In the course of writing these plays, I’m becoming more and more amazed at how problematic Jesus’s utterances can routinely be. Not just the grand pronouncements of heavenly mysteries, which you’d expect to be problematic, but the ordinary logic of daily conversation. I know I should be happy about this, because it provides so much grist for the plays, but I’m beginning to seriously wonder what’s going on here. It’s like when someone is speaking in a language that wasn’t theirs by birth. They might get all the words right, but there can be subtle variances in idioms, or correct but not quite standard grammatical constructions that give away the fact that they’re not speaking in their native tongue. Only in this case, it’s not language per se, but the thought processes themselves, the logical connections between statements, the flow of events in a scene.
Take this week’s story about the ten lepers. It seems like a simple story on the face of it: ten lepers (well, only six in my account, because I don’t want too many characters per scene) ask Jesus to heal them and he does, but only one of them goes back to thank him. He then makes a comment about the lack of gratitude on the part of the other nine, and it’s a nice lesson for all. However, in the story, Jesus goes on to make one more statement: “Your faith has made you well.”
On the surface, there’s nothing wrong with this line. The leper was made well, and we’re informed it was because of his faith. Fine. But there’s something just slightly off about the line in the context of the rest of the story. After all, the other nine were healed, too, also presumably due to their faith. But Jesus has just finished denigrating the others for not returning to thank him. It makes you want to treat the “your faith has made you well” as something that applies only to the leper who returned. That’s what you’d expect in the normal flow of the encounter. Plus, Jesus says, “has made” and not “made”, speaking in the present tense as if the healing has just happened, and only because the one leper returned.
It’s not an outright contradiction or logical flaw, of course. There’s no law that says the one statement had to be connected to the other. It’s just that they don’t quite flow, like a native idiom not quite used right, or a slight accent in pronunciation.
Could Jesus have been an alien from some planet where the laws of logic are slightly different?
The truth is out there!