Wrestling this week's sermon into submission has not been easy - not because I don't know what I want to say, I do. Just that it seems to need either two paragraphs or a PhD thesis, neither of which quite fits the bill. Ah well, maybe by close of play today I will have something I'm adequately happy with.
One of the things that has struck me, as I've compared various translations of the main passage (the cleansing of ten lepers in Luke 17) is the interpretive choices made in each case. Are the men 'cured' or 'healed' or 'cleansed'? What is different about the one who returns? Even though I'd used my trusty Greek interlinear (crib for those of us who are rubbish at Greek!) it was only after I'd completed my draft that it struck me I'd waltzed straight past the interpretive choices... hang on, I thought, nowhere are 'therapy' words used, and even my rubbish Greek recalls that one. Walking through the park on my way home it struck me that whilst I'd spotted the 'katharos' (cleansing) words I'd blithely not spotted the 'sozo' (salvation/rescue) word had been rendered in language of 'made well' - curing. I'm not about to rewrite the whole sermon to change it from its aim of thinking about healing and wholeness, but there is clearly another in there for someone else to do about 'cleansing' and 'salvation' based on a different set of interpretive choices.
As a sort of an aside, among the leaflets I was lent about TLM was one from a medical perspective about the Biblical referents of 'leprosy' which deduced that translators had chosen to assign a familiar-to-them dreaded-skin-disease, 'true leprosy' to all the skin diseases referred to in the Old Testament - even when there was no evidence of 'true leprosy' being found in that area at that time. Yet, it noted, this interpretive decision helped support the excellent work done to alleviate leprosy and its impact. It is interesting to ponder (a) what might have been the impact of an interpretive decision that allied the conditions mentioned in Leviticus with, say, psoriasis or eczema and (b) what are the conditions might we select as the 21st century equivalents, say HIV/AIDS, maybe even MRSA or others that necessitate isolation.