Ten lepers healed. Shout about that miracle from the rooftops. And—Trinity Cathedral Portland—your new rooftop is looking awfully good!
In an age of high quality—if not highly accessible—medicine, it’s easy for us to forget the disaster that was chronic illness in Jesus’ time. Specifically of leprosy, a label that might have described any number of painful and debilitating skin diseases, and would also have been cause for extreme social isolation. So what a party that healing ought to have been! Maybe, like the prodigal son, the ten went home to an overjoyed parent and a fatted calf. But here’s the thing: we don’t actually know what happened to most of them. We only know of the one who turned back to thank Jesus. And he wasn’t, by Jewish standards, polite company. He was… a Samaritan.
Luke’s hearers would have been aware of the centuries-long history of religious enmity between the Samaritans and the Jews. It was a rivalry with both religious and geographic dimensions; perhaps a bit like the Bible belt functions in our country. The region of Samaria, along with Galilee to its north, had once been part of the northern Israelite tribes who separated from the southern tribes of Judah in the 10th century BCE. Two centuries later, these northern tribes were conquered by the Assyrian empire, precipitating inter-marriage and—from a Judean perspective—ethnic and religious compromise.
Over time, Samaritans developed their own rituals and traditions, although they shared a devotion to Torah. So—to extend the Bible belt analogy—we could say that everyone in the land was reading the same holy books, but they didn’t necessarily think each other’s interpretation or faith practices were valid. Does that sound familiar? In fact, the hostility between Jews and Samaritans was such that a Galilean would usually bypass Samaria on their way to Jerusalem, even though it added considerable time to the journey.
Which brings me back to Jesus, deliberately traveling through the unstable borderlands. From the very first sentence of the Gospel we heard this morning, listen up—”On the way to Jerusalem Jesus was going through the region between Samaria and Galilee” it says—we already know social norms were being challenged. Luke, of all the evangelists, includes the most stories about Samaria and Samaritans. And in the Book of Acts—the post-resurrection continuation of Luke’s Gospel—the risen Jesus imagines Samaria as a kind of threshold between the Jewish homeland and worldwide ministry.
“You will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth,” he says to the apostles. So the story we just heard—both stories, actually—serve as hints at the ultimate healing of God’s whole community. Not just the Samaritans and military commanders of Aram and those with persistent skin conditions.
I had a small healing recently. Or maybe that’s not the right word, maybe it’s more like an “I told you so” comeuppance. My son Aaron, whom some of you know, had a special guest come to his high school classroom for career day. She’s a rather charismatic young finance professional who worked for my husband, and she took a day off to talk to East Oakland teens who were mostly Latino like herself. After her visit, Aaron asked his class to write their thanks to Brianna. It didn’t go all that well. “Mom,” he reported back to me, “They were so stubborn about it. I finally understand why you got so frustrated when we didn’t want to write thank you cards to our grandparents.” Thanks for noticing, kiddo! I feel much better already.
Of ten healed lepers, it was only the Samaritan who returned to give thanks. That is, the one whose shared ancestry with the Galilean rabbi did not normally engender brotherly love. If anything, they were adversaries in an ancient family feud. So I suspect it wasn’t his mother or his teacher who reminded the healed leper to say thank you, because there really wasn’t a duty of gratitude between Samaritans and Jews. To thank someone is an investment: an acknowledge that we are in relationship with them, and that we are committed to continuing the relationship.
To whom do we express our gratitude, and how? You at Trinity are in the midst of a really important pledge campaign. The treasure, time and talent that you commit to the mission of your cathedral this fall don’t just pay the bills, they are likewise a sign of hope in your future of this cathedral, and its witness to a community that refuses to be divided by enmity and rumors of war. Your gifts are an investment in relationship: with the people around you in the pews, with the people in your neighborhood and your city who are blessed by Trinity’s many ministries, and in the generations to come who will worship and work and study and grow here.
You don’t have to pledge, any more than the Samaritan leper had to thank Jesus. But here’s the thing: like so many of our most holy and healthy habits, we can actually fake it ‘til we make it. We can exercise our bodies to the point of discomfort, until the new activity feels good. We can say our prayers by rote, until the day when words as beautiful as those in our Prayer Book well up in us spontaneously. We can pledge a little more than feels normal, and do it again and again every year until perhaps we arrive at the biblical tithe, or some fraction thereof. I assure you that there are people at Trinity who do that, and it has become for them the most joyful and natural thing to do. The spiritual discipline of turning, praising and giving thanks will do this to us!
So maybe this Gospel is about something more than restored skin and renewed relationship. Maybe there’s also a cosmic significance to this encounter between Jesus and the Samaritan. Maybe it’s echoing in the background whenever we pray, “it is right to give God thanks and praise.” Maybe it’s really about a transformation of the heart, born out of the joy of knowing that we can be healed and whole and grateful. Because haven’t we all been a Samaritan, in one way or another? Recall that in the parable of the good Samaritan, which falls earlier in Luke’s Gospel, the enemy is portrayed as the neighbor whom Jesus’ hearers are called to love.
But the good Samaritan is not merely the neighbor we should love even if we consider him an enemy. In his care for a wounded traveler, the Samaritan becomes the neighbor who loves us. There’s a kind of spiritual development in Luke from “love your enemy” to “What if your enemy is someone who bears God’s love to you?” The story of the Samaritan leper takes this love even deeper: while the Good Samaritan models a genuine love of neighbor, the leper models uninhibited gratitude to God. “When he saw that he was healed,” the Gospel teaches us, “he turned back, praising God with a loud voice.” From Luke’s perspective, it seems to be the suspect Samaritans who exemplify the great commandment both to “love your neighbor as yourself” and also to “love the Lord your God with all your heart.”
Which kind of Samaritan are you? The one who cares for the wounded, or the one who gives praise to the Lord your God?” Or are you the one who—for all the years of bitter feuding—still turns back to your sworn enemy and pauses to say “thank you?”
Well, why not try out being all of them? Our Jewish neighbors who celebrated Yom Kippur—the holy day of atonement—about a week ago have a prayer that sums up the fullness of healing God offers us, when we choose to be in healthy relationship with one another. “To those I may have wronged, I ask forgiveness. To those I may have helped, I wish I could have done more. To those I neglected to help, I am truly sorry and ask for understanding. To those who helped me, I am deeply… grateful.”
