Strange. Those lepers from 2nd Kings are still rattling around in my head some days later. Look at them again:

It is easy to see the obvious gospel parallel for the believer in Christ — His return immediately destroys any need for spreading the Good News, as the Good News himself appears.

The light of morning reveals the good news, and the lepers would (the way it occurs to me) lose any "leverage" they have in knowing good news: "you knew they were gone, and you didn't tell the starving and the dying? You knew?"

And so their guilty consciences prod them.

It's the carrot-and-stick all over again, with the carrot (as is usual) meant to be the main motivator: the siege has been overthrown, the nightmare is over, and hand-in-hand with that, provisions have been put immediately at hand.

But there's an added layer of I-know-not-what here that continues to burn in me:

The lepers are giving the good news to the people of Samaria; the same people who have excluded them from the city and society at large.

We grapple with two concepts simultaneously: the lepers have been excluded by the laws of the Torah, handed down from God Himself. But just when we are ready to cry "How could a Merciful God write such a law?!" something like this happens, a jarring note: according to this tale — preserved in the Tanakh — He sees the lepers in their exclusion; He is with the lepers, and indeed, they figure into the tale sometimes.

So is He just, or merciful?

Yes!