I wrote those words as soon as I woke up today, and I left them alone on the page.  Five words – reflecting both my hopes and my doubts.  Then I took them with me as I went out with the others.  On waking, I had felt joy and excitement welling up inside me – although I wasn’t sure why – and it seemed to grow as I talked to my friends.

Of course, they wouldn’t have been my friends if we hadn’t all been lepers.  They only tolerated me because they were outcasts themselves.  We lived together to provide support for each other, and a bit of companionship.  They lived at the border of Samaria because they were outcasts from the Jews in Galilee, and I lived at the border of Galilee because I was an outcast from the Samaritans.

Overall, we got on alright, although they clearly looked down on me at times because I was a Samaritan.  I tolerated their attitudes because I was interested in God, and their worship of him seemed better than the mixed-up worship I was used to among my own people.  True, we claimed to worship the same God, but we mixed him up with so many other gods and so many other ancient traditions from the distant lands of our ancestors that we didn’t seem to really understand what we worshipped.  I knew that I wanted to understand more, and when I caught leprosy, it – perversely – gave me the opportunity to learn more about God.  I had to leave my home, my work, my town, my relatives, even my wife and our only son, Joshua.  Since then, I’ve only seen them from time to time, and only from a distance.  After all, I don’t want either of them to catch this dreadful disease.

So that sheet accompanied me, with its bold, hopeful writing.  Those words reminded me not to give up even when we sought Jesus and learned that he must have taken a different road from the one we had expected.

At that point, some of the others suggested that we should just forget about it; give up on our plan.  But those words echoed in my mind and reminded me how important our goal had been when I woke up.  They made me think just how much it would change my life if it did come true.  I pictured being with my wife and our son once more; of waking up in the morning and being able to walk among the rest of the people in our village with no need to hide my shame away.

It strengthened my resolve, and I added my voice to the few who said that we should hurry across to the next town to make sure that we got there before Jesus did.  And it worked.

There were eight of us who had the energy and courage to go.  There were others who had hoped to join us too, but in the end they stayed behind because the effort required was too great.  Leprosy is a sickness that is both humiliating and painful.  Raw skin is very sensitive – touch it or knock it and it hurts a lot.  And suffering saps the will.  It is so easy to just stop caring about things, in a way that leaves life merely flowing over one, instead of one living life.  I’ve seen it happen with many people over the last two years: newly sick people who never recover from their initial devastation at the diagnosis of leprosy.  They stay all day in their shelters and gradually grow more and more morose; hopeless.  They give up.

Others never give up, however bad things seem to be.  Rufus is such a man, one of those who went with me to see Jesus.  He had lost everything because of his leprosy – to the point where he never wants to talk about the way life used to be – but he has never given up hoping for recovery.  His was the strongest and most convincing of the voices that spoke in favour of finding Jesus.  He caught leprosy as a teenager, and has lost all connection with his family in the 30 years that have passed since.  The girl he had been to marry married someone else.  His parents were ashamed of his situation and disowned him.  His younger brother had been made the heir and ran the family business.  Several years ago, when Rufus was badly injured by a rampaging bull and unable to do anything for three months, his family never offered the slightest help, or even acknowledged his plight.  If it had not been for the other lepers, he would have been left alone to die of his injuries.  Yet Rufus has never given in to depression and never criticises his family for what they did to him.

When you join the “family” of lepers, you are just one more tragic story in a massive collection of tragic stories.  Stories of wasted lives and of people who have been abandoned or rejected by their families.

I didn’t want it to end that way for me or my friends.

So we set off.

Jesus was travelling along a road that would take him through a town only a few kilometres away from where we lived, and we hurried there.  When we arrived, we enquired whether Jesus had arrived yet and were assured that he hadn’t.  Naturally, we had to stay outside the town, and the townsfolk didn’t even want us on the road that led into the town, so we stood off to one side and watched.

As we waited, we met another two lepers who lived outside the town and we all talked about Jesus.  They were Jews too, and they weren’t very happy with the fact that he had travelled through Samaria at times.  They criticised both Jesus and the Samaritans for a while until one of my friends told them that I was a Samaritan too.  I’m used to their attitude about us and ignored it, but I was very pleased at the confirmation that Jesus isn’t above talking to Samaritans.

Jesus is a Jew, but apparently he’s spoken to a few Samaritans and other foreigners, and even healed some.  I hoped and believed that he could cure me.

We kept waiting all morning.  Some of my friends were ready to give up and go home, but we’d heard that Jesus was often surrounded by crowds that slowed him down, so the rest of us encouraged them to keep waiting.  Eventually we heard a commotion along the road, and there he was.  A crowd was accompanying him, and it was hard to work out which of the men in the crowd was the one we wanted – his clothes were ordinary, his actions were ordinary, his face was ordinary.  Everything about him was ordinary, except for the things he said and the things he could do that no-one else could do.

Obviously, as lepers, we couldn’t go close to him, so we stood and shouted from a distance, all ten of us, “Jesus, Master, have mercy on us.”

It took quite a while to make ourselves heard; we had to keep on shouting and shouting.  If I hadn’t been so desperate – and determined – I might have given up then.

When at last he heard us and understood what we wanted, all he did was to shout back to us, “Go and show yourselves to the priests.”

That’s all.

No waving of hands, no bright lights in the sky, just a few shouted words and that was it.

We looked at each other.  Nothing had changed.  His voice had faded away and there was nothing to show for it.  I looked at my skin and it was just the same: raw skin, painful patches.

Jesus hadn’t cured us.

But though he said no more, he did keep looking at us.  Was he waiting for us to start on our way to Jerusalem?  Was there any point in doing so?  I thought to myself, “I’m going to look really stupid if I go to the temple and show myself to the priests like this!”

Yet when I looked into his eyes, I saw a challenge there.  A compassionate challenge.

Start the journey, his eyes were saying, trust me.  Take that first step towards Jerusalem.  He was willing me to do it, but leaving the final decision up to me.

I made my choice.  I turned away from Jesus, at just the same time as some of the others did.  Together we started to move away, and within a few moments, all ten of us had set off down the road, heading for Jerusalem.

I know it sounds ridiculous, because I had no money, no food, no spare clothes – nothing but faith that it would work.  Somehow.

For an hour or more, we walked in silence.  No-one had the confidence to ask out loud the questions we all wanted answers to.  Some smiled, but most of us were quite unsure of what would happen.  By the time we had walked a few kilometres without speaking, my questions were growing more insistent, and I was having difficulty keeping my fears inside me.  What if it didn’t work?  I pressed my lips tightly together and kept walking.  Step by step, hill by hill, village by village.  It happened so gradually I hardly noticed at first, but as I walked, my skin started to feel… well, different.  I looked down at my arms and felt fairly sure that the red patches of raw skin were shrinking.  I looked around at my friends and saw them holding up their arms too.  Looking.  Wondering.

I stopped, and all the others did too.  We stood still and each looked at his own skin.  Then we looked at each other, and on each face I saw wonder and the beginnings of some of the biggest smiles you could ever imagine.

“It’s working,” I whispered, and I think my voice was shaking.

Everyone agreed and we all cheered and shouted together.  As we stood and jumped and danced in joy and amazement, the healing work of Jesus continued, and after a few minutes my skin was almost like that of a young child, even better than it had been before the curse of leprosy struck me.  Immediately, I started to think of my wife; my son; my family; my home.

“Let’s go home,” said one of my friends.

“We can’t do that,” another objected.  “Jesus said to go to the priests.”

“That means Jerusalem, doesn’t it?  That’s a long way.”

“There are priests in other towns,” said another.

“But they’re all down in the south anyway.  Not much closer than Jerusalem.”

“We’re healed.  There’s nothing for the priests to see.  Why bother going to see them?”

“Jesus said to.”

“But they wouldn’t believe our story anyway.  The priests hate Jesus.”

“They’ll probably find some way to keep saying that we are unclean.”

“You’re right.  We might as well just go home.”

Ten people, all given the same instruction and all newly cured of leprosy because they had started to obey.  Yet now there were as many ideas of what we should do next as there were people in the discussion.

“I think we should go back and say thank you to Jesus,” I said.

“But he didn’t tell us to do that.”

“He wouldn’t even talk to you anyway – you’re a Samaritan, remember.”

“I think he will,” I said, “but even if he doesn’t, I still want to say thank you and to praise God for what he has done.”

“But it’ll take you more than an hour to get back there, and then you’ll have to find him.  It’s a waste of time.”

“Let’s get on with this trip to Jerusalem,” said Rufus.  He had nothing to attract him to his old home.

“I think I’ll just go home,” said another.

The discussion went on, backwards and forwards, but I wasn’t willing to change my mind.  I was going back to find Jesus and thank him.

“I’m going back,” I said, finally.  Stubbornly.

They gave me their best wishes, but I got the feeling that they were beginning to stand apart from me – even Rufus.  Now that we were all healed, they were remembering that I was a Samaritan.  It crossed my mind that this might be the last time I saw them.  Should I go with them and see if I could maintain the friendship?  No!  I had to praise God, and tell Jesus how thankful I was.  The temple could wait.  Even my family could wait one more day.  I had to do it.

Well, my friends were right to some extent: it did take quite a while to find Jesus, but it really wasn’t bad.  He had been travelling along the same road as we were, just more slowly because of the crowds that always demanded his attention.

When I found him, I shouted out my praise to God and explained who I was.  Then I fell at Jesus’ feet and thanked him.  I can never thank him enough for what he has done for me.

Jesus welcomed me, yet he did so in a way that demanded that I acknowledge that I was not a Jew, not one of the chosen descendants of Abraham.  He called me a “foreigner”, and I suppose I could have got upset about that – but really, it’s true.  I am a foreigner, not a Jew.  Jesus came to teach the Jews, not people like me.  However, he still welcomes foreigners like me if we are persistent enough.  And he was obviously very happy that I had come back to say thank you and to praise God.

His final words to me were, “Go your way; your faith has made you well.”

And if Jesus thought it was a good idea for me to return and say thank you, then I’m sure it was a good idea.  Now I need to do what he said: go to the temple to offer the gift Moses commanded.  I wouldn’t have bothered if Jesus hadn’t told me to do it, because the Jewish priests are never very happy to see us Samaritans.  But since Jesus said it, off I go.  What a wonderful day this has turned out to be!  Jerusalem first, then home to my family!

I must hurry.