The leper’s deliverance and healing and restoration were immediate.  For us they are part of an often lengthy process, the infrastructure of which was put in place all those thousands of years ago in Palestine.  For that humanly insuperable gap between creation and glory, between the beginning and the Divinely intended end, has been spanned by Our Lord’s Crucifixion, Resurrection and Ascension, and by the coming of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost.

These unique and pivotal events are the foundation and piers of the bridge of salvation, linking humankind’s creation and future glory.  It needs to be completed for each individual by God’s gifts to him or her of redemption, forgiveness, restoration and renewal.

For, created by God in his own image, we have to be transformed by him into his own likeness.  So St John, looking ahead to salvation’s consummation, said: we know that “…we will be like him, for we will see him as he is” (NRSV, 1 John 3:2).  Thus salvation here is continued as salvation hereafter.  As Jesus said in the Temple at the Feast of Dedication, “My sheep hear my voice.  I know them, and they follow me.  I give them eternal life, and they will never perish” (NRSV, John 10:27,28, our emphasis).

However, it has to be recognised that eternal life, which is salvation’s fruit both here and hereafter, is offered: it is not imposed.  It is a gift, but a gift that can be refused.  In the words of the Book of Ecclesiasticus, “Man has life and death before him; whichever a man likes better will be given him” (Jerusalem Bible, 15:17).