Restoration at a time of division
Proper 23C | Luke 17:11-19
Imagine the moment he found out. A mark on the surface of his skin or a strange tingle underneath it. A sense that was unfamiliar. Maybe he noticed something a few days ago, three perhaps. How long does it take before we decide it is something worth paying attention to? I think that’s the fourth day, personally. The first three days are normal, right, but on the fourth it becomes an extended period of time. So let’s say it is day four or five, and now there is a second sore, or a third. The tingling causes him to drop a cup; it falls to the floor and shatters in embarrassment. Which is why he realizes what he has avoided thinking about. He put it into the back of his mind for the most obvious of reasons.
There isn’t time to prepare, of course. It is too late to warn anybody. His mind jumps between two obsessions: minimizing his infection of others and interrogating the last week of his life to find the moment when this happened. Who did he come in contact with? The mind goes to the usual sorts — the sense of the stranger, the darkness, where he might have picked it up just through proximity to the wrong sort. Except, of course, there wasn’t such a moment to isolate and contain.
He draws his mind back to the thing he has to do first, which is to get out. Cover up and leave town, leave the community forever. Keep Reading…
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