Luke 17:11-19, from Proper 23 (28)
For a bunch of supposedly godless apostates, the New Testament’s Samaritans sure do get an awful lot of things about godliness right.
The “Good Samaritan” of Luke 10:25-37 shows charity to a battered mugging victim. The Samaritan woman at the well in John 4:1-42 starts out sketchily but ends up evangelizing her entire village. And the Samaritan in this week’s passage, Luke 17:11-19, is the only one of 10 lepers healed by Jesus who returns to express his gratitude.
The irony in all of this Samaritan righteousness, of course, is that good Jews of Jesus’ time considered Samaritans worse than Gentiles. Samaritans had descended from Jews in Northern Israel who, in the 10th century B.C., had split from the Jews in Southern Israel to form a rival monarchy. A couple hundred years later, the Assyrians invaded and conquered these northern Jews. Intermarrying and cultural intertwining followed. In the 2nd century B.C., the northernmost of these northern Jews – those in Galilee, where Jesus would grow up – returned to Jewish orthodoxy, leaving the region in the middle, Samaria, stuck between them, isolated by mutual hatred. Jews in Galilee who made the trek south to visit the Jerusalem temple would go well out of their way to avoid setting foot in Samaria, which is why the woman at the well was so surprised to find Jesus there at all, let along seeking a conversation with her.
So, that’s the punch behind the punch line of the story of the 10 lepers. When Jesus asks, “Where are the other nine? Has no one returned to give praise to God except this foreigner,” he is dryly noting that “this foreigner” has eaten the nine presumably Jewish lepers’ spiritual lunch.
But in what way, exactly?
The standard takeaway from this story is that Christians should show gratitude, like the Samaritan leper did, rather than ingratitude, like the other nine did. Read as if that were the only point, though, the story sounds incomplete. One would half expect an epilogue revealing that the nine ungrateful lepers ended up contracting leprosy all over again as punishment for their ingratitude. But all indications are that they spent the rest of their lives just as healed and healthy as the grateful leper. Where’s the justice in that? Expressing gratitude comes off as a pointless move for suckers, especially given that all the Samaritan seems to get for his trouble is Jesus’ backhanded compliment about being surprisingly moral for a Samaritan, followed by an abrupt dismissal.
Jesus plainly draws a distinction between the way the Samaritan leper responded to his healing and the way the nine other lepers responded to theirs. But I don’t think that distinction is aimed at affirming the value of saying “thank you.” Anytime an interpretation reduces Jesus to a first-century version of “Miss Manners,” be on guard. Manners are important, but they’re not worth dying on a cross to promote. And in case you haven’t noticed yet, Jesus had terrible manners. He is blunt and brusque with the Samaritan leper. That’s the norm for Jesus throughout the Gospels.
The first thing to notice is that the difference between the Samaritan and the others has nothing to do with their leprosy. All 10 had the disease. Because of Jesus, all 10 no longer do. And as far as we know, all 10 lived the rest of their lives 100 percent cured of the disease.
You wouldn’t know it from the way some Christians talk, but the death Jesus is on his way to Jerusalem to die will cure sin in a way no less indiscriminate and permanent. Like the seed in the Parable of the Sower back in Luke 8:1-15, the grace Jesus will bring into the world will go everywhere. Like the lamp on the stand in Luke 5:15, it will give light to everyone. And like the party the father throws for the prodigal son in Luke 15:11-32, everyone will get an invitation.
This is the part of the Gospel that so-called “universalists” get right. The kingdom of God that Jesus brings into the world doesn’t set up here or there, but everywhere, and so, by default, everyone is “in.” But that’s just one part of the Gospel, and that part doesn’t mean that everyone who is in stays in. Not all the ground the seed falls on allows it to thrive. The lamp on the stand gives light to all except those who clap a bowl over it. The party is open to all except those who, like the older brother, refuse to show up.
There is “inclusion before exclusion,” to borrow from the late Rev. Robert Capon. But there eventually is exclusion. That’s the part that universalists get wrong.
It’s the part the nine ungrateful lepers got wrong, too. Cured of their disease, they simply got back to business as usual. They returned to whatever villages or cities they had come from, or wanted to move to, and became potters or farmers or laborers or whatever else people did to eke out a living back then. They had kids, perhaps, and maybe even grandkids. Maybe some of them did downright well for themselves. But they all, in their own ways, ran as far and as fast as they could away from the lepers they used to be. Can you blame them? Nobody would want to remember life as a leper. What’s the point of being healed if not to move on, to pretend that what was never was, that nothing about it matters now?
But the Samaritan leper ends up cured in an entirely different way. Instead of fleeing from the leper he once was, he embraces his past and carries it straight back to the One who freed him from it. “Remember me, Jesus?” he says. “I’m one of those lepers you cured. I sure remember you. Thank you for my life.”
There is more than gratitude in his act. There is confession – difficult confession, painful confession – about who he used to be. I can imagine the crowd leaning in to hear as he throws himself at Jesus’ feet, then jumping back as he reveals his leprous past. But admitting who he used to be is essential to being aware of who he has become instead – and, critically, to participating in the grace that changed him. This is what happens when the soil accepts the seed, when the bowl is lifted off the lamp, and when the prodigal son takes the seat of honor at a party celebrating that he used to be, but no longer is, a lost, dead fool.
No matter who you are or aren’t, you live your entire life in the kingdom of God, a kingdom built exclusively for screwed-up people, because that’s the only kind of people there are. Acknowledge that you’re such a person, and this real kingdom will become real for you, as it did for the Samaritan leper. But if you never see yourself as screwed up enough to need a place in this kingdom, never thread the needle’s eye of confessing your past and seizing grace, never let this kingdom affect you, never even open your eyes to catch a glimpse of it, then for you, it simply won’t exist, and because in truth it exists everywhere and is all that really does exist, you will exist exactly nowhere.
For you, the seed will never flourish, the light will never shine, the party will go on without you, and unlike the Samaratan leper-turned-adopted-son, you will never hear Jesus say, “Rise and go; your faith has made you well.”
