As our Gospel lesson begins, the Lord Jesus enters a certain village. He hears the Jesus Prayer (attested, by the way, in few places in Scripture):

The literal level of this poignant story speaks to our hearts plainly and powerfully, certainly in our own century and (we would imagine) in any century. Their encounter with Jesus of Nazareth is a story of compassion, of healing, and of gratitude striking deep chords in the heart. Many vowed religious today have embraced such as these lepers in compassion. We think of Francis of Assisi. We think of Fr. Damian de Veuster, a Roman Catholic priest of the Congregation of the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary, ministering to lepers cruelly abandoned on a spit of land surrounded by the sea and damned off by a high, forbidding cliff .... left there to die. We think of Sr. Marianne Cope, a Franciscan nun, who assisted him. And we think of a Sister of this Hermitage, a former Franciscan nun, who lived among lepers in India for years embracing them, consoling them, and supplying their needs.

Their Master, the Lord Jesus, is moved to pity for these suffering people. He heals them. They register their new, clean state of health with the Temple priest, so they might return to normal life living among friends and family, no longer as outcasts and beggars. He has resurrected them from a living death. Among these ten, whom He has healed, one returns, assuming a posture of worship, to thank his Savior.

The allegorical or spiritual level of the story moves us to a different focus. In the spiritual view, leprosy represents divorce from God. The declaration "Unclean!" points to a soul in darkness separated from the God Who alone is good (Mk 10:18, Mt 19:17, Lu 18:19). We are not speaking about Hansen's Disease, now, an affliction that affects the godly and the ungodly alike. We have shifted focus to the allegorical view of two states of life: the path leading to Divine theosis, which is spotless union with God or the "leprous life" given over to lust, unruly desires, and attachment to the material world.

During the recent weeks of our Nativity Fast, we have meditated together on life as a pilgrimage away from the world and towards a heavenly state of being. It begins the moment we are baptized, and it it concludes forty days after our death (according to Orthodox tradition). In that sense our brief Nativity Fast rehearses that longer journey and focuses us on what is important. Will we remain earthly creatures of clay or seek transformation into Divine creatures? Will we remain inured to the stinking life of soiled cities or breathe the rarefied air of purest Heaven? Will we ascend upward from our animal thoughts to claim our "angel life" and its marvelous lightness of being? Will we be delivered from the power of darkness? What will we do? What will we be?

In that sense, our path is not so much a road stretching before us as it is a complex of crossroads, one after another. Seen from above, this landscape would appear to be a maze.

From the moment we embrace the Lord Jesus in baptism (which is the only route to Heaven), we cross a line plunging us into this journey. For the very moment Jesus is baptized, He is driven into the wilderness to be tempted:

The Nativity Fast reminds us of this journey from which there is no respite. Through fasting and prayer we practice control over our passions and meditate on what is important in our lives. Ironically, it is often at the very moment that we have gained the upper hand that we let down our guard and become most vulnerable. Surely, this is the case in our Story of the Ten Healed Lepers from the Gospel of St. Luke. One man, being healed, understands the meaning of this new life: it is an opportunity to draw near to God once more, approved, acceptable, and whole in His sight. By contrast, the other nine men take courage from their renewed health and return to the illusion that they are in control, that they once again are masters of their several fates.

Do we not see this commonly in our own world? As a hospital chaplain I would encounter men who were in the midst of grave illness. Their hearts had become tender, and their minds had gone to a place of deep introspection. They pondered the wrongs they had done and the people they had hurt. They resolved to become new men if only they might return to health. But it would not take long in most cases before they slipped back into their former lives, back to full strength and now indifferent to others. "Thanks, God!" they seem to say, "but I'll take it from here!"

Among the lepers of our story, the case was more extreme than a hospital bed. It was a gripping drama of dying, then becoming resurrected. During Antiquity, lepers were called "the walking dead," for their flesh was seen to decay, and their bodies gave off an odor like that of a rotting corpse. They cried out to God in this most desperate state, "Jesus, Master, have mercy on us" .... eleison, the Greek text reads. And Jesus heals them, raising them from the dead, as it were. granting them new life and a fresh start. "Go, show yourselves to the priest," He tells them that they might reclaim their place in the rolls of the living.

As we recall our recent meditations on First Temple spirituality, hearing of the religion of Melchisedec and the Patriarchs, we see in the lepers a particularly vivid example of conversion central to this spirituality — a transformation from rotting animal nature to immortal angel nature. To paraphrase W.B. Yeats, man is an immortal soul lashed to a dying animal ("Sailing to Byzantium," 1926). So which will it be? Dying dog or immortal soul? After all, disease and death are the chief consequences of our animal nature having gained the upper hand in Eden. The wandering leper, the dead who have yet to be buried, reminded the ancient world of its universal doom.

In the depths of their illness, all ten lepers felt this doom most keenly. They knew without doubt that they all were completely dependent upon God. They expressed this reality in the words of the Jesus Prayer. Indeed, they were granted that greatest blessing: to offer this supplication to Jesus Himself. Yet only one of the ten would hold all this to mind after being healed,

Only one. As we behold this poignant scene, several teachings of Jesus come to mind:

Having considered the literal level of our story through the prism of human emotion as well as its allegorical meaning, we might conclude this morning's spiritual conference .... except for one detail:

As Margaret Barker has argued ( Temple Theology: An Introduction On Earth As It Is in Heaven, et al. ), the Hebrew religion of the Patriarchs was fundamentally one of spiritual transformation associated with the mysterious Melchisedec offering bread and wine. But Judaism, by contrast, introduced into Palestine by returning exiles from Babylon in the sixth century B.C. was one focused on animal sacrifice. Outside of Judea and beyond the reach of Zion's authority, the old religion was free to continue, to be practiced in other places.

The Samaritan understands his healing to mean, above all, personal transformation and restored intimacy with God signified by his embrace of Jesus' feet. We note here that the title with which he addressed Jesus, επιστατα (epistata) , was used during Antiquity in inscriptions honoring most exalted figures. It is something far above rabbi or teacher.

Here, we are moved to consider other Samaritans we have met in the Gospels. There is St. Photini, the woman at the well near Mt. Gerazim, whose transformation is published abroad throughout the city and who becomes Equal-to-the-Apostles. And there is the Samaritan, also contrasted with Judean men of the Temple, and the man who is beaten and left on the Jericho Road. Here also is a story of ethical conversion set against a formation tied to animal sacrifice. For the Judeans depicted of that story — a priest and a Levite (Lu 10:31-32) — cannot afford to draw near to the bleeding man because that would disqualify them from offering sacrifice in the Zion Temple, being ritually unclean.

The healed Judean lepers simply walk away, understanding that their sin has been removed by an external force. Theirs is an objective experience. What is there to be excited about? A priest has offered a general sacrifice for the sins of the people — a collective removal of sin by a third party, not a personal experience of transformation.

By contrast, the Samaritan has experienced a subjective event. He is a new creature. And his every action and word reflect this deeply felt, personal transfiguration. He was lost, and now he is found. He is living where once he was dead.

As we have shared throughout the Nativity Fast, the spirituality of transformation should not be seen as an esoteric religion practiced three thousand years ago in Solomon's Temple. It is here and now: the living, beating heart of Christianity. We encounter it in the Psalms we read at the Divine Office:

Here in the depths of the Nativity Fast our Epistle lesson spells out our own journey plainly and movingly: