What is your image of a leper? Is it the medieval picture of someone carrying a bell to warn anyone they meet that they are unclean and infectious? Is it someone who is shunned by other members of society, who has to keep their distance and is despised out of fear?

Certainly in the time of Jesus lepers were expected to live just beyond the edges of the towns and cities, but close enough to enable them to receive charity. This followed the practice set out in Leviticus (13:45f):

“The person who has the leprous disease shall wear torn clothes and let the hair of his head be dishevelled; and he shall cover his upper lip and cry out, ‘unclean, unclean’. He shall remain unclean as long as he has the disease; his dwelling shall be outside the camp.”

Leprosy is caused by a bacillus, Mycobacterium leprae, a distant relative of TB, and is probably spread by airborne particles. It results in sores, ulcers and scabs on the skin as well as destroying blood vessels and ligaments. It can result in blindness, loss of feeling and paralysis if untreated. But today it is curable with various drugs. The World Health Organisation estimates that there are 830,000 cases worldwide, 90% of whom live in developing countries.

The disease still carries quite a stigma and certainly did in the time of Jesus. Because of this it is much more than a medical condition. It becomes a psychological one too. Even with the ancient requirement that people with leprosy live close enough to be able to receive charity, a sign of care and concern, being required to live far enough away not to be a threat would affect how someone valued themselves. So it is not difficult to enter into this kind of story and ask who the lepers are today in our society, where the actual disease is pretty rare in this country.

Who do we shun and push to the margins? We may be prepared to pass on some charity at arms length, or we might have gone down the line of later medieval society and started to shun them. It may be that to get into this question we have to ask what criteria we use to value people, to assess another person’s worth in our eyes.

One way, of course, is through the pay packet. The low paid and economically challenged are often given less worth than those with clout and a high disposable income. One advert even implies that if you have the wrong mobile phone ring tone you will become a leper, shunned by the beauties who just two seconds earlier had been following in adoration! Adverts aren’t real life, but they have a way of tapping into it that becomes the true word said in jest.

Another way we value people is through how like us they are, or how we would like to be. Those who are different, or whose life is a bit messy at the moment (because it just is sometimes), or who like different things to us - they might even listen to Radio 1 or 2! People with mental illnesses still have to deal with a great stigma and yet all of us can find ourselves being disturbed by something deep seated. The grieving, those whose tears just won’t stop, someone who is coming to terms with their own mortality can all be made to feel they are social lepers because they make us confront the uncomfortable and the very things we want to avoid.

These people may be us. There may be times when we are made to feel like lepers because of our faith which for all of 70% of the population putting Christianity down on their 2001 census forms, our popular culture doesn’t really get people who take faith seriously and personally.

The ten lepers are beginning to be not so distant. They are crossing a boundary that we like to keep which makes them other and over there somewhere. They have crossed the boundary and stepped inside us and we now realise that they are us.

So what does showing ourselves to the priest mean here? Firstly, we have to call out to Jesus, to God in Christ, that we need his healing touch, his healing command. We need to hear the words that say you are my beloved child and that is why these other things don’t matter. The most important thing is living the new life we have found in him because trying to shape yourself on the right phone ring tone, salary scales that may just be from a parallel universe to our own, to pretend that you don’t grieve when you do, whatever it is, to try to shape yourself on these unreal standards will just tie you up in knots and send you quietly, or not so quietly, chasing your own tail.

Then with this new found confidence and self-esteem, with these burdens lifted, we find that only one of the ten comes back to say ‘thank you’. And it is the outsider, the Samaritan, who belonged to a group of social lepers, who remembers to say ‘Thank you’!

We tend to take so much for granted. I think this is one of the particular sins of our generation. You could probably write your own top ten sins of our times, but somewhere in it I would put taking for granted. We take life for granted; until something happens to shake us up a bit, even then some just regard whatever it is as an affront. We take the prospect of eternal life for granted, forgetting that is only through God’s gracious love and mercy that we have anything at all, let alone new life in his Christ.

I like getting thank you letter, not because I expect it and like to feel special, but because it says that the person has not taken what was done for them or given to them for granted. I have been struck by a number of thank-you's recently. There have been those on the prayer list who have appreciated a card saying that they are being prayed for. There have been those who received harvest boxes last week who wrote straight away to say thank you for the thought. I’ve put those notes on the noticeboard in the hall.

Of course we have thank you written into our title deeds and it is what the word Eucharist means. Eucharistos is the Greek word for Thanksgiving and the Eucharistic Prayer is the great prayer of thanksgiving. It is through being thankful for the gift we receive in Christ that we receive the transforming love that sets us alive and makes the difference between us being a gathered community dedicating ourselves in the service of God rather than just a club for the likeminded. In this act of thanksgiving we give back the lives we have received that they may be sanctified, blessed and used for the praise and glory of God. With that we can join the one leper who, now healed, returned to say thank you and go our way for faith has made us well.

© Ian Black 2004

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