Wednesday of the 32nd week in Course 2023
Ten lepers came as near to Jesus as they dared. That would have been fifty to eighty meters. Their chronic skin condition, maybe Hansen’s disease as we see such infections these days, has ruined their social and religious lives. They were ostracized from society, and could not enter either Temple or synagogue. They lived outside the towns and villages, perhaps in caves that had access to places they could scavenge for food and cast off clothing. Their life expectancy was very short because they couldn’t get the basics of life. They were the neediest of the needy, and Jesus had special compassion for them.
We are reminded of a much later story of the convert Roman soldier, Martin of Tours, who was so inspired by the Gospel stories of Jesus and the destitute that he threw his own cloak around a leper he encountered. He is commemorated as bishop Martin of Tours every November.
Back to this Samaritan area. Jesus simply said a Word: Go. Go show yourselves to the priests. The Law of the Jews was very clear when treating of lepers. There were no dermatologists in first-century Israel. The priests handled not just sacrifices and counsel, but anything involving restoring Israelites to proper worship. So women, after childbirth, needed to appear before the priests, just as the Virgin Mary did after the birth of Jesus, and make the proper sacrifice. So nine of the lepers, feeling themselves being cured–wasn’t that a great feeling?–took off for the Temple to, in the words of a priest I know, “get their ticket stamped.” Then they could get new clothes and a job and be readmitted to the synagogue. But there was one left over. He could not go to the Jerusalem Temple. He was a Samaritan with nowhere to go.
So he came to the Lord Jesus and threw himself at the Master’s feet, just as we need to do whenever we are healed of bodily or spiritual illness. He thanked the Lord for His healing. Jesus asked where the other nine were, and why only this outcast Samaritan had returned with thanks. (The other nine were too eager to get their tickets punched; they omitted the obvious first step to thank the One who had cured them.)
But Jesus may have been thinking of another Samaritan outside a different Samaritan town, a woman who we read about early in John’s Gospel. She was a public sinner, and came at a time when she would not run into anybody else to the well where Jesus was resting while His disciples were off revictualing. In that great dialogue, Jesus revealed that worship was about to be transformed, and that in the future there would be no worship at the Jerusalem Temple or at the phony Temple in Samaria, but rather in Spirit and Truth. And we learn at another place that the Temple, the real Temple of the New Covenant, was the very Body of Jesus, that would be destroyed by Jew and Roman but would be raised up three days later. In the Kingdom of God, as John wrote in Revelations, Jesus would be revealed as the true Temple, and there would be no illness or death. We commemorate this reality, going on in God’s presence right now, each time we come together for Mass.
