9/10/20
Many churches throughout the world use a Bible reading schedule called a "lectionary." It's just a fancy word meaning "selected readings." Posts like this reflect on the readings for an upcoming Sunday or other Church holiday, as found in the historic one-year lectionary.
On the border of two cultures, Jesus meets men from those two cultures - Samaria and Galilee. The men are in athe same kind of trouble, suffering from leprosy. At the time, it was an incurable disease which led to a slow and painful death after going through the course of the disease separated from society and treated like an outcast. It was a slow death in poverty. These men need help. There is no earthly help for them, so when they find Jesus, the healer they have heard of, they ask for mercy.
Jesus sends them to visit the priests. Why is this? It’s because the priests are the people God appointed in the Old Testament to look at illnesses, specifically leprosy, to see if it was spreading or if maybe it was a rash that was going away, and to put people in quarantine or release them. Jesus sends them to the proper authority.
Did you notice that he didn’t heal the men before he sent them? He just sent them. As they went they were healed. God’s healing happened to them after they had gone ahead and followed God’s will.
One of the ten, a Samaritan, not a Jew who would have recognized himself as part of God’s covenant people, came back to thank Jesus. That’s when Jesus tells the man that his faith has healed him.
When we realize God’s mercy and grace, when we walk in the truth and we see that we are all right, when we then turn to the Lord in thanksgiving, that’s when Jesus normally tells us the message we already were realizing. That’s when he tells us we are healed, we are restored, we are forgiven. When did it really happen? Jesus was healing the Samaritan man from the time he asked for healing. Jesus then proclaimed that his promise was good and complete.
Likewise with us, when we ask the Lord for his mercy, he responds by showing us that his mercy was there for us all along. This is the Lord who is able to come before us and rescue us. We normally realize it only later. But our right response is exactly that of the Samaritan. We give thanks to God for his work.
If this brief meditation was helpful to you, I hope you will check out the other materials on our website at www.WittenbergCoMo.com and consider supporting us.
Many churches throughout the world use a Bible reading schedule called a "lectionary." It's just a fancy word meaning "selected readings." Posts like this reflect on the readings for an upcoming Sunday or other Church holiday, as found in the historic one-year lectionary.
On the border of two cultures, Jesus meets men from those two cultures - Samaria and Galilee. The men are in athe same kind of trouble, suffering from leprosy. At the time, it was an incurable disease which led to a slow and painful death after going through the course of the disease separated from society and treated like an outcast. It was a slow death in poverty. These men need help. There is no earthly help for them, so when they find Jesus, the healer they have heard of, they ask for mercy.
Jesus sends them to visit the priests. Why is this? It’s because the priests are the people God appointed in the Old Testament to look at illnesses, specifically leprosy, to see if it was spreading or if maybe it was a rash that was going away, and to put people in quarantine or release them. Jesus sends them to the proper authority.
Did you notice that he didn’t heal the men before he sent them? He just sent them. As they went they were healed. God’s healing happened to them after they had gone ahead and followed God’s will.
One of the ten, a Samaritan, not a Jew who would have recognized himself as part of God’s covenant people, came back to thank Jesus. That’s when Jesus tells the man that his faith has healed him.
When we realize God’s mercy and grace, when we walk in the truth and we see that we are all right, when we then turn to the Lord in thanksgiving, that’s when Jesus normally tells us the message we already were realizing. That’s when he tells us we are healed, we are restored, we are forgiven. When did it really happen? Jesus was healing the Samaritan man from the time he asked for healing. Jesus then proclaimed that his promise was good and complete.
Likewise with us, when we ask the Lord for his mercy, he responds by showing us that his mercy was there for us all along. This is the Lord who is able to come before us and rescue us. We normally realize it only later. But our right response is exactly that of the Samaritan. We give thanks to God for his work.
If this brief meditation was helpful to you, I hope you will check out the other materials on our website at www.WittenbergCoMo.com and consider supporting us.
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