“They kept their distance, but raised their voices…” – Luke 17:12-13
Imagine standing before anyone who comes near you, shouting over and over: “Unclean! Unclean! Unclean!” The Mosaic law required it.
Torn clothing to signal your affliction. Unkempt hair to mark you as untouchable. And that mandatory warning, repeated until people turned away.
What does it do to the psyche to declare your own unworthiness dozens of times a day? To embody shame as your primary identity?
We may not have leprosy, but we know the colonies we create in no man’s land—those border spaces between who we were and who we hope to become, between Galilee and Samaria, between belonging and exile.
We know what it’s like to feel unclean in ways that have nothing to do with skin disease.
Depression that won’t lift.
Addiction we can’t shake.
Trauma we can’t escape.
Failures that define us.
Losses that isolate us.
And into these spaces walks Jesus, seeing what others refuse to see. Not looking past our afflictions, but looking at them—really seeing them—and seeing us within them. “Taking a good look at them,” Luke writes, as if this act of truly seeing was itself part of the healing.
The lepers don’t cry “unclean” to Jesus. They cry “Master, have mercy.” They’d heard something about this homeless nomad that gave them permission to ask for something different than what they’d been declaring over themselves for years.
Sometimes healing begins not with a miracle, but with allowing ourselves to be fully seen—and daring to ask for mercy rather than declaring our unworthiness.
Reflection: What are you declaring over yourself in the quiet moments? What shame-script plays on repeat? Today, practice replacing “I am unclean” with “Jesus, Master, have mercy on me.”
Grace and Peace,
Andrea