2 Timothy 2.8–15, Luke 17.11–19
The Seventeenth Sunday after Trinity, 12 October 2025, Austwick
[Begin by showing the congregation my collection of stoles – bought before ordination from The Leprosy Mission, each stole having been produced by people suffering leprosy in India.]
Leprosy is the oldest disease known to humankind, and while most high-income countries are almost completely free of it now, still around 200,000 people are diagnosed with leprosy every year, particularly in Asia, Africa, and South America. Millions more live with the consequences.
Some of those consequences are of course physical – leprosy affects the skin, the eyes, and the nervous system, causing numbness, muscle weakness or paralysis.
But those with leprosy also suffer from the many misunderstandings around the disease, like the beliefs that leprosy is incurable, or that it’s highly contagious, neither of which are true.
Then there’s the stigma put on leprosy sufferers by those who believe that leprosy is a curse, the result of sin, a punishment from God. This, again, is untrue, for leprosy is simply a bacterial infection. It doesn’t discriminate based on race, gender, class, age, or religion. It has nothing to do with curses or sin. [1]
It would seem from the story told by Luke that that stigma held strong in the society of Jesus’ time; for here were ten lepers, expelled to the edge of the village, who, having been cured by Jesus, still needed to go in search of a word of absolution from the local priests before the community would accept them in again.
It’s notable that the one cured man who didn’t go to the priests was a Samaritan; and I suspect that this was because his ethnicity would exclude him from the priests’ ministrations; the religious leaders of the village would not, or could not by law, absolve him, because he was an outsider.
The Samaritan was the only one who turned back to thank Jesus for healing him, and by doing so, taught us all a great lesson.
He taught us that Jesus was a natural healer; his ability to heal came from somewhere outside institutional religion; it was not sanctioned by the establishment; it did not rely on the authorisation of any clerical authorities.
He taught us that assuming that our sickness is caused by our sinfulness is not the way of Jesus, who does not add to the burdens of those who are suffering by condemning them with the language of sin and curses and punishment. Jesus had all the immense powers of a healer, but these were natural powers, reliant on the movement of the Spirit, responding intuitively in compassion to the cries of those in need, and through all this, barely using words at all.
When the healed Samaritan went on his way, his faith having made him well, this ‘faith’ was that his healing had come from somewhere profoundly deep within creation; from a healer who was attuned to the life-giving spirit at the heart of nature.
In this way we might place Jesus alongside the wise healers of other spiritual traditions. It has been said that the natural healers of the native peoples of America had “a sense of humility, a reliance on the spirits, and immense powers”. Their healing abilities were garnered through their intimacy with the natural world, through keen observance of nature’s ways: their deep understanding of the patterns of the clouds, of the movements of the waters, of the behaviour of each of the creatures. Immersing themselves in the life of the earth in this way meant that the spirits of the earth could work through them to restore, heal and renew. [2]
In Colossians Paul puts Jesus at the very heart of creation. He says that “all things have been created through him and for him”; that “in him all things hold together”. Jesus is a natural healer because he is at the very heart of creation, and his heart is fully invested in nature and its ways. [3]
At harvest-time we try to express our thankfulness to God for all in creation which helps to feed, sustain and heal us. Words are barely sufficient for this; taking the bread and tasting the wine can help; enjoying the sight of the flowers and the shape and smell of the fruit, leaving food out for the wild creatures, listening to the song of the stream, giving so that others might receive – these are all quieter, gentler ways which help us find our faith making us well.
Notes
See also my previous talks on this story, Being thankful in hard times (Austwick, 2022), The one who came back (Sutton Montis, 2016; Norris Green, 2004)
[1] Information from The Leprosy Mission website, accessed 7 October 2025.
[2] Vine Deloria Jr., The World We Used to Live In: Remembering the Powers of the Medicine Men.
[3] Colossians 1.15-20.
