Proper 23 Year C 2025: Luke 17:11-19

One of my closest friends has been bald since he was nine years old. He has a condition called alopecia, where you lose all of your hair. He’ll get a little bit of peach fuzz, but nothing else. No eyelashes, eyebrows, nothing. He was also raised Pentecostal, with a belief in faith healing. So he believed that if he just prayed hard enough, his condition would change - and, worse, that the loss of his hair was a sign that he did not have enough faith. My heart breaks when I think of that 9-year-old boy, praying so hard, firmly believing that his hair loss was his own fault.

Jesus’ statement at the end of today’s Gospel lesson, “your faith has made you well”, seems to affirm this theology. But Jesus certainly doesn’t say anything like this every time he heals. Back in Luke chapter 9 Jesus seems to say the opposite. “A man from the crowd shouted, ‘Teacher, I beg you to look at my son…I begged your disciples to cast (the spirit) out, but they could not.’ Jesus answered, ‘You faithless and perverse generation, how much longer must I be with you and bear with you? Bring your son here.’” And Jesus rebuked the unclean spirit and healed the boy. It almost reads like Jesus healed the boy out of spite. Jesus reveals the glory of God in this healing, but Jesus certainly doesn’t frame it as a reward for faithfulness.

There’s the healing of the centurion’s slave in Luke chapter 7, where Jesus marvels at the centurion’s faith at stating that Jesus didn’t need to physically be there to heal his slave, saying, “I tell you, not even in Israel have I found such faith”, but it doesn’t feel like Jesus is saying “as a result of your faith, he’s healed”, more like a “look at his faith, how great is that?”

In John 9, a blind man is brought before Jesus and Jesus was asked, “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” to which Jesus responds, “neither this man nor his parents sinned; he was born blind so that God’s works might be revealed in him.” That exchange is also part of an exploration of this question of who is a sinner that runs through the entire ninth chapter of John. While punishment of children for their parents’ sins is spoken of in Exodus and Isaiah, the idea is condemned in Ezekiel. We have always been trying to figure out a cause and effect for why bad things happen.

But no matter how much context we give this phrase, no matter how much we caution against using this single verse as a proof text for all of what Jesus teaches about faith healing, at the end of the day there has been a lot of suffering as a result of our belief that we can pray ourselves better. Even with the context of all of the other things Jesus says about healing, with the knowledge that there continue to be people in Jesus’ community who are not healed and that illness doesn’t end with Jesus - all of the faithful who were Jesus’ contemporaries weren’t physically healed - we can’t shake the theology that a physical ailment is solely the result of a spiritual ailment, or that every physical ailment can be cured if we just pray hard enough. Because being ill - especially chronically ill - is exhausting and demoralizing. So, we see these fantastic stories of becoming instantly well, and wish we had the control to become well by praying enough or praying correctly.

It is true that wellness is a combination of the physical and the spiritual. The summer I did my Clinical Pastoral Education chaplaincy internship, the hospital at which I was working was rolling out an entirely new charting system. There were staff members from the company that made the system there to help in the training of the staff. There was no way they were going to have the time to train chaplaincy interns who would only be there for ten weeks when the long-term staff of the hospital wasn’t trained yet - including in the pastoral care department. The hospital administration saw that they had two choices: not have chaplain interns that summer, thereby losing out on hundreds of patient visits from pastoral care, or have summer interns and not have those interns chart on the new system. The hospital found the pastoral visits were so valuable to patient outcomes that chaplain interns had little tally sheets where we kept track of our visits for data collection, but we didn’t chart.

But that’s not what’s happening here. Jesus didn’t say, “what a great holistic view of wellness, your combination of seeking medical attention alongside spiritual guidance has resulted in your recovery.” He said, “your faith has made you well.” So where does that leave us?

One of the Old Testament professors at my seminary tells this story of her first day as a teaching assistant in graduate school. She had everything ready, her lesson plans were all set, and then she woke up in the middle of the night before that first class in a panic. She couldn’t get back to sleep. First thing in the morning she went into her supervising professor’s office and asked the question that had kept her up that night: what happens if someone asks a question and I don’t know the answer? To which her supervisor said… “you say ‘I don’t know’.”

That’s my very long way of saying I wish I had a better answer. There are, of course, nuances surrounding the word translated as “save”. That it is used principally to describe God rescuing believers from the penalty and power of sin and into His safety. That word - “sozo” - comes from the word “sos”, the root of the word “soter” - translated “saviour” - and of “soteriology” - the word theologians use to describe the doctrine of salvation. Jesus says to the forgiven “sinful woman” at the end of chapter 7 - the end of the chapter that began with the healing of the centurion’s slave - “your faith has saved you; go in peace”. The text speaks of no physical ailment, it is her sins that she seeks healing from. And Jesus uses that same word to describe her saving as he does to describe the leper’s saving today.

But spiritualizing this encounter feels like a cop out. Especially when so many people have been hurt by the theology that if only you prayed hard enough, if only you weren’t such a sinner, if only you prayed in the right way, that you would be physically healed. And that if you aren’t, there is something you are doing wrong or, worse, that God is punishing you or loves you less. If you have been told these things by someone who claims to be professing the Gospel, I’m sorry. 

In Luke chapter 4, the beginning of Jesus’ public ministry, Jesus is at the synagogue on the sabbath. “He stood up to read, and the scroll of the prophet Isaiah was given to him. He unrolled the scroll and found the place where it was written: ‘The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.’ And he rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the attendant, and sat down. The eyes of all in the synagogue were fixed on him. Then he began to say to them, ‘Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.’” This is the beginning of a poem that those in the synagogue would have been aware of. Luke gives us the first two verses. For all we know, Jesus read considerably more than that, Luke just decided to not transcribe Isaiah. It’d be like giving the first few words of a song to jog everyone’s memories, but not the whole thing because the people to whom you’re talking don't need it.

This part of Isaiah is about the good news of deliverance. Those who mourn will be provided for and comforted, the Lord loves justice and hates wrongdoing, and by Jesus interpreting Isaiah through himself, he’s declaring that through Jesus, we are a people who are blessed and the Lord will cause righteousness and praise to spring up before all the nations. This is followed by a promise of vindication and restoration of the holy city Jerusalem. All of this good news is what Jesus is here to proclaim. None of which depends on us. We are the object of everything the Lord will do in the Isaiah text. We are the recipients of the good news of Jesus. It is not our job to say the magic words to make God heal us in the way in which we would like. Our job is to trust in God and proclaim the good news of Jesus.

Which can feel unsatisfying. What about all of those people physically healed by Jesus? This is where I wish I had a better answer. Instead, I have to follow the advice of my professor’s advisor and just say I don’t know. But I do trust. In the good news of God revealed to me, to us, in Christ Jesus our Lord. Amen.