Pentecost XX                                The Rev'd Nathan J. A. Humphrey

Luke 17:11-19                               October 14, 2007

                                                    Solemn Mass

As a priest, I have many duties. I am thankful, however, that I will never be called upon to perform the diagnostic duties that the temple priests of Jesus' day had. For in Leviticus, chapter thirteen, we read:

 

When a person has…a leprous disease on the skin of his body, he shall be brought to…one of the priests. The priest shall examine the disease…and if…the disease appears to be deeper than the skin…the priest…shall pronounce him…unclean… [T]he priest shall confine the diseased person for seven days…The priest shall examine him on the seventh day…and if the disease has abated…the priest shall pronounce him clean….

 

In short, the temple priests of Jesus' day acted as medicine men of a sort. And this is no surprise, since in many cultures priests have also been the dispensers of curatives. In the religious life of Israel , ritual purity was especially important, and so those who were “unclean” had to be separated from the community of the faithful.

 

In Luke chapter seventeen, we meet ten such people, a roving leper colony. They are careful to observe the Law, keeping a distance from Jesus, and calling to him: “Jesus, Master have mercy on us!” Jesus' response is likewise in keeping with the Law, for he instructs them to “Go and show yourselves to the priests,” just as Leviticus commands.

 

This is a pretty ordinary scene in that time and place, actually: an unclean person appeals to a teacher, a rabbi, and the rabbi sends the unclean person to the proper authorities, in this case the temple priests. Part of what makes this scene extraordinary, though, is that this isn't Jesus' usual M.O. Jesus isn't usually concerned about keeping within the confines of the Law when it comes to ritual purity: time and again in Luke and the other gospels, we see him break down those religious boundaries by actually touching the unclean.

 

So why does Jesus seem to be playing along with the lepers? He doesn't push the religious limits; he doesn't touch them. He simply instructs them to do what lepers had been doing for thousands of years in that culture: show themselves to the priests. But then a really extraordinary thing happens. On their way to the priests, the ten lepers are “made clean.” And then one of them, seeing that he was healed , turns back to thank Jesus and praise God.

 

Only then are we told the most extraordinary thing of all: this healed leper is a Samaritan . Now, most of us already know that to Jews, Samaritans were icky people. They were an ethnic group that arose in the period of the Babylonian captivity, when a few Jewish peasants were left behind while the Jewish nobles were carted off to Babylon. These peasants intermarried with the surrounding Canaanite populations, a thing expressly forbidden in the Law. To add to that, the Samaritans adopted Canaanite religious practices. And when the Jewish bluebloods finally were allowed to return from Babylon, the Samaritans built a rival temple to the Jerusalem temple. So to the Jews of Jesus' day, Samaritans were half-breeds, unclean, and heretics to boot. They were an abomination. In fact, the worst insult the religious Jews could think to hurl at Jesus in John's gospel is to call him a demon-possessed Samaritan.

 

So here's an anomaly. Somehow, a Samaritan leper had fallen in with some Jewish lepers. I suppose that if you were a Jewish leper, a Samaritan leper might be marginally tolerable. You were both outcasts, after all. But of course, a Jewish leper had only one problem, a problem that could be solved by being healed, while a Samaritan leper even after being healed would still be unclean .

 

This is why Luke changes words in the middle of his story. He writes, “And as they went, [all ten] were made clean ” (of the leprosy, that is). “Then one of them, when he saw that he was healed [of the leprosy], turned back, praising God with a loud voice.” When speaking of the Samaritan on his own, Luke couldn't say that the Samaritan was “made clean” like the other nine, because as a Samaritan he was unclean by birth . In the eyes of his neighbors, the only thing that would cleanse him would be an “ethnic cleansing.”

 

In this story, then, we meet a Samaritan whose physical healing cannot negate the fact that in the eyes of the Jewish authorities, he is still “unclean.” And yet, the way he responds to his physical healing leads to something deeper and more meaningful than whether he is “in” or “out” in the eyes of those authorities. For at the end of this lesson, Jesus says, “Get up and go on your way; your faith has made you well.” The word Jesus uses for “made well” is rendered elsewhere as “saved.” So that last sentence could be translated, “Get up and go on your way; your faith has saved you.” And I think the double entendre is intentional.

 

Of course, this all begs the question: from what has the Samaritan's faith saved him? There's nothing in this passage to indicate that Jesus is talking about life after death, since Jesus hasn't yet died and been raised from the dead. Instead, Jesus is talking about living life fully, as God intended life to be lived, right here, right now. What Jesus praises in the Samaritan is the fact that he has returned to “give praise to God.” It is this faith, this attitude of thanksgiving for the gift of wholeness and new life, that Jesus points to when he asks, “Were not ten made clean? But the other nine, where are they?”

 

Jesus knows full well where those other nine are. He had told them to show themselves to the priests. So Jesus isn't giving us a lesson in etiquette, that it was rude of them not to thank him. Rather, he's pointing to something much more important: that living a life of thanksgiving to God leads to a wholeness, a holiness, which is much more valuable than ritual purity.

 

But that's not the set of assumptions out of which the Jewish lepers operate. They believe that holiness and ritual purity are the same thing, that being on the right side of the in group is what puts them in right relationship to God and to each other. The Jewish lepers have bought into the logic of what I like to call “us-them religion.” In this version of “us-them religion,” the priestly gatekeepers determine who is “us” and who is “them.” When the lepers were unclean, they followed the rules; and once they were made clean, they expected to be allowed back in the club. This system works quite well when your main concern is to maintain a sense of certainty , specifically, that God is on your side and not on anyone else's. It's reassuring to know that the world can be divided into “clean” and “unclean,” “pure” and “impure.”

 

But that's not what the holiness code in Leviticus was originally intended to do. Here, all it was really intended to do was safeguard a vulnerable nomadic population from contagious disease. The priests were to quarantine people so that an epidemic wouldn't break out and kill everybody. But that's not how the holiness code was applied down through the centuries, and that's not where we are today with it. Its plain sense has been overlaid by traditions that obscure its purpose and which serve to foster the very sort of religion that Jesus in the gospels consistently acted against.

 

That's what makes these eight verses from Luke so terribly important. Two thousand years have passed, yet we've hardly even begun to understand and put into practice what Jesus was getting at.

 

What we can take away from these eight verses is that our holiness is not dependent upon how “pure” we are, and our righteousness is not dependent upon how “right” we are. All that matters is the way we live in relationship to God and with one another in community.

 

So when Jesus asks, “Was none of them found to return and give praise to God except this foreigner ?”, his own use of that word is ironic. He's being rather arch here, and it becomes clear to us that in his eyes, this one “foreigner” is more a citizen of the Kingdom of Heaven than nine native-born Sons of Israel.

 

Of course, if all Jesus is doing is turning the tables so that those who were “out” are now “in” and vice-versa, that wouldn't amount to anything new. That's not gospel. Rather, the good news is that when all of us are living a life of thanksgiving, then we have no need for these categories. It's not that they disappear altogether, but that they are put into new perspective.

 

The question, then, is whether we can hold onto that new perspective, whether we can see everyone in the Church and everyone in the world in the same light as Jesus. This teaching is so difficult to put into practice because even after we “get it,” we tend to divide the Church and the world into two groups: those who get it, and those who don't. How pernicious! For then we end up back at the very beginning.

 

The last time I preached on this text, I noted that we were eight days away from the release of the Windsor Report. Three years ago, I predicted:

 

[W]hen the report is released, we can either start sorting people into “us” and “them,” or we can treat everyone as beloved, if often errant, children of God, and try to figure out how we can all live together in the midst of conflict so that God is the one who leads us, rather than [our] setting agendas we expect God to follow. In other words, we will have an opportunity to listen to God more deeply, but only if we stop the din that comes from dividing the Church between “us” and “them” and focus instead on what it means to give thanks to God in all times and in all places and under all circumstances.

 

I still believe that is true, but I see now that I was overly optimistic about our capacity as a Church to heed God's call to mutual commitment and discernment. I refused to believe that my fellow conservatives could be so insistent that the only “Christian” thing to do about our conflicts is to separate and form a purer province, and I have become increasingly appalled by the weary apathy that has set in among most of my fellow moderates and liberals: Let them go. They don't “get it” anyway. We, the real Church, will be better off without them. Good riddance.

 

My question and challenge to you this morning is: How do we refuse to participate in that ol'-time “us-them” religion when we are seemingly forced to take sides, either with those who get it or those who don't? My answer, partial though it must be, is that the only way to do this is to see both—indeed, all —sides as “us.” The Samaritan who was saved teaches us that we are all objects of Christ's compassion and love. Our job, today and tomorrow and always, is to love both those who get this lesson and those who don't, continuing to give thanks to God at the same time as we repent of our hardness of heart toward our brothers and sisters in Christ, regardless of whichever “side” they are on. Only then can we claim to be following the religion that Christ himself taught us when he gave himself for us, all of us , whether we “get it” or not.