ten lepers wouldn’t respond in faith when He healed them. All they wanted was relief from bodily suffering. They failed to learn any lesson from their years of pain. If this man before me can have mercy on my body, surely he will have mercy on my soul. If he has dismissed this corruption of my flesh with a word, surely he will conquer the corruption of my soul with His blood. If all my suffering, the years of being an outcast, the cold nights, the stinking, painful flesh, the screams of children running away in horror, if all this suffering has led me to this, to stand before God in human flesh and receive His love and mercy, then praise God for it, I am blessed beyond all men. But they learned nothing. They learned only that they got what they wanted and now they had no need for Jesus. It is this ungrateful response that should make us wonder why God would be so generous still. Why He would heal our diseases or give relief from pain to this unbelieving and thankless world.
But we know why. We know the character of our God. We know He is long suffering and patient and kind. If he has mercy on all the world and only a few measly sinners give Him thanks, still He does it without regret. And this is exactly what He’s done, with great cost and bitter pain to Himself. He pays the eternal ransom for our souls on the cross. He suffers the payment for the sins of all the world. And He sees and he knows the ungrateful response, that people instead go their own way so long as they have what they really want, money and comfort and entertainment and relief from suffering. But He does it still. He pours out His precious blood still. And He does it because this is Who He is, the Son who loves His Father and us in the Spirit, the God who counts it His glory and honor to win us as His children, who will be prodigal with His mercy if only He can win us for Himself and have us forever in His heaven.
And the one leper, the outcast, the Samaritan, who returns to give thanks, he understands what all his life tended toward, what all his suffering has finally brought him to. He stands before his God. That’s what the text says, not that he knelt at Jesus’ feet, but that he fell down at God’s feet. Because this Jesus is God in the flesh. And He has come to have mercy on body and soul. When he tells the leper, Your faith has saved you, he isn’t telling him his faith took the leprosy away. It didn’t. All the ten lepers, even the ingrate nine who never returned to give thanks, were cured of leprosy. But this one man received far more. He was saved. The leprosy of his soul was cleansed. He would not go to the Temple and show himself to the priests, because he had the great High Priest before Him, who would cleanse Him of all his sins. He was touching with his own fingers the Temple made without hands, that would pour out a blood far more precious than the blood of goats and bulls.
The man was a Samaritan, a Gentile. He couldn’t enter the Temple in Jerusalem except maybe to go into the court of the Gentiles. He was cut off from access to God. But Jesus, the true Temple, brings all to Himself. This is what He Himself said, But I when I am lifted up will draw all people to Himself. And He has drawn us. Just as He drew little Rhett today, He has drawn us to Himself, put His name on us, cleansed us of all sins, made us children of His Father, given us His Spirit. And so we come. Like the Samaritan, we come. And we receive far greater things than anyone ever received in that Temple in Jerusalem made with hands. The glory of God descends again and we eat and drink the body and blood that has suffered for us in love beyond expression and will finally put an end to all our suffering, that even now cleanses our conscience of all sin and will in the age to come relieve us of all pain and corruption of body and soul.
And so Jesus sends us on our way in peace, Go your way. Your faith has saved you. He says. So long as Jesus is ours, we fear no evil, not of body or soul, and our way is pleasant because our way is Jesus. I am the way, the truth, and the life, no one comes to the Father except through me. Amen, dear Lord, Jesus, we come to the Father through you. Grant us your grace always to thank you for your precious mercy. In the name of Jesus, Amen.