You, the Leper [Trinity 14; St. Luke 17:11-19]

It is Jesus Who speaks in your hearing today, saying:

“Was no one found to return and give praise to God except this foreigner?”

Jesus did a very silly thing to these 10 lepers. He heals all of them knowing full well that only one will return and that it will be a person you would probably not want in your church. Free will, given by Jesus, leads the Samaritan to return to Christ, but it also led the other 9 away from Him.

St. Luke has written this Gospel is such a way that you are to see Jesus as the sacrifice for all, regardless of their decisions about Him, all the Temple sacrifices were for the express purpose of revealing the Messiah to all people. However, it was not the act of sacrificing that saved them, but belief in the promise behind those acts.

If there was no promise, the sacrifices would be worthless. If God had not said, “Offer sacrifice”, there would be no point. For without the Promise, a bloody mess is just a bloody mess and no holy significance.

So it is with this foreigner. He is not of Abraham’s bloodline nor is he Moses’ descendant. He is a bloody, diseased mess living as far from the Temple in Jerusalem as he feels his prayer is from God. Last week you heard of a merciful Samaritan. This week it is an enlightened Samaritan; even a lost and condemned, enlightened Samaritan.

Here is what is happening: Jesus is walking into a certain village. Not just any village, but a village far away from the Temple; read: far from God’s promise of real presence among His people.

Not only is Jesus in a place where a Samaritan is welcome, but He is also among lepers. We can only conclude that this village is no village at all, but a leper colony, for no regular village, in their right mind, would allow such a meeting between the non-infected and the infected.

Yet, these 10 lepers have a divine gathering around Jesus in just such a diseased place. Jesus purposefully walks to them. The Good Samaritan, purposefully gathers them, and purposefully purifies all of them, regardless of creed, station, or bloodline.

This does not mean that Jesus has come in this sort of manner for us all today. It does not even mean that Jesus reveals Himself in acts of healing miracles. It means that Jesus is revealed in His Word and in the preaching of that Word. Thus, He preaches and these 10 hear and believe saying, “Jesus, master, have mercy on us.”

What it means is that this foreigner who was raised outside the Temple with little to no knowledge of God’s Law, much less His Promises, can hear and be saved just as you can.

Repent! Your family members will not be able to get you into the good graces of God and neither will any of your other associations. Whether you are born into a church or outside; those things you do and surround yourself with, though filled with sin, do not prevent Jesus from doing the work He wants to do. That is: accomplishing your salvation.

The Old Testament is full of God’s people exercising their free will and each and every time, it takes them down the path of sin and death. So, free will is not what is at work here. The Spirit of Christ is alive and hovering over the void of darkness, that is this cursed earth and your cursed will, creating faith.

Jesus seeks the sinner. These 10 were not completely in the dark about God and who He is, but they were in the dark about their own salvation. Given up for dead by their own countrymen and exiled into this colony, they then give up on themselves.

You can see why they are so loud when they hear Jesus approaching! The Miracle man! The Faith healer has finally come to us. We are freed from this illness!

And that’s all they wanted. True faith was not theirs, but the Giver of true Faith was not about to let them doubt His Word and promise just because they were sick, so Jesus purified them all.

True faith does not turn away from Jesus. While all 10 were purified, only one was made well. While all ten were given victory over their malady, only one was given victory over sin, death, and the devil.

For, the same reason Jesus plays with mud and spit, Jesus comes into contact not only with lepers, but with the dead. Jesus physically communes with His creatures in order to show that the one, true, physical God has come to earth, not just to work miracles, but to take on this sin-sickness in His very own Body.

This is the atonement upon the cross, for you. Now the leprosy of these 10 men is Jesus’. Now, the suffering and illness of these men has been transferred to Jesus and it is a suffering unto death. Even though your sin clings to Jesus, it does not stop corrupting until it causes even the death of God.

Thus, Christ comes to die for the lepers. He barges into their colony of disease, stench, and death, bringing purification. It is an exchange: Jesus’ health for their illness. Jesus’ life for their death. This is what Jesus tells them by His presence.

By His presence, Jesus proclaims their freedom! He comes bringing emancipation from the social stigma and excommunication that they have suffered with for all these years. Who wouldn’t be ecstatic? Who wouldn’t be elated and burst from pure joy upon receiving a bill of clean health?

It is funny that you have more time for God when you are suffering and sick, than when you are well and at peace.

The 9 leave, never to return as far as we know, seeming to have no time for Jesus now that their lives are fixed. The 1, the foreigner with all his disadvantages of being far from God’s Temple, returns, not by his own will, but under the guide and direction of the Spirit of Jesus. He returns to Jesus, because it is Jesus, not the priest, Who has made him well.

More than that, it is his faith that he now possess, from Jesus, that is saving him. This has nothing to do with his purification. By nothing, I mean that faith, given in the Word, had already saved this Samaritan before purification. Regardless of his physical condition, the Word of God speaks to him absolution.

Today, Jesus proclaims His presence among you by His Sacraments. Today, you hear the Gospel of freedom and believe, because the Spirit of Christ is now hovering over these waters. But instead of them being dark and void of life, they are full of the true Light. Instead of disease and sickness unto death, there is only the Word of God and life.

This same Word is spoken to you. You have been set free. You are led by the Spirit to hear and feast on Christ, your true salvation. The works of the flesh and the law have no hold over you. This great and wonderful news needs to permeate everything you do.

Your body, both sinful and sanctified, is a reminder to you that you are yet slaves to the law. In your own sickness of sin and death, you are to serve your neighbor in love in everyway possible. Jesus did not free the leper from his body, but He has freed your conscience from the curse of the Law, from sin, and from death on account of Himself.

Where the old covenant of the Old Testament could only observe and declare one to be clean, the New Testament of Jesus Christ creates that cleanliness. In Christ, the Gospel preaches purest. In Christ, the Sacraments are rightly administered. Meaning, they are rightly given to you: the baptized children of God who have inherited the disease-free kingdom of heaven, through faith alone.