Sermon Tone Analysis

This month, in conjunction with our Tuesday education series on mental health, we are going to look at a hand full of texts which bear witness to Jesus’ healing power.

I think, before diving into this morning’s text, that it’s fair to take a moment to talk about healing and the relationship between our lives and what we read in the Scriptures.

Jesus’ ministry is filled with stories of healing — the blind receive sight, the crippled walk again, even the dead are raised to life.

And how we reckon with these texts in our modern world is so important.

How do we handle healing and recovery?

In our modern context, we do see people healed.

We have doctors who help us fight off cancer, physical therapists who help us walk again, mental health professionals who help us unwind our anxieties and find a grounded place from which to live.

My sister experienced an incredibly debilitating condition about a decade ago.

After spending a summer working at a camp, she and her husband were settling in to some time of more doctoral school for him and daily life for my sister.

But over a very short period of time, she began to become incredibly weak and ended up on bedrest in the ICU with mysterious symptoms of paralysis.

Her body began shutting itself down, her arms and legs no longer working, her breathing more labored, and the doctors feared other systems would soon begin to shut down as well, sharply hindering her ability to breath, eat, or even for blood to circulate through her heart to the rest of her body.

She spent weeks in that hospital bed in Wenatchee, WA.

I remember visiting her and seeing her recognize me in her eyes, but not really be able to move or greet me when I sat by her hospital bed.

We were all very scared.

The doctors were eventually able to diagnose her with Guillan—Barre syndrome.

Guillan Barre is rapid-onset muscle weakness caused by the immune system attacking and damaging the peripheral nervous system.

Our peripheral nervous system impacts our ability to breath and the way our blood pumps through our body, very important parts of maintaining life…if I do say so.

And since it can come on so quickly, it is incredibly important to intervene with swift action to stave off any long term damage.

Thankfully, Lora responded, slowly, to the treatments she was given.

Her body slowly rebounded.

She had to learn how to walk again.

They had the coolest looking bionic leg braces for her, robot controlled to help her legs gain strength again.

And this was an incredibly nerve-wracking time, as she tried to heal and gain strength while not knowing really what might cause a setback again.

Her husband, Mike, and my parents were by her side through the whole journey and…thankfully she has rebounded back to health.

Leprosy and these kinds of nervous system disorders are akin in how they wreak havoc on our bodies.

With leprosy, the long-term infection in the body begins to deaden nerves in the extremities of the body, where injuries and infections then can overcome the arms or legs and cause weakness, sores, and even loss of limbs.

It is similarly a disease that effects the nervous system, damaging our ability to feel pain, walk, or function with normal physical movement.

It is a scary disease as well.

We need to think about healing in the context of such ravaging diseases of the body.

And we also witness it in my subtle ways — can we heal from long-term trauma or the stress associated with it?

Can we heal from addictions and maladies which we may even set upon ourselves?

Can we find healing from silent, unseen disorders like cancer, which quietly and dramatically attack our bodies in surprising and for seemingly unexplainable reasons?

We have to question healing.

Because we want to heal miraculously like the men in this story did, at the touch and word of Jesus.

One of our members here at St. James, Jennie McLaurin, wrote a book a couple of years ago called “Designed to Heal”.

In it Jennie shares her wealth of medical expertise in describing how our body heals from a wound.

It is a dramatic and beautiful process where the body works within its faculties to heal, to restore, and to strengthen following a wound.

It is a complex process that I cannot outline here, but it also beautifully maps upon our lives as we think about how communities heal — it is possible.

It may be painful and long, but we can heal.

This is the hope of looking at these healing texts in this season.

Not to say that all things can be restored here and now — we know that some diseases and wounds will never fully heal.

But to wrestle with the process of healing, to seek it out and work through it.

To be people who respond to healing, who find ways to celebrate it even as the pain may continue.

I find the story from our text today so familiar.

This is one of the stories I remember sticking out from the Bible in my childhood.

I was fascinated by all these lepers and blind people that Jesus was healing.

How?! Miracles!

In the familiarity of this text, I am drawn back to what my Sunday school class must have discerned as the meaning of this particular story — to be grateful when we are healed.

That line of thought is interesting and certainly, we learn a lot about responded to grace given here.

Look what Jesus says to the one who came back: “Were not ten made clean?

But the other nine, where are they?

Was none of them found to return and give praise to God except this foreigner?

(The man who came back was a Samaritan.)

I was taught, explicitly or implicitly, that Jesus is teaching us to return and be grateful when we experience God’s goodness and healing.

Right?

Jesus remarks that this man wasn’t even a Jew…perhaps he didn’t have access to the temple where the others went and so returned to Jesus instead?

By the way, it is important that the men went to the temple to show they were healed.

They would have been ostracized, kept away from temple worship, because their leprosy made them unclean.

So going to the temple to be reviewed, this would then allow them to reenter public life, to worship and make sacrifices again, to participate in the wholeness of community.

And, while Samaritans had a place in the temple life too, albeit more removed than that of faithful Jews, they were foreigners and outsiders to a greater degree.

The original teaching, of needing to be grateful for healing, is fine, but it’s incomplete.

Or it speaks of a more quid pro quo expectation from God.

Perhaps we believe God requires our fealty and gratitude, that we owe this to God, for what God does in our lives.

This is the standard teaching.

And it’s not wrong, it is vital that we praise God and return back our gifts of blessing to God, for God is the great giver.

But…I find myself wondering at this text today in new ways.

What is different about this Samaritan’s response?

What happened to the others?

Again, back to my Sunday school learning…what I gathered was that these other nine were ungrateful and somehow not as blessed as the Samaritan man.

If you’re given a gift, you go say thanks.

And I’ll confess, I’m not always good at saying thanks.

And I feel implicated when I read this story.

Like, if I don’t say thanks, perhaps my healing won’t occur…?

But what if we slow down and read this again....

Vs. 14 says...”and as they went, they were made clean.”

Not right that moment with Jesus and not when they arrived at the temple to show their clean bodies…but as they went.

While they were on the move.

This would have been a very visceral experience, movement with decaying bodies that becomes movement with greater strength and healed sores.

Like pushing yourself up slowly out of a chair with numb legs, only to find that they can hold your weight with fresh strength and stability, and then you can walk like you once did.

Like a condensed round of physical therapy, where the healing occurs somehow instantaneously, like a bone pops back into the joint properly and gets moving.

They are made well on the way.

Were any of them not made well?

Were the ones who didn’t come back not healed?

Nope, they were all healed, all made well.

Regardless of their return.

I think we get thrown by the last words Jesus speaks, in vs. 19: Get up and go on your way; your faith has made you well.

But was it only this man who cried out, earlier, “Jesus, Master, have mercy on us!”

Nope, it was the crowd.

Vs. 13 says they cried out.

It’s plural.

So we can assume it is all of them (that’s the idea) all of them that cry out and are healed.

Ok, then, so what’s different about this one last man, the Samaritan?

I don’t love the way the NRSV translates the last word of Jesus’ reply, the word “well.”

We hear that and question if he’s the only one who is well.

The Greek word here is actually sozo, which means to save or deliver.

The English Standard Version translates this as “whole”, which makes a lot more sense to me.

Jesus is saying that the faith of this man has made him saved, complete, whole.

We need to again add in that he is a Samaritan, a man on the outside of the religious system Jesus was a part of.

A foreigner.

Did the faith of the other men make them well?