What About the Other 9?

Today we have a guest blogger, Arlene Muller. Arlene B. Muller, OSF, is a Professed Secular Franciscan, lector & Extraordinary Minister at St. Pancras Church, Member of St. Margaret's Choir, and Itinerant Speech/language Therapist.

The scripture readings for today's blog can be found at http://www.usccb.org/bible/readings/101319.cfm

Whenever I read or listen to today's Gospel account of JESUS healing the 10 lepers, only one returning to thank Him, & JESUS' reaction, I wonder about the other 9 lepers.

When the 10 lepers stood apart from JESUS (since the laws concerning leprosy demanded distance) & begged for mercy, JESUS clearly instructed them to go & show themselves to the priest. The Jewish Law, especially the detailed prescriptions regarding leprosy outlined in the Book of Leviticus, required lepers who were healed to be declared healed by the priest before they were allowed to return to their families & the rest of society & to be no longer considered social outcasts. All 10 lepers began their journey to the priest out of obedience to JESUS, & making this journey required & demonstrated great faith on their part, because it would not have made sense for them to appear before the priest unless they believed they could show proof of  their having been healed by the time they arrived.

The one leper who returned to thank JESUS was a Samaritan. The Samaritans were commonly thought of as being a group of people who were a mixture of Jew & Gentile due to intermarriage, & so they were not as strictly attached to the Jewish Law. They worshipped God on their mountain instead of going to Jerusalem (see the account of JESUS' dialogue with the Samaritan Woman at the Well in John 4), & their laws & customs were different. The Jewish people were very strict in their observance of the Law of Moses & I would imagine that obedience was greatly emphasized in their upbringing. Centuries after the Babylonian exile the Jewish people were very aware of the consequences they had experienced as a people because of their disobedience to God's Law.

The difference between the Samaritan view of the Jewish Law & the Jewish view of the Jewish Law would probably have made it much easier for the Samaritan to be less fastidious about arriving promptly where the priest was located & thus it would probably have been easier for him to pause in his journey & to return to JESUS to thank Him.

I suppose many people reading this blog are "cradle Catholics" like myself, educated in the Catholic school system. My education in Catholic schools spanned the pre-Vatican II, mid-Vatican II & post Vatican II eras. My parents, aunts, uncles, and at least my maternal grandmother were all educated in the Catholic school system prior to Vatican II. Learning the value of obedience was an essential part of our formation, and I remember reading about the virtue of "right away obedience". When instructed to go on an errand we were encouraged to complete our errand and come back without unnecessary stops or delays along the way. In this way I can relate to the sense of urgency that faithful Jewish lepers might have felt in seeking to obey JESUS & the Jewish Law promptly and completely. I imagine that in their place I would have wanted to complete the assigned task before returning to seek out JESUS to thank Him.

Several years ago while on retreat I was taught what I considered a new insight into the intentions of the priest and the Levite who passed by the injured victim in the Parable of the Good Samaritan. If the victim had actually been dead instead of being half dead (which was hard to discern from their view on the road) and they had touched a dead body, they would have been made ritually unclean & unable to perform their service at the temple for a specified period of time. So it was not necessarily simply a lack of compassion on their part that caused them to fail to perform an act of charity by caring for the injured victim, but their strict observance of the Jewish Law & their vocation, which was not an issue for the Good Samaritan (although the Samaritan had to transcend cultural prejudice in order to treat the Jewish victim with compassion).

The question that haunts me whenever I hear or read the account of the 10 lepers is whether the other 9 lepers were merely very focused on obedience--if, like young Frederic in the Gilbert & Sullivan opera THE PIRATES OF PENZANCE they were "slaves of duty"--or whether they were, in fact, carelessly ungrateful. Would they have returned to seek out JESUS to thank Him IMMEDIATELY AFTER they had fulfilled their assignment of showing themselves to the priest & been declared cured? Or would they have merely returned to their lives, complacent, comfortable, forgetful & ungrateful? JESUS, since He is God, was and is able to read the hearts of every human being, so certainly He could read the hearts of all 10 lepers and understand their intentions. Was his annoyance at the return of only 1 leper merely His human reaction of hurt human feelings at a seeming lack of appreciation, especially on the part of his fellow Jews? Or did He, as God, recognize a lack of gratitude in the hearts of those who failed to return? Only God can read heart so only JESUS could tell us if the fault of the other 9 lepers was neglecting the prompt expression of gratitude due to over-conscientiousness or if they were, in fact, insufficiently grateful.

Obedience is still essential to us in our day, although as Christians we are not bound by most of the Jewish Law. Even in the Gospel of John JESUS equates love for Him with keeping His commandments. As Catholics we are supposed to abide by the commandments of God & His Church. From the account of the healing of the 10 lepers & the Parable of the Good Samaritan I would suggest that obedience is still vital to us today but there are two necessities of the Law of Love (the two greatest commandments) that should modify strict obedience: (1) expressing thanksgiving to God (like the Samaritan leper), and (2) acts of charity toward people in need (like the Good Samaritan).