To us who read the Bible or hear it read in the church, lepers are probably fairly familiar characters. Whenever they are mentioned, we almost instinctively know that they are terribly sick and look rather awful; they suffer and are excluded from the rest of the society, because no one, of course, wants to catch the disease off them. You know this and I know this but I have come to realise that I am not really shocked – as I think I should be – when I encounter lepers in the narrative and I struggle to imagine what they even look like. The image of a rather jolly leper from ‘The Life of Brian’ does not help either.
But recently I have been reading Umberto Eco’s ‘The name of the rose’ (following the vicar’s good example; he read it last year). The story is set in medieval Europe, and at one point in the text, there is a description of a group of lepers, which is just awful. Here it is. ‘Once I saw a hundred [of them] together. Misshapen, their flesh decaying and all whitish, hobbling on their crutches, with swollen eyelids, bleeding eyes. They didn’t speak or shout; they twittered, like mice’.
Quite a sight. And if we think of speech as a definitive aspect of human identity and experience, then the fact that they communicated more like mice than humans indicates that something of their humanity was lost to their sickness. It is also quite telling that they are in a big group: those who are excluded individually clearly find strength and security in numbers.
In the Gospel reading today, Jesus only encounters ten, but it still is a sizeable group. They stand at a distance, knowing they will not be welcome if they approach. In the interest of accuracy, it needs to be said that the term ‘leper’ in the Bible does not necessarily mean ‘a person with leprosy’ but someone with any kind of skin disease. This, however, is enough to exclude them, following the laws of purity laid out in Leviticus 13 and 14.
Whether they have maintained the gift of speech or not, they are clearly not perceived as humans and are cast out. And we often talk about the fact that no one should be excluded, but we do so from the perspective of those who might ‘do’ the exclusion. Children are taught to share with others and to play nicely with their friends so no one may feel alone or upset. As adults, we talk about the virtues of tolerance and inclusivity. We know that including others is kind and Christian and not doing this erodes our own souls. But what about being excluded? What does that do to us?
Well, here is the lepers’ perspective. One of the characters in the same book, ‘The name of the rose’, continues, ‘The outcast lepers would like to drag everything down in their ruin. And they become all the more evil, the more you cast them out; and the more you depict them as a court of lemures who want your ruin, the more they will be outcast.’
Exclusion increases hatred on both sides; it erodes the souls of both the excluded and the excluders.
Being excluded creates strong habits and resentment. I imagine the other nine lepers in our story never returned to Jesus because they forgot what community, gratitude and wholeness were. Their life as their own flock on the margins of society at some point must have started to suit them. Perhaps they got used to being angry and relying on the occasional mercy of others. Pain and resentment can be held for a long time. We know enough stories when someone, wronged or cast out once, even after return to normality, still bears a grudge years later. And often a big dramatic change for the better is just so unfamiliar it becomes unbearable, and it is easier to go back to the old ways.
So by returning to Jesus, that one leper really does something almost miraculous. He breaks this pattern. This is even more remarkable because he is also a Samaritan, a foreigner, and knows what it is like to be excluded on more than one level. And yet, he comes back and what happens to him is more than just being rid of the illness.
A few of us from this church currently attend a course on healing and wholeness. Being healed, we are told, is not just becoming physically well; it is being spiritually and physically restored to harmony and peace. One of the things that was said in the very first session was that healing is a product of a relationship between God, the healer and the one being healed. Without any one’s participation healing will not happen. The Samaritan’s return manifests that participation by the one who is being healed. Jesus says to him, ‘Get up and go, your faith has made you well’. He is not simply cured – he is healed and made whole.
The emphasis both in the story and in the course we are doing is on personal healing, but I think the same principle applies to collective healing too. If a community is broken and wants to be restored, everyone’s participation is required.
Dare we suggest that this principle may be mapped onto the realities of today and applied to ourselves and to the groups of people whom we define as either incurably sick or foreign? Dare we, following Christ, extend that invitation into wholeness to them, through which both them and us will inevitably be healed? And dare those who are excluded respond with the grace of being willing to have that wholeness restored?
Christ is at the heart of that restoration, the author of wholeness, but we are the agents through whom that wholeness and restoration may be possible. St Francis, who went to live with the lepers, knew this; numerous saints who welcomed foreigners and outcasts knew this. We, and especially those who make laws and policies today, should know this too.
You may have detected that I am approaching some sort of a modern parallel to our story. You may have even detected that it is immigration, among other divisive issues. This is something that is on the news and probably on our minds and we want to be kind and welcoming, but we may also be scared of what migration might mean for us and our communities. We might be concerned about the consequences to the economy. We listen to different voices on this and we disagree. But the reality is that at the moment freshly arriving immigrants are the group of people who are most likely to be excluded from many communities. Sometimes this may not be helped by difficulties in assimilation, whatever the root of them. But responding to this crisis, our society seems to be moving in the direction of exclusion rather than inclusion and, if we are to follow what Jesus teaches and St Francis puts into practice, this should trouble us.
I don’t know how to solve the immigration crisis. And even if I did, I am the last person anyone should be asking. But I think what the story shows us today is that the more the excluded people are shut out, the less likely they are to want to be whole and to be healed and to be integrated into the common life, which makes healing for the rest of us impossible too. The story is as much about the one leper who came back as it is about the nine who never did and the effect this is going to have on everyone else. Let us remember this as we navigate a world full of division and seek to be Christ-like in it. Amen