The Ten Lepers and the Kingdom

Then he turns to his disciples and says: “Woe to the one through whom stumbling-blocks come! It would be better for him if he had never been born, or if a millstone were hung around his neck and he were thrown into the sea, than that he should make one of these little ones stumble” That is, one of his disciples. So judge for yourself what kind of punishment it is that he threatens so heavily. The one who is going to avenge an injury done to his disciples is no stranger to them. Recognize the Judge in him, then — and a Judge who speaks about his followers’ safety with the same tenderness the Creator showed long ago: “Whoever touches you touches the pupil of my eye.” Care as identical as that comes from one and the same Being. [a]

He wants a brother who does wrong to be rebuked. Anyone who neglected that duty of correction was himself sinning: either he hated his brother and wanted him to stay in his sin, or he spared him out of favoritism — and this although he had the command in Leviticus, “You shall not hate your brother in your heart; you shall firmly rebuke your neighbor, and you shall not take on sin for his sake.” And it is no surprise that this is his teaching, since he is the one who forbids you to leave even your brother’s cattle unreturned when you find them straying on the road. How much more should you bring your straying brother back to himself. He tells you to forgive a brother who wrongs you even “seven times.” But that is a small thing. With the Creator there is a larger grace, for he sets no limit at all to forgiving, charging you with no number attached “not to hold a grudge against your brother,” and to give not only to the one who asks but even to the one who does not. What he wants is not that you should let an offense go, but that you should forget it.

The law about lepers had a deep meaning, both in the forms the disease itself took and in the inspection by the high priest. Working that meaning out will be a task for us later. Marcion’s business, though, is to throw the law’s fussiness in our faces, so as to make out that here too Christ is the law’s enemy — getting in ahead of its requirements even in his cure of the ten lepers. All he did was tell them to show themselves to the priest, “and as they went, he cleansed them”: no touch, no word, only his silent power and his bare will. But what need was there for Christ to busy himself going back over the qualities and the fine points of cures — Christ, who had once for all been announced as the healer of our sicknesses and our sins, and had proved it by what he did? Or for the Creator to be dragged before the law’s scrutiny in the person of Christ? If any part of this healing was done by him in a way the law had not laid down, he still did it himself, and did it perfectly. The Lord may work one way through himself or through his Son, and another way through his servants the prophets; and those proofs of his power and might that are his own acts, being greater in glory and in strength, rightly leave the works of his servants far behind. But enough has already been said about that in an earlier passage.

Now he did say, in an earlier chapter, that “there were many lepers in Israel in the days of Elisha the prophet, and none of them was cleansed except Naaman the Syrian.” But of course the bare number proves nothing about a difference of gods, as though the Creator were pulled down for curing only one and the other set above him for healing ten. Who can doubt that many might have been cured by the one who cured one, more easily than ten by someone who had never healed anybody at all? The real point of that statement was to strike at Israel’s unbelief, or at its pride: though there were many lepers among them, and no lack of a prophet, not one of them had been moved even by so conspicuous an example to take himself to the God who was at work in his prophets.

So then, since he was himself the genuine High Priest of God the Father, he inspected them according to the law’s hidden intent, which signified that Christ is the true examiner of humanity’s defilements and the true end of them. All the same, what the law plainly required he ordered done: “Go,” he said, “show yourselves to the priests.” But why say that, if he meant to cleanse them first? Was it as a despiser of the law, to prove to them that, since they had been cured already on the road, the law was nothing to them now, and neither were the priests? Well, if anybody supposes Christ held views like these, he must take the consequences himself. There are certainly better readings of the passage, and ones more worth believing: that they were cleansed for this very reason, because they obeyed and went as the law required when they were told to go to the priests. And it is not believable that men who were keeping the law could have found their cure from a god who was destroying the law.

Why, then, did he not give that command to the leper who came back first? Because Elisha gave no such command to Naaman the Syrian — and was he any less the Creator’s agent for it? That answer is enough. But a believer knows there is a deeper reason, so consider what the real grounds were. The miracle was performed in the district of Samaria, and one of the lepers belonged to that country too. Now Samaria had broken away from Israel, taking the nine disaffected tribes with it: the prophet Ahijah had torn them off, and Jeroboam settled them in Samaria. Besides, the Samaritans were always pleased with their ancestors’ mountains and wells. So in John’s Gospel the Samaritan woman, talking with the Lord at the well, says, “Surely you are greater…,” and again, “Our fathers worshiped on this mountain, but you people say that the place where one must worship is in Jerusalem.”

Accordingly, the one who had said, “Woe to those who trust in the mountain of Samaria,” now stooping to restore that very region, deliberately tells the men to “go and show themselves to the priests” — because priests were only to be found where the temple was. He is putting the Samaritan under the Jew, since “salvation is from the Jews,” whether for an Israelite or for a Samaritan. The promised Christ belonged wholly to the tribe of Judah, so that people might know that at Jerusalem were both the priests and the temple, and that there too was religion’s womb and its living spring — not its mere “well.”

So, since they had acknowledged the truth that the law was to be fulfilled at Jerusalem, he healed men who were to be counted righteous by faith, without the law’s ceremony. That is also why, when he marveled that only one of the ten was thankful to God’s grace for his release, he did not tell that one to bring an offering as the law required: he had already paid his due of thanks when “he glorified God.” This is how the Lord meant the law’s requirement to be read. And who was the God the Samaritan thanked, seeing that not even an Israelite had so far heard of any other god? Who but the one by whom everyone up to then had been healed through Christ? That is why it was said to him, “Your faith has made you well” — because he had found out that what he owed was the true offering to God Almighty, that is, thanksgiving, in his true temple and before his true High Priest, Jesus Christ.

But it is impossible either that the Pharisees should be thought to have asked the Lord about the coming of the rival god’s kingdom — since no other god has ever yet been announced by Christ — or that he should have answered them about the kingdom of any god but the one they were used to asking him about. “The kingdom of God,” he says, “does not come with observation; nor will people say, Look, here it is! or, There it is! For look, the kingdom of God is within you.” Now who will not take “within you” to mean in your hand, within your power, if you listen to God’s command and do it?

And if the kingdom of God lies in his command, then set Moses on the other side, following our own antitheses, and you will find exactly the same verdict: “The command is not too high for you, nor is it far off. It is not in heaven, that you should say, ‘Who will go up to heaven for us and bring it to us, so that we may hear it and do it?’ Nor is it beyond the sea, that you should say, ‘Who will cross the sea for us and bring it to us, so that we may hear it and do it?’ The word is very near you: in your mouth, and in your heart, and in your hands, to do it.” Which means: the kingdom of God is not in this place or that place; look, it is within you.

And if the heretics have the nerve to insist that the Lord was not answering about his own kingdom but only about the Creator’s, which was what they had asked about, the words that follow are against them. He tells them that “the Son of Man must suffer many things and be rejected” before his coming, when his kingdom will be revealed in substance. In saying that, he shows that it was his own kingdom his answer had in view, and that this kingdom was still waiting on his own suffering and rejection. And since he had to be rejected and then afterward acknowledged, taken up, and glorified, he borrowed the very word “rejected” from the passage where David celebrated his twofold showing under the figure of a stone — the first in rejection, the second in honor: “The stone,” he says, “that the builders rejected has become the head of the corner. This is the Lord’s doing.” Now if we believed that God had foretold the humiliation, or even the glory, of just any Christ at all, it would be pointless for him to have set his seal on the prophecy for anyone but the one he had already foretold under the figure of a stone, a rock, and a mountain.

If, however, he is speaking of his own coming, why does he compare it with the days of Noah and of Lot, days that were dark and terrible — mild and gentle god that he is? Why does he tell us to “remember Lot’s wife,” who despised the Creator’s command and was punished for her contempt, if he does not come with judgment to avenge the breaking of his own rules? If he really does punish, as the Creator does; if he is my judge — then he ought not to have taken the examples he instructs me with from the very God he destroys, or else that God, and not he, will look like my teacher. But if even here he is not speaking of his own coming, but of the coming of the Hebrew Christ, then let us go on waiting for him to grant us some prophecy of his own arrival; and meanwhile we will go on believing that he is no one but the one he keeps reminding us of in every passage.