The Grateful Samaritan Stephen G. Hyde Ravensworth Baptist Church October 9, 2016 Luke 17:11-19

Transcription

1 1 The Grateful Samaritan Stephen G. Hyde Ravensworth Baptist Church October 9, 2016 Luke 17:11-19 At first glance, it looks like today s story from Luke is all about gratitude, or the lack of it. It appears to be a theme that would better fit November 20 th this year, the Sunday before Thanksgiving. Ten lepers approach Jesus, calling out to him from the respectable distance dictated by their society. Their voices have become so accustomed to calling out the words of warning, also dictated by their society: Unclean! Unclean! The disease, which has affected their skin, has also thinned out their voices. Maybe once they were strong and assertive, even leaders in their villages and synagogues. But now their voices, thin and weak, carry to Jesus a plea for mercy. What were they hoping Jesus would do for them? What would be the merciful thing to do? Maybe some of them still harbored a hope for healing someday, a notion that the day might come when their villages would allow them to re-enter the lives of their families and community. Or maybe that hope had died. The ten lepers are not necessarily a close-knit group. They are bound together by the wounds of their illness, and they travel together as a group of ten because this is the only human connection available to them. Nine Galileans would certainly not have chosen to be in the constant company of a Samaritan. They are stuck with each other. Some of them spot Jesus walking along the border between Galilee and Samaria, about to enter a remote village, and at least one of them recognizes him. They have a quick conversation among themselves, move cautiously as close to him as they dare, and with a voice as strong as they can muster, all ten call out: Jesus, have mercy on us! This sounds like a plea for a spiritual blessing, for a brief moment of acceptance and affirmation of them as brothers of Jesus, created in the image of God. They don t ask Jesus to give them clean skin. They re not negotiating, begging him for healing so they can return to their families, and re-enter their lives. They re not asking for the moon. If that s impossible--and of course it is--maybe he will at

2 2 least be kind, and speak words of blessing to them. What they seem to be saying, as they raise their voices together, is both pitiful and touching: Jesus, please don t be repulsed by us. Please don t turn away. Have mercy on us! If Jesus does not react like everyone else reacts, maybe they can give him the names of their villages, and he might be kind enough if he enters each of their villages during his travels, to deliver personal messages. That would be an act of mercy. Maybe when he returns from wherever he s going, he can come back on this same virtually untraveled route on the border between Samaria and Galilee. They can be on the lookout for him, and would he consider bringing personal messages back from those who remember them, perhaps even love them and miss them? That would be an unimaginable act of kindness and mercy. What they don t know, but the readers of Luke s Gospel know, what we know, is that Jesus will not be coming back that way. He will not be coming back at all. This encounter with the ten lepers comes as Jesus walks the border between Galilee and Samaria, on his way to Jerusalem. They call out to Jesus for mercy, and he does not turn away. There s no report in Luke that Jesus was deeply moved by compassion, but the simple act of not rejecting them was compassionate. Jesus speaks to them. What sounds to us like not-such-a-big-deal when we hear the words of Jesus to these 10 lepers, who are starving for the smallest expression of human kindness, is to them so shocking, and so wonderful, the lepers could be forgiven if they respond with disbelief. Jesus says to them: Go and show yourselves to the priests. With our access to 21 st century medicine, we probably would not call what they had leprosy, but it doesn t matter. In their time and place, any serious skin condition made them unfit to live in their homes and communities. When Jesus tells them to go and show themselves to the priests, they look down at their skin, and nothing has changed. Go and show yourselves to the priests means to them: You can leave this place of isolation.

3 3 Before you see any changes, move quickly against the grain of everything you have been taught. You have been told that you no longer belong, that because of your skin, you are less than a child of God. I m telling you that is not true. It never was true. So leave this desolate border country, and go home. Go home to your families, and on the way there, stop by and see the priest so he can witness what God is doing in your life. At the end of this short story, Jesus will say to the Samaritan: Your faith has made you well. That can and should be said of all ten of the lepers. Imagine the courage it took for them to turn towards home when, by all appearances, nothing had changed. Only moments before, they had been afraid that Jesus would reject them, and now, they are walking, jogging toward home with the very high risk of once again being humiliated, rejected, and turned away. They have no reason to think that anything is different, other than Jesus telling them to go and show themselves to the priests. They had asked Jesus for mercy, and somehow he had given them hope. They don t look any different, but they feel different. There has to be a reason why a group of ten outcasts don t respond to Jesus words with a cynical sneer, or a whining sense of hopelessness. One of the most remarkable features of this story is that this beaten down, degraded group of ten lepers did what Jesus said. And along the way, says Luke, when they could no longer turn around and see Jesus in the distance, somewhere between that place on the border and their villages, they were made clean! As this happens to all of them at once, they are no longer a group of ten. They veer off in different directions toward their villages, jumping and shouting, tears of joy streaming down their faces. Luke gives us a picture of what happened to each of them, as he tells us that the Samaritan leper, on his way home, looked down and saw that he was healed. The other nine had the same experience, each in his own way, but they continued on toward their homes and the local priest, exactly as Jesus had told them to do. But the one who turned back, the one who returned to kneel before Jesus, and praise God for his healing, was the Samaritan. Luke wants us to be reminded of an earlier parable by Jesus, when the one person who stopped and helped the wounded victim on the side of the Jericho road was a Samaritan, not the Jewish priest or Levite. So it s about now that we turn this into a Thanksgiving story, and conclude that of the ten, only one was grateful. Shame on the other nine! Amen. But that s not what Luke is saying.

4 4 We have to use our peripheral vision, and watch the edges of the story. There we will see the other nine returning to their homes, the looks of disbelief on the faces of their loved ones, all the questions that tumble out at once even as they hug each other over and over: How did this happen? How could this be? The nine tell their families and friends about Jesus, what he had said to them, what he had done for them. And every day for the rest of their lives, the nine thought about Jesus, and thanked God for the day they met him on the border between Galilee and Samaria. On the edges of the story, we see the face of Jesus, well on his way to Jerusalem. When he tells them to go home, and to see their priest, he is on his way to see the priests, not the local priests of the villages, but the high priestly class in Jerusalem who are in so deep with the Romans. He is on his way to a week in which they will challenge him at every opportunity, try their best to embarrass and discredit him before the people. And on the edges, we see more up close, the Samaritan leper. In the forced community of isolated lepers, there may have been moments during their shared misery, in which the other nine had forgotten they were supposed to despise the Samaritan in their midst. Their forgetfulness shines a light on the absurdity of the prejudice and bias between them. They had once been one people, the Samaritans as Jewish as anyone. During a complicated history of exile, emigration and intermarriage, the Samaritans had over time become despised by those who had once been their people in the northern kingdom of Israel. They had forgotten their kinship. Because of their common condition, these ten had re-established each other s birthright, including the Samaritan. On the edges of this story that takes place on the border, a miracle every bit as great as the healing of disease, would be for everyone--for all of us-- to realize that the human condition is what is common to us all, and the only reason we see those of other places and races as different, is that we have forgotten. We have forgotten who we are, and who we all are together, called by God to be brothers and sisters. This story about a Samaritan, like other Gospel stories about Samaritans, is calling out to us to remember. The Samaritan runs back to Jesus, not because he s more grateful than the other nine, but because there s another miracle happening to him. His skin is restored, but his eyes are also being opened. It s not enough for him to praise God with a loud voice. He has to do this in the presence of Jesus, to thank him, and to let Jesus know that he knows there is more to this healing than clean skin.

5 5 Jesus tells him to get up and go on his way. This is a moment in the story that is profoundly Baptist, and we have to look on the edges to see that. By telling him to go on his way, Jesus is saying: You don t need a priest anymore. Jesus will then go on his way, and his way is to keep walking toward Jerusalem, where he will be rejected, taken outside the city gate, degraded, humiliated, pronounced unclean, and wounded unto death. Amen.