The New Healing
Luke, the only Evangelist to tell us of the ten lepers cleansed by Jesus (17:11–19), tells the story succinctly, but with enough details to make it unforgettable.
Jesus is apparently passing through the border territory shared by Galilee and Samaria. Consequently, those around him are a somewhat mixed crowd, predominantly Galileans but with some Samaritans in the group. Jesus comes to a village.
A handful of lepers, standing afar off, shout out to him, "Jesus, Master, have mercy on us!" These lepers are standing afar off because they are not permitted to enter into the village itself. They remain just outside the city limits. They can approach no closer, but their voices reach the ears of Jesus. They plead with him, "Jesus, Master, have mercy on us!"
Jesus could walk over and touch them, as he did to the other leper, twelve chapters earlier (Luke 5:12–16). Instead, he instructs these lepers, "Go, show yourselves to the priests."
A Summons to Trust
Now, this is curious. The lepers ask for mercy, and Jesus responds by instructing them to do something. He simply gives a command; he does not heal them right away. He does not even promise to heal them. He just says, "Go, show yourselves to the priests." The lepers ask for mercy; he gives them a podvig, an obedience, a duty, a task they are to perform. That is Jesus' last word to this group.
The burden of this command, however, is not bare obedience, or obedience for the purpose of raw submission. The command is, rather, a summons to personal trust. When Jesus tells the lepers, "Go, show yourselves to the priests," the order really means, "Show me that you trust me! Obey me as your Lord because you trust me as your Savior."
Why show themselves to the priests? Unless the reader is familiar with the Old Testament, this gesture is probably not self-evident. In fact, however, Jesus gave the same command to the leper cured in Luke's fifth chapter. This referral to the priests meets the requirements of the Levitical code about leprosy. Since this disease renders a person ritually impure with respect to Israel's common worship, the actual healing of a leper must be certified by a priest (Leviticus 14).
Along the way, says Luke, these lepers are all cleansed. The story touches a constant pattern in the Gospel stories of Jesus. He heals people—he restores people—by telling them to do something. The purpose of this is invariably to activate their trust in him. He says to a crippled man, "Rise up and walk!" He tells a blind man, "Go, wash your eyes in the Pool of Siloam!" He instructs the waiters at Cana, "Fill the pots with water!" He commands the citizens of Bethany, "Roll away the stone from the door of the tomb!" And now he tells the ten lepers, "Go, show yourselves to the priests!"
A Healed Man's Insight
Then comes the irony: One of these cleansed lepers, seeing what has happened to him, gains a new insight, and this insight forms a large part of the story: instead of going to one of the local priests (evidently at his Samaritan temple on Mount Gerizim), this man returns to Jesus.
Patrick Henry Reardon is pastor emeritus of All Saints Antiochian Orthodox Church in Chicago, Illinois, and the author of numerous books, including, most recently, Out of Step with God: Orthodox Christian Reflections on the Book of Numbers (Ancient Faith Publishing, 2019).
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