From Healing to Faith
Gospel: Luke 17:11-19

Fr. Jijo Kandamkulathy CMF
Claretian Missionaries

The gospel narrates the healing of ten persons with leprosy. The significant part of it is that one Samaritan among the ten returns to meet Jesus. We can run the risk of reducing the message of today’s Gospel to a lesson of good manners, to remember to say thank you to those who help us.

The invisible codes running in this narrative is stunning. Think of the Jews and Samaritans who have traditional enmity, now living together, once they contracted leprosy! Sometimes, it needs an adversity for us to forgo our egos and false securities and identities we have built around us. An Indian village where people practiced caste distances suddenly began to submerge in a flood in 2018. Some low caste men reached out to a high cast lady to move her to safety. This lady who would not have allowed any low cast people to touch her, now had to literally sit on their shoulders to move to safety. Adversities make people forget futile marginalization of people to feel proud about themselves.

The story extends to our own faith lives as well. All of us, one or the other way are scarred by the leprosy of sin. Whoever is not aware of one’s own condition of being a sinner ends up considering oneself righteous and with the duty to condemn others to the margins. God has not created two worlds: one for the good ones and the other for the wicked ones but—be it in the present or in the future—a unique world wherein he calls all his children to live together, all sinners saved by his love.

The numbers referred in the gospel passage are not casual but shockingly meaningful. There were nine Jews among the lepers and one Samaritan! How do the Jews who practiced such ritual purity and cleanliness end up having more lepers among them! The story is not just about leprosy but about sin and marginalization. It says that there are more marginalized people from Jewish religion than from the Samaritans. It also talks about the inability of the nine to identify God’s presence even when they got healed. Jesus is challenging the religion that marginalizes and outcasts people.

In the gospel of Mark we read, after stretching his hand and curing them, Jesus could no longer enter publicly in a city but stayed outside in deserted places (Mk 1:45). Jesus knew that touching the leper he made a gesture that would make him unclean and for that, he had to distance himself from the society of the pure. He touched him all the same because he chose to share the condition of the marginalized, excluded and outcasts.

At the end, Jesus remains surprised: a Samaritan—a heretic, a non-believer—had an insight, which the nine Jews, sons of his people, educated in the faith and knowledgeable of the Scriptures, did not have. Along the way, all ten were aware that Jesus was a healer. The great news was immediately announced to the spiritual guides of Israel. God has visited his people. He has sent a prophet on par with Elisha. Until here, all the ten arrived.

A new light brightened only in the mind and heart of the Samaritan: he understood that Jesus was more than a healer. In his act of salvation, the leper captured the message of God. He, the heretic who did not believe in the prophets, had surprisingly intuited that God has sent him, whom the prophets announced: He opens the eyes of the blind, the deaf hear, the lame walk, the dead are raised to life and the lepers are made clean (Lk 7:22).

He is the first to truly grasp that God is not far from the lepers. He does not escape nor reject them. He knew what he must say to those who institutionalized, in the name of God, the marginalization of the lepers: get over with religion that excludes, judges, condemns the impure persons! In Jesus, the Lord appeared in their midst; he touches and heals them. The message of joy is this: the impure, the heretics, the marginalized are not only closer to God, but they get to him and to Christ first and in a more authentic way than the others.

Not everyone who is healed is saved. One was saved, the one Samaritan who recognized Jesus as the saviour. The others were only healed. Getting healed and working miracles are not the guarantee to be part of God’s Kingdom but, faith is, the faith that Jesus is the savior and is closer to the poor and marginalized, and that he would touch them personally and intervene in their lives.

Indebted to Fr. Armellini for some textual analysis

© Claretian Missionaries
Cum Approbatione Ecclesiastica 2022