+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
So if you’ve ever heard a sermon on this Gospel text before, including from my mouth, it’s probably been about gratitude and how the Samaritan was able to show it because he was an outcast among the outcasts, and all of that is good and true, but you might have heard it a dozen times before. So I want to talk about leprosy instead. But first, I want to talk about that most exciting of all topics, bible translation.
I was recently talking to somebody about the fact that one can no longer access the New Revised Standard Version of the bible online, as it has everywhere been replaced by the New Revised Standard Version, Updated Edition. This rarely affects me, because in this parish I have us using either the Revised Standard Version or the Authorized (or King James) Version, since I find them almost invariably superior translations, both in terms of aesthetics and, at least as regards the former, accuracy. So when Deborah or I need to cut-and-paste readings into bulletins, it’s easy to do.
I recently needed to do this procedure with the NRSV, though, as I was putting together a bulletin for a diocesan function, and though this is only one of several canonically approved translations for use in our church (the Updated Edition is not yet), its use as the “standard” has become almost ubiquitous, and I didn’t want to have to justify my curmudgeonly idiosyncrasy to somebody “triggered” at hearing the word “brethren” instead of “brothers and sisters.” Anyway, this meant I could not cut and paste, I just had to type it out. It only required five minutes to do, but it was galling, since nobody would have complained if I’d just used the Updated Edition despite the fact that I would thereby technically be breaking church law. I’d bet dollars to doughnuts that the majority of parishes who put the readings into their bulletins instead of paying for lectionary inserts (which is a thing) are inadvertently breaking canon law, but I suppose it would not be wise for me to start bringing people up on charges in the ecclesiastical court.
I mention all this because I had a suspicion about how this week’s Gospel would be rendered in the New Revised Standard Version, Updated Edition, and this suspicion was immediately confirmed. As of four years ago, the NRSVUE having been completed in 2021, Jesus no longer heals ten lepers. He heals ten people suffering from skin diseases. Now, my ill-humored whinging aside, this may technically be more correct. We don’t know if these ten people suffered from Hansen’s Disease (proper leprosy) or from common acne or from something in-between. We don’t know if what they had was so communicable that society was at least partially justified in discouraging close contact with them or not. We all experienced in recent years just how complicated and difficult it is to humanely balance public health and the need for human connection, so we’d better be really circumspect before we start judging an ancient society who didn’t even have the germ theory of disease for how they dealt with these things.
In all events, this is an instance, I think, of a translation which may be more technically accurate but less helpful. “John suffers from a skin disease” evokes sympathy. “John is a leper” might evoke fear or disgust. Set the moral content of that reaction aside for a moment and you’ll be in the mindset of an ordinary, healthy first century person who’d rather avoid a similar fate. That ordinary, healthy first century person, no matter how naturally kind and empathetic, would need to really stretch his empathy muscles to see “person suffering from skin disease.” His immediate reaction would be: “Danger. Lepers.”
Now, set your Christian faith and worldview aside for just a moment (don’t worry, you’ll pick it back up in just a few minutes). Set aside for just a moment your knowledge that God not only loves the most unlovely but touches the untouchable. These lepers are now not just dangerous. They are ritually unclean. They are forsaken by God, who does not visit them, and—excepting the possibility of an honest-to-God miracle like the one experienced by Naaman the Syrian in this morning’s Old Testament lesson—they always will be.
This is an exceedingly controversial thing to admit in our age of interfaith understanding but I already kicked the hornet’s nest when talking about bible translations, so why not. I’m increasingly convinced that insofar as those phenomena we tend to lump together and call “religion” outside our Judeo-Christian inheritance came into being, they came into being from a concern with safeguarding purity by constructing barriers between ourselves and “dirt” in every sense of that word. I say “phenomena we tend to lump together and call ‘religion’” in the opposite sense from the way some evangelicals tend to claim Christianity is not a religion. I mean to say (and this is the really controversial thing, probably the most controversial thing I can be accused of believing) that Christianity and Judaism are religions proper, that some sects and heretical movements have religious elements insofar as they have taken them on from either a Judeo-Christian past or at least an interaction with religion proper, and these other anthropological phenomena are not religious per se and were mostly thus categorized because nineteenth century anthropologists didn’t know what to do with them. It’s controversial not just because it implies that religious studies departments shouldn’t exist and comparative religion courses shouldn’t be taught (because you’re only left with theology and two religions to compare), but because it makes people awfully angry when you say you believe Christianity is true and other worldviews are false, which is basically what I believe. You can’t bring me up on canonical charges for that one, but you could get me ratioed on Twitter if I were on it.
Anyway, all of this is to say that we have a preternatural drive to protect ourselves from all that we find potentially polluting, and so strong is this drive that we’ve developed our most complex socio-cultural norms around avoiding “taboo.” I pulled out my copy of Mary Douglas’ Purity and Danger which is not only the most important analysis of this phenomenon, but also one of the most important works of anthropology ever written, and found in her preface to the 2002 edition (the book was originally published in 1966) admitted one retraction, which might sound minor, but it essentially covered an entire chapter, in which she dealt with the dietary codes found in Leviticus. Just as her forebears had projected Western Judeo-Christian assumptions onto African and Asian tribal cultural norms a century before, Douglas made the same mistake the other way round. She made the natural mistake of assuming the uncleanness of certain animals to pertain to their unsuitability as safe and healthy food rather than as a function of the elaborate relationship between God and Israel and the relative suitability of animals as sacrificial offerings based on parallels between God and the covenant people. To say more gets us too far afield, but it is one more bit of evidence for the distinction between God-given religion and the enforcement of taboo prohibitions.
Now, one danger to my admittedly religiously exclusivist position is that we might get the idea that being a practitioner of “true religion” exempts us from the danger of erecting dividing walls for the sake of maintaining purity. Just looking at our track record should be enough to disprove this assumption. Despite Christianity having no purity code as such (all things are lawful, even if not beneficial) we too often translate our natural fear of “dirt” to other things and justify exclusion which amounts to a fear of “moral contagion.”
In any event, we need to focus on what Jesus does when approached by the lepers. Normal, healthy, pre-Christian purity minded man would understandably shout “stay back” for all the reasons already stated. Knowing what we do about loving, fearless Jesus, we might expect him to do exactly the opposite–walk up, touch them, heal them on the spot. But he doesn’t do that. He says “go, show yourselves to the priests.” This is precisely what they’re not supposed to do. Yet, inexplicably, they obey. All ten of them, not just the one Samaritan leper have the mustard seed of faith that we heard Jesus tell the apostles they needed. We heard that last week, but the Apostles might have heard it about five minutes before the lepers came into sight, and their faith would have shamed them for their lack of the same. So all ten did well, even if one did better. In one command, in four little Greek words as a matter of fact, Jesus bid these roaming outcasts to show that their faith was greater than the apostles and the whole system of purity keeping. He told them, in a sense go break the purported religious law on what looks like a rather grand scale, while my scrupulosity wouldn’t allow me to bend one about bible translations (in my defense, I hope I would have done if Jesus appeared to me and told me to, but I don’t know for sure).
And yes, the one who returned may have been more grateful, but what else? The priests wouldn’t have seen him if he showed up in Jerusalem at the temple. He was ritually outcast by virtue of not being a “real Jew”, only a Jewish-adjacent Samaritan.
I don’t do sports metaphors, but I’m going to try one for the first time today. Ten football players with torn ACLs were hobbling by the roadside, and one was a Michigan Wolverine. They all cry, have mercy on us! And Jesus says, go present yourselves to the athletic trainer at Ohio Stadium and coach will put you back in the game to play for the Buckeyes this Saturday. Nine did as they were told, and the Wolverine had nowhere else to go. Maybe he could have hitch-hiked all the way up to Ann Arbor or Mt. Gerizim, but he found a new team with a better coach.
You see, the nine had enough faith to see Jesus and recognize him as Lord and Master. They were rewarded because they did just as he had told them. That’s good. One took it a step further. He realized then and there that this was God and he had changed everything, not just his life. And so he took the better part, just as Mary had done better than Martha, as nice as Martha’s efforts and intentions might have been. It was meet, right, and the bounden duty of those nine to go get checked out and to make the appointed sacrifices of thanksgiving. But it’s also a good idea to go right to the source of health and salvation and say “thank you” from the heart. Then those sacrifices will be truly acceptable and pleasing to God, as they will be an act of spiritual worship.
+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.