“…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” (NRSV, Luke 17:15,16).
In Our Lord’s day lepers were the ultimate outcasts of society. They were forbidden to mix with anyone except a fellow-leper, and were required at all times to give warning to passers-by by calling out “Unclean! Unclean!” Hence we are told in St Luke’s Gospel that the lepers stood and addressed Our Lord from some way off.
The Rabbis taught that all disease was the consequence of the sufferer’s own sins. Leprosy, however, was in a class of its own. It was regarded as moral death, and lepers were the living dead, and as such they were required to dress like a mourner – their clothes rent, their hair dishevelled, and the lower part of their faces covered. They were as people going to their own funeral who read their own burial service as they go.
We can well understand, therefore, that when the ten lepers saw that they were healed they had much to be thankful for. They had been delivered from a living death and had received the priceless gift of a healthy, normal life among their fellow human beings. The tenth leper had good cause indeed to turn back, praising God and giving thanks.
We, however, have even greater cause to do likewise, because we have been delivered from something infinitely worse than leprosy, and have been given something infinitely better than the new life which the leper was now entering.
As we are reminded in the Eucharist, God has created us and all humankind to share his eternal glory. But there is no smooth transition from creation to glory. We ourselves, along with the rest of humankind, have seen to that by our many sins, and by our rebellious hearts where those sins have their origin. Thus we are the architects of our own separation from our Creator. For sin and God are eternally incompatible. As St John reminds us, “…God is light and in him there is no darkness at all” (NRSV, 1 John 1:5).
Moreover, God is the ultimate living Reality and therefore our whole future will be determined by our attitude to him and our relationship with him, and that is something which is crystallising here and now. For the past, the present and the future together form a continuous whole, a progressive sequence. Moral and spiritual union with God - Our Lord calls this light and life; moral and spiritual separation from him he calls by the opposites – darkness and death. And he uses those terms to apply to this world and the next. However, because the next world, unlike this one, is a spiritual world pure and simple, the only life, as distinct from existence, which it holds – or ever could hold – is spiritual life with God. The alternative is spiritual death.
It is pointless to enquire what that living death means. For, towering above all speculation, is the central fact of human history, that God thought it worthwhile to come himself into this world as a human being and to be crucified in order to save the human race from that living death.
The leper’s deliverance and healing and restoration were immediate. For us they are part of an often lengthy process, the infrastructure of which was put in place all those thousands of years ago in Palestine. For that humanly insuperable gap between creation and glory, between the beginning and the Divinely intended end, has been spanned by Our Lord’s Crucifixion, Resurrection and Ascension, and by the coming of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost.
These unique and pivotal events are the foundation and piers of the bridge of salvation, linking humankind’s creation and future glory. It needs to be completed for each individual by God’s gifts to him or her of redemption, forgiveness, restoration and renewal.
For, created by God in his own image, we have to be transformed by him into his own likeness. So St John, looking ahead to salvation’s consummation, said: we know that “…we will be like him, for we will see him as he is” (NRSV, 1 John 3:2). Thus salvation here is continued as salvation hereafter. As Jesus said in the Temple at the Feast of Dedication, “My sheep hear my voice. I know them, and they follow me. I give them eternal life, and they will never perish” (NRSV, John 10:27,28, our emphasis).
However, it has to be recognised that eternal life, which is salvation’s fruit both here and hereafter, is offered: it is not imposed. It is a gift, but a gift that can be refused. In the words of the Book of Ecclesiasticus, “Man has life and death before him; whichever a man likes better will be given him” (Jerusalem Bible, 15:17).
The tenth leper who “…turned back, praising God with a loud voice” and “prostrated himself at Jesus’ feet and thanked him” (NRSV, Luke 17:15,16), he has his counterpart today in those innumerable Christians who week by week gather at the Sunday Eucharist.
For the Eucharist, whose very name means thanksgiving, is the Divinely instituted means by which the redeemed, the blessed company of all faithful people, give thanks to God for their salvation which his Son Jesus Christ has given them.
And given is the operative word from first to last. As St John affirmed, “…God so loved the world that he gave his only Son…that the world might be saved through him” (NRSV, John 3:16,17, our emphases). And in the furtherance of his Father’s will the Son himself declared that he had come “…to give his life a ransom for many” (NRSV, Mark 10:45, our emphasis).
So too in the Eucharist, we have no thank offering of our own to make that could remotely be worthy of all that we have been given. So our Divine Lord in his love and generosity responds to our need. In becoming man he became one of us and one with us, and then he went further. He formed his Church to be his Body, and in the Eucharist he gives himself on the altar to be the Church’s own thank offering for the salvation which the Father has wrought for us in him. And in offering him, Crucified, Risen and Ascended we offer the very sacrifice which he made for us and our salvation.
Let St Paul sum it all up for us, “Thanks be to God for his inexpressible gift!” (RSV, 2 Corinthians 9:15).