Scriptures: Mark 12:28-34; Luke 17:11-19
I want to begin with the story about the ten lepers this morning. It will lead us in a kind of roundabout way to what I really want to talk about.
The story is pretty straightforward. It says that ten people approached Jesus, all of whom had leprosy. It’s important to note that leprosy in this context was not just a disease. If you had leprosy, you were not just physically afflicted. You were a social and religious outcast. You not only had a disease. You were a disease. Lepers were required to shout out “unclean, unclean” as they moved about, letting people know they were there and warning them to stay away.
So it wasn’t just the sickness that people didn’t want to catch from the lepers. It was the loneliness and the desperation. That’s what people didn’t want to catch from them. We don’t want to have what they have. We don’t want to feel what they feel. We don’t want to feel what they might make us feel. So better if we just keep that distance between us.
The lepers approach Jesus, crying out “Jesus, have mercy on us.” We know where those words come from, and what they say. They come from a place of desperation, and maybe some of us know that place, know people who have been there, or have been there ourselves. And what those words say is “Lord, look. Pay attention. See what situation I am in, or this person I love, and do something. Do something.
And Jesus did, though at first it wasn’t entirely clear what. He didn’t rid the people of their disease, not right away. He did pay attention, and just in that act broke the rules and broke through the isolation. Then he sent them off to show themselves to the high priest, and they went even though when they left they didn’t have anything to show to the high priest. It was while they were on their way that the ten lepers were freed from their disease.
At that point we lose track of nine of the ten lepers. They just disappear and we don’t hear a thing more about them. But there was one of the ten who, when he was healed, was so overcome and overwhelmed that he just had to turn around and go back to Jesus, praising God in a loud voice, falling down at Jesus feet, making quite a scene, I imagine. And the scripture then says, “Oh, and by the way, he was a Samaritan.”
Jesus, we are told, was a bit bewildered by all this. Weren’t there ten of you? Weren’t the others healed too? Why are you the only one who has come back? But then he blesses the man, sends him on his way, saying “your faith has made you well. Go in peace.” That’s where the passage ends.
Now I have heard actually a fair number of sermons on this story. I don’t get to hear too many sermons, but I’ve heard quite a few on this passage. The reason is that the times I get to hear other people preach have been those occasions when churches get together for joint services, and chief among those in my experience is Thanksgiving, and this scripture has often been treated as a Thanksgiving text. After all, Jesus himself pretty much treats it that way. It’s good to be thankful. And shouldn’t we act like that one person in the story who came back to give thanks? Isn’t there a pretty simple lesson here? It’s good to have a grateful heart. It’s not just good. It’s part of our salvation, our movement toward wholeness. Healing is about more than being cured of a disease, and a grateful heart is one of those things that brings a larger wholeness. I’ve not only heard some variation on that sermon more than once. I’ve given it…more than once.
But a couple of years ago I ran across a different interpretation of this passage that made me think about it in a new way, and that made me think of it again this week in connection with what has been on my mind for this Sunday. I owe this insight to the Episcopal priest, popular preacher and writer, Barbara Brown Taylor. She suggests that we not be so hard on those nine people who never returned to give thanks to Jesus. The story doesn’t say they were ungrateful, and there’s no reason to assume they were. In fact maybe the issue here is not after all a matter of giving thanks, as though we were encouraging one another to mind our manners and say please and thank you.
The nine people who didn’t return did do what Jesus told them to do. They did what they were supposed to do. They went off to show themselves to the high priest so that they could be pronounced clean and return to society. They may have even done this with words of thanks on their lips and prayers of gratitude in their hearts. They did nothing wrong.
But one person did something different from what he was told to do, and more than what politeness or duty required. It was not that the one man was the only one who was grateful. It’s not even that he took the trouble to come back and say thank you to Jesus’ face, or rather to say it while lying at his feet. Nine people acted responsibly, we assume—responsibly, ethically, conscientiously, blamelessly. One person, Barbara Brown Taylor suggests, acted like a person who is in love with God.
That reading of the passage brought me up short. “…a person who is in love with God.” I’m not sure I know what it means to love God. Or maybe I do, at least a little bit. I think I do know what it means to love God. Maybe about a tenth part of me knows about loving God, only I have trouble finding words to describe it, and maybe loving God by its nature is something that defies description. There is a part of me that knows about loving God enough to know at some level that this is different from being good, different from being dutiful, responsible, or thoughtful, different even from being good to each other, different from being really good to each other, different even from loving each other. Which brings me to the other scripture for this morning.
This is the one where Jesus gives us a sort of capsule summary of our faith, his faith, the Jewish faith, and by extension our faith, those of us who accept the name Christian or presume to be followers of Jesus. A man comes up to Jesus, a scribe, a keeper of the law, and asks Jesus which commandment is first of all, some translations say which is the greatest commandment. Jesus says, “Hear, O Israel: the Lord your God the Lord is One, and you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind and with all your strength. And a second, he says, “is this: you shall love your neighbor as yourself.”
Now there is nothing startling about any of this. It’s not even new. All of what Jesus says here is centuries old. These are not things Jesus made up. They are verses from the Hebrew scriptures, one from Deuteronomy and the other from Leviticus. All Jesus is doing here is drawing upon the storehouse of his own tradition, and lifting up these verses as what is at the core of a life of faith. In fact, for Jewish people the words that begin, “Hear, O Israel, the Lord your God, the Lord is one”, that phrase is known as the Shema and it has been and is central to Judaism with or without the endorsement of Jesus. Over the centuries Jewish children are taught that verse as their first lesson in faith, and it’s the wish of many devout Jews to have those words be the last that pass from their lips before they die. These words are placed over doorways, worn on the body, recited twice daily by many Jewish people. You could say that this was a no-brainer for Jesus. What commandment, what verse has the greatest claim on us? Not really a whole lot of thought required on this one.
And for us too, as Christians, we may not recite them by heart, but we pretty much know what Jesus said. He said we were supposed to love God and love our neighbor (he added that in as of equal value), and if you want a quick description of what the Christian life consists of, there it is. Pretty clear. Pretty simple.
Except for one thing. If we don’t just sort of slide over the words without paying too much attention, they are not simple at all. We do tend to reduce Jesus’ words to what sounds basic and doable. Love God. Love your neighbor. But that is not what Jesus actually said. What he said was: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength.”
There is nothing watered down about that. It’s not only not simple. It is pretty much impossible.
Far from being easy, loving God, even to speak or think of loving God, is an extraordinary matter. I can believe in God. I can worship God. I can sing hymns for God. I can try to serve God in various ways. But how are we—how am I—to love God…just to love God…to love just God…and to do it with all my heart and all my soul and all my mind and all my strength?
To love our neighbor, to really love our neighbor, is hard enough, God knows. Sometimes we may feel that we’ve hardly even begun to scratch the surface of all that’s involved in loving our neighbor. If we’re honest with ourselves, we know there’s nothing simple about that either, simple to say not to do. People are not always nice to us. People do not always act in loving or loveable ways. It’s not always easy to love our neighbor. Sometimes it not so easy to love our husband or wife, mother or father, son or daughter. So if we hear Jesus—and if we don’t allow ourselves any excuses—loving our neighbor will not be easy, and we have not exactly perfected that little job Jesus has for us. We do know that.
But we also actually do know something about loving our neighbor. We know what it means to care and be cared for. We are able to love others, though our ways of doing so may be flawed. We at least have a pretty good sense of what it might mean to love another as ourselves. We know what it means to love another even more than ourselves. And at this level of our lives there is also usually something real and tangible to be done, some way of expressing love. Loving our neighbor may not be easy or painless, but it’s not foreign to us.
Loving God I think is something else again. Loving God with all our heart and soul and mind and strength is pretty much foreign to us. It is to a large extent a mystery. However much loving God and loving our neighbor may go together, and however hypocritical it may be to say that we love God without attending to love of neighbor, still loving our neighbor is not necessarily the same thing as loving God. And if we are honest we probably should say that much of the time we are not even sure what it would mean to love God, to love God with all that we have and all that we are. How are we to love this mysterious being we don’t even know how to give words to? (All our discussions about inclusive language to me have this dimension. It’s not only about what words are or are not acceptable to whom. It’s not about inclusive language as such. It’s about imagining God. It’s about loving God. Every time I stop and ask myself what word I want to use when speaking about God, every time I do that I make God a little less taken for granted and in that way take a tiny step closer to loving God.)
I started today with the story of the ten lepers because, at least in Barbara Brown Taylor’s reading of this that doesn’t have much to do with saying “thank you, Jesus”, at least in that interpretation we are reminded that there may be a very real difference between doing good things, and loving God.
We can do everything we can think of that a good Christian ought to do—coming to worship, supporting good causes, working for justice, studying the Bible—we can do all sorts of things and still not love God. Loving God is different. Loving God is to devote our full attention and our whole being to a holy mystery whose face we have not seen, whose being we cannot fathom, and whose ways with us we do not fully understand. To love God is not to attend to the tasks we have been given to do. It is to embrace that holy mystery as the dearest, most precious thing in our lives. Loving God serves no useful purpose, and in our activist, practical world it may often seem not even a very sensible thing to do. I have always wondered if loving God might not be something that is reserved for saints and mystics. Mostly I feel like loving God purely, unconditionally, is beyond me. Mostly I have to try to love God indirectly by doing my tarnished best to love those whom God loves. And I do believe that if I did that purely and deeply and tenaciously enough that it would put me on the path to loving God.
In the meantime, I continue to live with the question that the great commandment asks us, and that lingers always at the edge and once in a while in the center of my consciousness. What would it mean, what does it mean for us, for me, to love God with all my heart and soul and mind and strength? I don’t have an answer to that question for you today. But I am content to end with the question, because I believe that merely asking the question and being willing to live with the question will bring us closer to God. Amen.
Jim Bundy
August 26, 2001