Do you feel
joy? Would you like to?
I assume we’d
all like to. Joy is defined as a feeling
of great happiness, and who would not want that? I cannot imagine being in a situation where
I’d say, “Nah, I don’t joy. I don’t want
happiness. And especially not great
happiness. I’d rather just feel
mediocre.”
We all want to
feel joy. But the thing is that joy is
just that, a feeling. Joy is an
emotion. It's a wonderful emotion. It's one that we all need to feel
sometimes. But the problem with emotions
is that they change. Emotions are
momentary. They are never
permanent. No matter how intense a
feeling of joy is, there's going to come a time when that emotion fades. So while it's great to feel joy, what we
really want is not just a momentary feeling of joy. What we really want is a feeling that we are
one with God. What we really want is a
feeling that God is with us and that we are with God, and that there's no separation,
no distance between us and God. Because
that’s a feeling that will give us more than joy. That will give us a feeling of peace and
contentment and love.
So let’s look
at our Bible reading for tonight. Ten
people are suffering from leprosy, and Jesus heals them.
Now,
understand that leprosy is a very serious illness. It’s an infectious disease that causes
severe, disfiguring skin sores and nerve damage in the arms and legs. It's not necessarily fatal, but what it would
do is put you in a position where you could not do any physical work. And because everything people did back then
involved physical work of some kind, and since there were no welfare or
disability payments at that time, if you could not work you either begged or
died. So, even though the disease itself
was not fatal, it pretty much amounted to the same thing. It was not a highly contagious disease, but
people were scared to death of getting it because of what it would do them.
Because of that, people would have nothing to do with people who had leprosy.
So these ten
people with leprosy approach Jesus, but they keep their distance. They did not know how Jesus would react to
them. They also did not know how those
with Jesus would react to them, either.
Still, they call out to Jesus, “Jesus, Master, have mercy on us!” Jesus responds, “Go and show yourselves to
the priests.”
We’re not told what the ten people expected
Jesus to do, but I’d guess that this was not it. I'd guess that they might have expected Jesus
to lay hands on them, the way he did with other people. And even if they thought Jesus would not
touch them, because of the leprosy, they certainly hoped he would call on God
or something. But Jesus did not do any
of that. In fact, as far as they could
tell, Jesus did not do anything. He just
said, “Go and show yourselves to the priests.”
They must have
really been disappointed. After all,
Jesus was probably their last hope. No
doctor had been able to cure them. No
priest had been able to help them. They
were probably thinking, “Show ourselves to the priests? The priests are the ones who declared us
unclean in the first place. They won’t
even let us into the temple, because they’re afraid we’ll ruin it for everyone. Show ourselves to the priests? The priests won’t even talk to us.”
Still, they
went off to show themselves to the priests.
Maybe they had faith in Jesus and believed that something was going to
happen. Maybe they just figured they had
nothing to lose. Whatever they thought,
they did it. And on the way to show
themselves to the priests, they were healed.
We don't know how that happened.
We don't know how far they'd gone when it happened. But at some point, on their way to the
priests, they were healed.
And one of
them came back to Jesus. We’re told
nothing about the one who came back, other than that he was a foreigner, a
Samaritan. He praised God with a loud
voice and threw himself at Jesus’ feet, thanking Jesus for healing him. Jesus tells him, “Get up and go on your way;
your faith has made you well.”
We don’t know
what happened to the other nine. We’re
told all ten were healed. There's
nothing in the Bible that says they paid any penalty for not coming back to thank
Jesus. Nothing says they got their
leprosy back or anything. Maybe the
other nine went to the priests, were pronounced clean, and then went on to live
their lives the way they wanted to. We
don't know.
So maybe
you’re thinking, “Well, so what? I mean,
good for the one. He did the right
thing. But what did it get him,
really? Did he get a gold star in heaven
or something? After all, the nine who
did not thank God were healed just the same as he was. Seems like they all got the same thing, the
thing they wanted. What difference did
it really make that he thanked God? It
seems like this story says it does not matter whether we thank God or not.”
Well, yes and no. It’s true that all ten of them were healed
from their leprosy. In that sense, the
same thing happened to each of them.
There was no physical difference at all.
There was no
physical difference, and yet there was all the difference in the world. Because when the Bible talks what happened to
the other nine, the scripture first says they were “cleansed”, and then that
they were “healed”. Jesus says the other
nine were “cleansed”, too. At the end of
the verses, though, Jesus says to the one who came back, “Your faith has ‘made
you well.’”
Your faith has
‘made you well.’ See, it’s one thing to
have a physical healing. That’s
important, of course. Anyone who’s
suffering from a serious illness, or who ever has, or who has a loved one who
is or has, knows how important physical healing is. Almost every Sunday there are people for whom
we ask God to bring about physical healing, and it’s important that we ask God
to do that.
Still, it’s
one thing to be healed physically. It’s
another thing to truly be made well. To
be well means to be healed in body, in mind, in soul, in spirit, all of
it. It means that things are pleasing,
that they’re good. It means that
everything is in a proper and satisfactory situation. In short, to be made well means that things
are as they should be in every way.
That’s what
Jesus was saying to the one who came back to say thank you. When that one person came back to say thank
you to Jesus, he showed that he had faith in Jesus as his Savior. Jesus told him that because of his faith, he
was not only physically healed, he was well.
He was well in every way:
physically, mentally, emotionally, spiritually. Everything about him was right. He was who he was supposed to be, he was
where he was supposed to be, and he was doing what he was supposed to do.
When the nine
had their pain go away, when they were healed, I'm sure they felt joy. It may have been the greatest joy they'd ever
felt in their lives. But eventually,
that joy went away. Eventually, the joy
faded, and they had to figure out a new way to go on with their lives, to deal
with whatever the rest of their life was going to hold for them. And we have no idea what that was. Would people have welcomed them back into
society? Would people still have held
them at arm’s length, not trusting that they were really healed? Would they have been able to find jobs? Did they even know how to do anything, beyond
just manual labor? Once their joy faded,
life might have been pretty tough for the nine.
Yeah, they were healed, and that was good, but life might still have
been a really hard thing for them.
Now think
about the one. I'm sure the one who
thanked Jesus felt joy, too. But he felt
more than joy. And after the joy faded,
he was still happy. Because, when he
felt thankfulness in his heart, he had been made well. God was with him, and he was with God. He was one with God. His life might not have been all that great,
either, but he did not have to worry about what the rest of life was going to
hold for him. He knew that, whatever it
held, God would be with him. He knew
that, whatever life held for him, it would be all right. He knew that because he had not just had his
physical problem taken away. He had been
made well, in every possible way.
Have you ever
felt that way? Have you ever felt, even
if just for a little while, that everything was right, that you were who God
wanted you to be, that you were exactly where God wanted you to be, and that
you were doing exactly what God wanted you to do? It’s a pretty incredible feeling. In fact, it’s pretty much the greatest
feeling in the world. To know, in that
moment, that you are who God wants you to be, that you are exactly where God
wants you to be, and to know you are doing exactly what God wants you to
do. There’s really nothing like it.
That’s what
the one person who’d had leprosy felt when he came back and thanked Jesus. And he did not just feel it for that moment,
he felt it for the rest of his life. He
had been made well. And we can be made
well, too, if we truly live our lives giving thanks to God.
It's a great
thing to have moments of joy in our lives.
I hope we all do, and I hope we have a lot of them. But when we live our lives with the awareness
of what God has done for us, and truly being thankful for it, we get something
even better than joy. We get a feeling
of peace and contentment and love. When
we get that feeling, we know that we have been made well. We know that, no matter what life holds for
us, it will be all right. Because we are
one with the all-loving, all-caring God.
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