October 14, 2007 Des Moines
Luke 17:11-19
Paying
Grateful Attention
A.J. Jacobs is an otherwise fairly
normal appearing guy who assigned himself the quite public task that most of us
at least implicitly try to shoulder as well:
following the rules of the Bible.
But Jacobs took it several steps beyond most of us. He wanted to see what it would be like to
follow them all. Everyone of them. Old Testament to New, doing it all: no clothing with mixed fibers; no pork, not
shaving; he even went so far as to stone an adulterer. In his new book, The Year of Living Biblically, Jacobs chronicles what it was
like. Along the way, he dressed like a
Bible character, he ate according to the rules he could identity, and he
altered his daily habits.
It was more
than a mere curiosity. For him it was
something of a search for meaning. With
very little religious background of his own – he describes himself as “Jewish
in the same way that the “Olive Garden”
is Italian – he became interested in the subject when he had a child. What, he began to ask himself, should he
teach his child about religion, about values, about faithful practice? So, he decided to dive in head first and
learn everything he could. His
experiment began, of course, with the 10 Commandments, but as he puts it, he
tried not to “pick and choose”. He was
determined to follow everything to see what might make his life better, and
what might not.
So, was he
successful? No. As he put it this week in an interview with
Matt Lauer on NBC’s Today Show, “you
are always going to break rules.” In
fact, he confessed, there never was a day when he was able to fulfill his
intent to the letter – coveting, gossiping, lying. “I was astounded by how much I sin,” he
lamented. “It was a rude awakening. But you can try and you can become a better
person.”
Now that
the year is over and the book is in stores, Lauer asked Jacobs if he is still
trying to follow the rules. “Many things
I’ve carried over – Sabbath keeping, for one; and thankfulness. The Bible talks a lot about gratefulness, and
I feel it is important to be thankful for the 100 little things that go right
every day that we don’t even notice.” [1]
Thankfulness. I find that interesting – that after a year
of giving it his best and most extensive shot, the thing that stands out to him
the most is gratitude. Thankfulness for
those 100 little things, but also for the literally countless enormous things
that, perhaps because of their sheer immensity in our lives, we fail to even
recognize. Gratitude. But if there is something important about the act of saying
“thanks,” I believe that Luke, in telling this little story from the life of
Jesus, is suggesting that there is ultimately something powerful about it as well.
The story
begins in the context of both estrangement and community. The estrangement
consisted of that age-old bigotry between the Hebrews and the Samaritans, the
essence of which had probably long since been forgotten, leaving behind only a
kind of hatred-by-definition: “we don’t
like each other because we don’t like each other.” Samaritans didn’t like Jews because they were
Jews. Jews hated Samaritans because they
were Samaritans.
And at this particular point in
his travels, the shortest distance between where Jesus, the Jew, was and where he wanted to go was straight through Samaria. Not a comfortable – or potentially even safe
– situation. So how does one get from
Story City to Des Moines if you don’t want to go through Ames? You take the long way around – which is how
Jesus was apparently intending to get to Jerusalem; skirting around the
boundary line for safety’s sake.
And
it was there, tiptoeing along the outer edge of the personal and political estrangement,
that Jesus encountered the community
– a “community of the afflicted” as it were.
A group of lepers who couldn’t afford the luxury of bigotry; who,
because of their disease, were forced to live outside of the towns, away from
their families and jobs and support systems, consoled and protected only by the
company of those similarly afflicted, supporting themselves on whatever they
could beg from passersby while maintaining an appropriate distance.
The rules
were quite specific. In the book of
Numbers is the instruction: Command the Israelites to put out of the camp everyone who
is leprous; they must not defile their camp, where I dwell among them. (Numbers 5:2-3)
And
in the book of Leviticus it insists that…The person who has the leprous
disease shall wear torn clothes and let the hair of his head be disheveled; and
he shall cover his upper lip and cry out, “Unclean, unclean.” He shall remain unclean as
long as he has the disease; he is unclean. He shall live alone; his dwelling
shall be outside the camp. (Leviticus 13:45-46)
And so it
was that Jesus passed along the way of these cast-asides. Keeping
their distance, just as the law prescribed, the lepers
called out, saying, “Jesus, Master, have mercy on us!”
And from here, things begin to get a
little topsy-turvy. Who’s to say just what
the nature was of the “mercy” for which they were asking? Maybe they were hoping Jesus had a few coins
he could spare. For many that could be
mercy enough. Perhaps they were simply
hoping that Jesus might do nothing more than show them a little kindness – sit
and talk, perhaps, awhile, or share with them some morsels of news harvested
from his travels. Or maybe they hoped
against hope that Jesus could offer something more.
But whatever, I think they almost certainly expected Jesus to do something.
Instead, he simply told them to go show themselves to the
priests. “And just what,” they might
have asked, “do you want us to do then?”
Implicitly, they were to go ask the priests for a clean bill of health,
but at that moment they had no evidence of health to show. They were to go “as if” it had already been
achieved. Wow! This faith business is tough!
But lo and behold, it happened. Whatever happened, they were healed. All ten of them.
While they
were on their way.
So all but one of them presumably
continued on their way: doing exactly
what Jesus had told them to do. Present yourselves to the priest. A priest must certify the illness, and a
priest must certify its cure. “Go and show yourselves to the priests,” Jesus
had instructed, and they did.
All but one.
All were healed, but one didn’t follow
the instructions. Instead of going to
the priest, one of them, when he saw that he was healed, turned back, praising God
with a loud voice. He
prostrated himself at Jesus’ feet and thanked him.
And then Jesus said something
curious: “Get up and go on your way; your faith has made you well.”
It might be helpful to pull of some of the floorboards of this passage
in order to notice a few of the structural pieces underneath and out of
sight. There are three distinctly
different phrases hidden in this English translation of the story that initially
sound quite interchangeable, but in reality communicate different truths
altogether.
Y The first occurs as the lepers
turned to follow Jesus’ instructions:
according to the story, they were “made clean.” The word underneath that English translation
refers to ritual acceptability.
Y The second occurs in the
self-comprehension of the one leper who stopped and turned around. According to the story, when he “saw that he
was healed…” which translates a word no longer connected with ritual purity,
but simple medical cure.
Y The third is spoken by Jesus when
he sends the grateful man on his way:
“your faith has made you well,” or to put it more directly, “your faith
– your trust – has saved you.”
Ah! Now language of
salvation! Physical health, distinct
from ritual purity, quite apart from the blessing of salvation. As Fred Craddock puts it, “What we have
[here] is a story of ten being healed and one being saved.”[2]
“Your faith has saved you.”
And then Luke drives home the sharper point: And he
was a Samaritan. One of those dirty,
despicable, God-forsaken Samaritans – not only physically healed but saved by
grace through faith. And grateful for
it!
“Were there not ten made clean?” Jesus asked, and the answer, of course, is
“yes.” But they were off doing what they
were supposed to do. They were busy
doing the correct thing, while this
one – this Samaritan – was here doing the right
thing.
And do you
see what happens? If affliction had
bonded a certain kind of community among the ill – transcending the barriers
that divide – so now does gratitude among the saved. Thanksgiving as the bridge above the
chasm.
I wonder
what might happen here – in our time, in the “no-man’s-land” that separates
Christians from Muslims, Americans from Iraqis, citizens from undocumented
immigrants – if we spent less time being correct and more time being right; if
we spent less time following the rules and more time being thankful; if we spent
less time collecting infractions – of
our own but especially of those around us – and more time paying grateful attention. I
wonder what kind of bridges might be
built, and what kind of community
might be formed if “thankfulness” summed up the character of our lives?
Who knows
just who might be saved?