Go and show yourselves to the priest. [Luke 17.14]
14 October 2007
Among the many joys and burdens of their priestly ministry, it is rare that the Chapter of Pusey House should have to deal with nine lepers - admittedly lepers who have been healed - clattering down the corridor toward their studies, or along the cloister here into Church. Perhaps only among the excitable crowd of choir and servers thronging the door of the Frederic Hood Room one Sunday each term do we find such a single-minded desire to get at the clergy, and then not to return thanks to Almighty God, but to be the first to be given lunch.
It was one of the duties of the Jewish priesthood in first-century Judea to adjudicate on matters of ritual purity and cleansing. Admission to the worship of God in the Temple courts and precincts would depend on the judgement of the priest, on a priestly declaration that there was no longer any impediment to a participation in the cultic sacrifices by which the standing of the Israelite before God was maintained. So Our Lord sends those whom he has healed – those who, through their physical disfigurement and sickness have been put beyond the bounds of the covenant community – to show themselves to the priests, and to be restored thereby to the liturgical life of ancient Judaism. The ten lepers are not simply cured of their disease; they are cured that their wounded relationship with God might also be healed, by resuming their participation in the worship offered to Him on their behalf.
One of the diseased men stands at another disadvantage. Not only is he a leper, but a Samaritan: to the Jews, a member of an heretical and schismatic group of spurious worshippers of the God of Israel. No greater breach existed; no feud between peoples was more hostile and intense than that between the Samaritans and the Jews. No example of Our Lord’s illustration of the summons to the radical exercise of love could have been more apt than that of the parable which St Luke also records, for nothing could have been more shocking to a Jew than to be asked to receive the hospitality and kindness of a Samaritan in the hour of need. Now, it is the Samaritan leper who turns back to Jesus, falls at his feet, and thanks him for the miracle he has performed.
The Samaritan has understood not only that he has been healed, but from where – or rather from whom – that healing has come. It is Jesus who is the healer; Jesus who is doing the work of God himself. Jesus is revealed – and the Samaritan sees this where the others do not – as more than simply a wonder-worker, but as Saviour. Among the many titles accorded to Our Lord in the New Testament, it is St Luke who most frequently designates Jesus as Saviour. It is in his account of the Nativity that the angel of the Lord tells the shepherds in the fields above Bethlehem that the one born to them in the city of David is the ‘Saviour, Christ the Lord.’ When Jesus visits the house of Zaccheus the tax collector he announces, St Luke tells us, that salvation has come into his house. In the Acts of the Apostles (the second of St Luke’s two-part book), St Peter tells the rulers and elders and scribes that salvation is in Jesus alone, while St Paul and St Silas tell the men of Philippi that they must believe in the Lord Jesus, in order to be saved.
To return to today’s Gospel. We recall Our Lord’s words to the Samaritan, as he sends him on his way; your faith has made you well. But the Greek verb there could as well be translated; your faith has saved you. And this is precisely how the compilers of the RSV do translate exactly the same word – from the Greek swzw - at the conclusion of the story of the sinful woman who meets Jesus in the house of Simon the Pharisee, in the seventh chapter of St Luke’s Gospel. There, you will recall, Jesus speaks to the woman who has anointed his feet, and washed them with her tears, and wiped them with her hair, in a series of extravagant gestures of love. Our Lord declares the forgiveness of her sins – scandalising the other guests at table with him – before telling her, ‘Your faith has saved you; go in peace.’ Forgiveness; healing; salvation; making-well, in body or spirit, and making-safe: each forms part of the experience of an encounter with Jesus Christ, the Lord’s anointed whose very name means, ‘God saves.’
To speak of salvation – or, in another possible translation of the Greek, ‘rescue,’ – prompts the question, of course, saved, or rescued, from what? The stories of the ten lepers and of the sinful woman provide point us very clearly to the answer. Jesus saves, or rescues, both the Samaritan leper and the woman from separation from God. In the former case, the separation is caused by what we might call external factors – deformity, nationality; and in the latter, internal: a crippling burden of guilt and sin. In each case, the encounter with Christ is radically transforming, and the leper who is healed, and the woman who is forgiven, are both restored to wholeness. Jesus does for the leper, and for the woman – by his healing touch, by his word of forgiveness – what the precepts of the law, the ritual observances of the Jewish religion, could not do: he restores them to a right relationship with God, and, in so doing, puts them at one with themselves as well.
Bulls blood and goats blood are useless for taking away sins, writes the author of the Letter to the Hebrews. But the blood of the one who is both God and Man, who is the true and eternal High Priest of the New Covenant, is efficacious for salvation – is capable of healing, forgiving, restoring to wholeness and a right relationship with God not just the children of the law, but all humanity. On the Cross, Our Lord does for everyone, for all time, what he does for the leper, for the sinful woman, for the others whom he meets and saves whom we find described in the pages of the Gospels. Soul of my Saviour, we sing in the familiar version of the fourteenth-century hymn, and we go on, ‘Deep in thy wounds, Lord, hide and shelter me.’ To repeat the little phrase again: we are made safe through the perfect high-priestly offering of Jesus to the Father which culminates in the sacrifice of Calvary. Or as the Church proclaims in the liturgy for the Feast of the Triumph of the Cross: We should glory in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, for he is our salvation, our life and our resurrection; through him we are saved and made free.
You’ll notice, I hope, that the way that I have talked of Our Lord’s work of salvation – in the encounters in his ministry with particular persons, and universally through the Cross – is quite different from the way in which many Christians, many in this city and University, might speak of it. The doctrine of ‘penal substitution’ requires Christians to believe that Our Lord’s high priestly work, wrought in his passion and death, accomplishes our salvation not because it reconciles God with man and heals the wounds of human sin, but because the Father’s wrath is thereby appeased through the death of his Son, who receives the punishment properly due to each one of us. That is not an understanding of God compatible with the merciful Father in the parable of the Prodigal Son. Nor does it do justice to a properly biblical understanding of sacrifice, for it isolates Our Lord’s death on Calvary from the entirety of his mission accomplished in the totality of his Incarnation, Crucifixion, Resurrection and return to glory. We must see every moment of Our Lord’s ministry as part of that work of salvation, completed and perfected on the Cross, and which fulfils the sacrificial system of the Old Covenant which, as the writer to the Hebrews explains, can ultimately only take us so far in our communion with God. Even those manifestations of his divinity in which no blood is spilt – the healing of lepers, the declaration of the forgiveness of a woman’s sins – are part of Our Lord’s sacrificial, saving work, part of the work of reconciling God with man, which reaches back to the very first moments of the Word taking flesh in Jesus. Rich and ancient is that tradition in Christian devotion which sees the wooden crib as a place of sacrifice, of the infant Lord, bound in swaddling clothes, foreshadowing the binding with nails on the wood of the Cross. St Robert Southwell, Jesuit, poet and Elizabethan martyr, is by no means the first to see in the circumcision of Christ the anticipation of the shedding of his blood on Calvary. Go to the Tate Gallery – Tate Britain as we must now call it – and see the wonderful painting by John Everett Millais, pre- Raphaelite (and sometime resident of Jericho) of ‘Christ in the House of his parents,’ also called ‘The Carpenter’s Shop.’ There, depicted in with a realism which scandalised his contemporaries – the painter squeezing blood from his own finger to compare the colour with what he was about to paint – we find the child Jesus hammering a nail into his young hand and spilling drops of the precious blood. He is comforted by his blessed Mother, while a young St John the Baptist brings water for cleansing the wound. The allusion to Calvary is clear, the message of the picture that Our Lord’s whole life, even in the hidden years at Nazareth, was one of sacrificial love.
What of us, then, who stand, as it were, on this side of the Cross, even as the lepers and the sinful woman and the others who knew Jesus in the flesh stand on that? St Luke, in whose Gospel our thinking has been anchored this morning, leaves us in no doubt that at the Last Supper, Our Lord institutes a perpetual memorial of the new covenant, the perfect sacrifice, which he will accomplish on the next day, on Good Friday. ‘This is my body which is given for you,’ ‘This cup that is poured out for you is the new covenant in my blood.’ In the notable phrase of the English-born Jesuit theologian Maurice de la Taille, writing just after the end of the Great War, at the Last Supper, Our Lord ‘placed himself in the order of signs.’ In other words, what would be done ritually, according to his command, thereafter, would be one with the sacrifice which his words and actions in the Upper Room anticipated.
So it is that, priest and people together, each according to our different parts, we offer here the sacrifice of Christ. When Our Lord told the lepers to go and show themselves to the priests, he was pointing them back to play their part in the rites and sacrifices of the Old Covenant, he was showing them the way to resume the practice of worship. No less urgent is the command enjoined upon us to offer worship, praise and thanksgiving to Almighty God, the first and last duty we owe as creatures to our Creator; but with this difference. At the heart of all Christian worship is the self-sacrifice of Christ, made present and effectual in the order of sacramental signs. When we come to the altar we communicate in the high-priestly action of Christ, illustrated and exemplified at every turn in the Gospel narrative, sealed and made perfect on the Cross. Offering Christ, we receive Christ that we might be made one with Christ. We are healed, forgiven, rescued, made safe, made well. Here is the gift of salvation.
Father Jonathan Baker Principal