The Grateful Samaritan
THE FOURTEENTH SUNDAY AFTER TRINITY
The Rev’d Dcn. Jason VanBorssum, homilist
The Gospel lesson appointed for last week recounted Jesus’s famous teaching of the Parable of the Good Samaritan. This morning, Luke’s Gospel once again involves a Samaritan. But not the Good Samaritan, the Grateful Samaritan.
What did it mean, exactly, to be a leper? The ancient rabbis observed that leprosy was “worse than death” and that “curing leprosy was as difficult as bringing a person back from the dead.” In his description of the Mosaic laws, Josephus states that it was forbidden for a leper to “come into the city at all [or] to live with any others, because they were in effect corpses.” Lepers were outcasts – not only believed to be contagious, but completely beyond human touch. To touch a leper was to risk infection but, perhaps more serious in the context of Jewish life, to defile oneself. To become unclean. To be quarantined in caves and filthy hovels, separated from spouse, children, family, and friends.
As if physical deterioration and rotting disfigurement were not horrible enough, the leper was commanded under sacred law to keep himself perpetually isolated and marginalized from the rest of society. According to the Torah, a person with leprosy must wear rags and torn clothes and must not bathe or even comb their hair. The leper must cover his upper lip and cry out “Unclean! Unclean!” as a warning to other Israelites to keep away. The burden was on the leper to broadcast their uncleanness and impurity, and when encountering other Israelites, perpetually remind himself and others that he was dirty, despised, rejected, and unworthy of human contact. A leper was the living dead. Lepers could not even live with other lepers. Leviticus commands that the leper “shall live alone.”
The leper was therefore required to bear the most painful burden of all the Torah commandments – being cut off from the rest of humanity – while being denied the benefits of Jewish life: family, communal living, and worship. The leper, although in covenant, was, according to Israelite thinking, effectively separated from God. The leper could not come anywhere near the Temple, where the Divine Presence resided, which meant that the leper could not pray in community, could not make offerings to God, and could not offer a kosher animal to the priests to be sacrificed. The leper could not make atonement and could not receive forgiveness. This was a living death.
Our Gospel reading today speaks of:
1. The importance of thanking God for His goodness, but it also tells us of
2. The importance of bringing our problems and afflictions to Jesus, and
3. The importance of doing what Jesus tells us.
There were ten lepers, one of whom was a Samaritan, whom Jesus healed. And so by inference the others were probably all Israelites. The ten approached Jesus and presented him with their petition:
They stood at a distance and called out in a loud voice, “Jesus, Master, have mercy on us!” And if Jesus followed what he did in other Gospel passages – I am sure his follow up question would have been:
“What do you want me to do for you?”
To which they would have replied “to be healed of our leprosy.” Remembering the context to which I just referred, this petition could rightly be understood as a plaintive cry not just to be cured of a physical disease, but to be brought back from death to life.
Interestingly, Jesus didn’t touch them as he did in other healings he performed. He simply said: “Go, show yourselves to the priests.” (Lk 17:14) Some context from Leviticus. This is what Jesus is talking about:
Leviticus 13
13 The Lord spoke to Moses and Aaron, saying:
2 When a person has on the skin of his body a swelling or an eruption or a spot, and it turns into a leprous disease on the skin of his body, he shall be brought to Aaron the priest or to one of his sons the priests. 3 The priest shall examine the disease on the skin of his body, and if the hair in the diseased area has turned white and the disease appears to be deeper than the skin of his body, it is a leprous disease; after the priest has examined him he shall pronounce him ceremonially unclean. 4 But if the spot is white in the skin of his body, and appears no deeper than the skin, and the hair in it has not turned white, the priest shall confine the diseased person for seven days. 5 The priest shall examine him on the seventh day, and if he sees that the disease is checked and the disease has not spread in the skin, then the priest shall confine him seven days more. 6 The priest shall examine him again on the seventh day, and if the disease has abated and the disease has not spread in the skin, the priest shall pronounce him clean; it is only an eruption; and he shall wash his clothes, and be clean. 7 But if the eruption spreads in the skin after he has shown himself to the priest for his cleansing, he shall appear again before the priest. 8 The priest shall make an examination, and if the eruption has spread in the skin, the priest shall pronounce him unclean; it is a leprous disease.
Well, this regimen of very specific ritual commandments continues for 51 more verses. I won’t read the rest of Leviticus 13. You get the gist.
The nine Israelite lepers were commanded to present themselves to the priests at the Temple in Jerusalem; we can discern from the text that this was about a 60-mile journey: a four days’ walk. The Samaritan would have been expected to go not to Jerusalem but rather to Mt. Gerizim. Since the Samaritans were banished from the Temple in Jerusalem, they established their own rival temple city on Mt. Gerizim, which served as the religious and administrative center for the Samaritans. This construction was completed at the end of the 5th Century B.C. – the Samaritan temple substituted the one built in Jerusalem and became the spiritual and religious center for the Samaritan people. So the Samaritan leper had a shorter journey – approximately 30 miles. But he would have had to leave the group and travel alone, reemphasizing how marginalized he was. He was a double outcast: both an unclean leper and a despised Samaritan.
When were the ten healed? Was it when they went to the priests? Was it when they decided to go to the priests? The text makes clear that their healing came when they obeyed what Jesus commanded them to do. As a Torah-observant rabbi, Jesus instructed the lepers in exact accordance with what is commanded in Leviticus. However, as Jesus Himself explained, He came not to abolish the Law, but to fulfill it. As the Divine Logos made incarnate, the Great High Priest, Jesus told these afflicted persons what to do. They dutifully obeyed and were brought back from death to life almost instantly, without having to make a long journey. God healed them because they were obedient. And God showed no favoritism. He didn’t say: I’m going to only heal the nine Israelites. He is the God and Father of all. Open to everyone to approach.
Jesus’s act of healing further fulfills His prophecy recorded in John’s Gospel. Remember Jesus’s encounter with a Samaritan woman in John 4. Whereas the Samaritan leper was, as I said, a “double outcast,” the Samaritan was arguably a “triple outcast” in an Israelite context: she was a woman (whom no observant Jew should acknowledge publicly); she was a despised Samaritan; and she had had five husbands and was living with a sixth man who was not her husband.
Let’s consider the connection between the Samaritan leper and Jesus (Luke 17) and the Samaritan woman and Jesus (John 4:19-26):
19 The woman said to him, “Sir, I see that you are a prophet. 20 Our ancestors worshiped on this mountain, but you say that the place where people must worship is in Jerusalem.” 21 Jesus said to her, “Woman, believe me, the hour is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem. 22 You worship what you do not know; we worship what we know, for salvation [Yeshua!] is from the Jews. 23 But the hour is coming, and is now here, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for the Father seeks such as these to worship him. 24 God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth.” 25 The woman said to him, “I know that Messiah is coming” (who is called Christ). “When he comes, he will proclaim all things to us.” 26 Jesus said to her, “I am he, the one who is speaking to you.”
These passages remind us that those we consider “beyond the pale,” “less than,” “unclean,” and “the other” are also part of God’s loving plan of life and redemption. Which brings me to my final point: the importance of thanking God for His goodness.
You would have thought that it would have been the nine Israelites – Jesus’s own people that would have known to come back and give thanks to God. Yet it was a Samaritan – the lowest of the low in Jewish eyes who showed the spiritual insight and, as Luke’s text tells us, 15 Then one of them, when he saw that he was healed, turned back, praising God with a loud voice. 16 He prostrated himself at Jesus’s feet and thanked him. And he was a Samaritan. 17 Then Jesus asked, “Were not ten made clean? But the other nine, where are they? 18 Was none of them found to return and give praise to God except this foreigner?” 19 Then he said to him, “Get up and go on your way; your faith has made you well.”
Nine reasons have been suggested why the nine Israelite lepers did not return and give thanks to God. They are fanciful but I think you will recognize in all of them reasons why we don’t think to give thanks to God in our modern society, particularly in these days of COVID-tide:
One waited to see if the cure was real.
One waited to see if it would last.
One said he would see Jesus later.
One decided that he had never actually had leprosy.
One said he would have gotten well anyway.
One gave the glory to the Levitical priests.
One said, “Well…Jesus didn’t really do anything.”
One said, “Any rabbi with the gift of healing could have done it.”
One said, “Obviously, I was already much improved.”
But one recognized the hand of God in his healing – and came back to worship God and give thanks.
We live in a society that takes the good things we have for granted. It even feels entitled to enjoy nothing but prosperity, amusement, and suburban comfort. In times of suffering, affliction, illness, and hardship, our society doesn’t know what to do. We shriek and scream, we want to “cancel” our ideological opponents, blame politicians, mock scientists and doctors. It is the sin of pride that makes us truly impure and unclean.
If we take nothing else away from today’s lesson, let us resolve to prostrate ourselves before God in humility, giving thanks in all He does for us. Please open your Prayer Books to page 19 and pray with me:
Almighty God, Father of all mercies, we, thine unworthy servants, do give thee most humble and hearty thanks for all thy goodness and loving-kindness to us and to all men; We bless thee for our creation, preservation, and all the blessings of this life; but above all, for thine inestimable love in the redemption of the world by our Lord Jesus Christ; for the means of grace, and for the hope of glory. And, we beseech thee, give us that due sense of all thy mercies, that our hearts may he unfeignedly thankful; and that we show forth thy praise, not only with our lips, but in our lives, by giving up our selves to thy service, and by walking before thee in holiness and righteousness all our days; through Jesus Christ our Lord, to whom, with thee and the Holy Ghost, be all honour and glory, world without end. Amen.
