Remember when you were a child, and stories tended to have a ‘moral’ or a object lesson at the end? So, for ‘The boy who cried wolf’ the moral was ‘don’t lie’. And for ‘the hare and the tortoise’ it was ‘slow and steady wins the race’. Well, whenever I was told the story of the ten lepers, the moral was always ‘don’t forget to say thank you’.
Now, I’d hate to discourage anyone from saying thank you when someone is kind to them. It is a very nice thing to do. One should also eat with the correct cutlery and queue correctly. But to diminish the narrative of Jesus and the ten lepers to a lesson about manners is an example of eisegesis. That is, finding in the text one’s own biases, presemptions and agendas. It is hardly surprising that Sunday School and regular school teachers read this text to groups of children, and land on ‘good manners’ as the take-away lesson. Adults in charge of children have a vested interest in good behaviour. But as disciples of Jesus, we do exegesis – we try to let the text first speak from its own context, with its own emphases. What we then do with interpretation and application is another matter – we call that hermeneutic, but before anything else we try to have a sort of scientific, objective view of the text, putting aside (to the greatest extent possible) our own agenda.
