The Grateful Samaritan

The Grateful Samaritan

Luke 17:11-19

So, in the last two weeks, we’ve pondered two essential features of what it means to walk in faith in this world: perspective and presence. Faith has the potential to help me to see things differently, to not just default to what I think is everyone else’s point of view or default to the point of view that I’m told any rational person would take. I look…and then I look again. At the same time, faith doesn’t drive me to focus on some other world, whether heaven or hell. Rather, authentic faith brings me fully into the present moment, not to ride the emotional roller coaster that life can easily become, but to stand in the present and see the real choices that are mine to make. The bottom line is that faith should lead us to live differently, to play by a different set of rules.

It bothered a lot of people that Jesus saw things differently and played by a different set of rules. This was enough to make the vast majority of people choose not to follow him. This was enough to confuse his disciples to no end. This was enough to make the authorities feel so threatened that one day they would arrest him and kill him. There is always a price to be paid for being different.

Perhaps his own experience of the cost of being different made Jesus extra concerned about caring for those around him who were different. In fact, he cared enough about these people that he broke the rules and walked right through society’s barriers to get to them. I wonder…have you ever been different or lived differently? Have you ever paid a price for your choice to care? If not…I wonder…is it time to break some rules?

The first rule that Jesus breaks is that he spent time in Samaria. Let’s remind ourselves. The question about Jesus for most people is whether he is the Messiah, the anointed one, who will rescue the people from Roman rule and restore the nation of Israel. When Jesus entered Samaria, the crowds would have felt their stomachs turn. I wonder… did the disciples, his closest followers, hesitate? The clear understanding that any rational person shared was that Samaria was a place that good people did not go.

Why was this the case? Samaritans were Jews. They were part of the national religion. However, 700 years earlier, when the Assyrians had conquered Israel, the entire population of the nation had been forced to leave their homes and head into exile in a foreign land…except for the Samaritans. The Syrians, for whatever reason, allowed the Samaritans to stay. The end result of this decision was that the Samaritans were different. They were suspects. Why did they do to get to stay? Why were they singled out?

Understand, this was something that had happened 700 years earlier. However, what unfolded from that point on was the story of separation and disconnection and hatred. In the 4th century, when the Jews were finally back in Israel and had the resources to rebuild their temple, the Samaritans were not allowed to contribute in any way to that project. They were unclean. If they were allowed to touch the temple, this sacred place would be defiled. As a result, the Samaritans gathered their own resources and their own craftsman and built their own temple, twenty-five miles away from the one everyone else was building.

The resentment and hatred that festered and produced two temples continued to be the foundation for segregation and hatred in Jesus’ day. Samaritans had their own area in which they were to live. They were not to cross those boundaries. If for some reason they did, then they were shunned by everyone. This is why the Parable of the Good Samaritan in which the Samaritan is the faithful person makes us feel warm and cozy inside but would have made the audience in Jesus’ day feel nauseous. If there was one thing that everyone

could agree about it was their shared gratitude that at least they were not Samaritans. Why did Jesus have to tell the story that way? What kind of of Messiah would do that?

So, the first uncomfortable conclusion from today’s text is that if we want to follow Jesus, then we have to break the rules and go where respectful people just don’t go. Have you been to North Chicago lately? Have you ridden the “El,” not the Metra? On the work trip, whether it is Missouri or Kentucky, there are the quaint areas in both places. However, all you have to do is drive just a few miles away from the bustling towns of Osage Beach or Berea and you find yourself in the throes of rural poverty. People look at you like they haven’t seen a stranger in a long, long time. You look around yourself and think, “Toto…we’re not in Kansas anymore!”

The boundaries that are crossed are not always just physical boundaries, either. There are so many rules about who we are supposed to interact with, right? Having cut our teeth as children on the notion of “stranger danger,” it’s hard to follow a Messiah who cares about strangers. However, it might be easier if Jesus would have just crossed into the forbidden Samaria and found the Samaritans who were just like us, right? Couldn’t Jesus just find some Samaritans who would make us comfortable? Isn’t that what a good Messiah would do…comfort us?

That’s another truth about Jesus. He goes out of his way to make us uncomfortable. I’ve come to believe this is true because discomfort is what always precedes the breakthrough moments in our lives. Again, on work trips, I’ve never really seen a crew walk onto a site and think to themselves, “We’ve got this!” I’ve never really seen a crew meet the people whose home they will be fixing and think to themselves, “Ya…that’s just like the folks at home.” The thing is though that we’re not there to be comfortable and we are not there to do something easy. What if the question that faithful people ask on a regular basis is, “Can I really do this?” What if successfully avoiding that question in life is a sign that what we’re really avoiding is the chance to grow and deepen our faith?

In case you think this is solely the story of how faith worked in a world of ancient prejudices, consider this. When America first started to deal with racism in popular culture who did television give us? We got Dianne Cannon and Sidney Portier. This beautiful woman and this handsome, articulate man were cast in safe roles as a nurse or a teacher or the like. We got to watch them essentially be like us. We got to watch them from the safety of our television screens. And a whole lot of white folks got to think to ourselves, “Well…I did like ‘Julia’ and “Mr. Chips!” However, what has been revealed in recent years has been a lingering racism that is still ugly beyond words. Of course, it would be convenient if we could blame this on pockets of white supremacists. However, let’s remind ourselves, we live in the Chicago metropolitan area, one of the most segregated places in the world.

So, Jesus leaves Samaria and the discomfort is over, right? Wrong! As he enters the nearest village, the first thing that happens is everyone’s worst nightmare. Jesus runs into lepers. Even the Samaritans hated them! It would be enough to ruin your day if you ran into one leper. Jesus, however, runs into ten. This is a veritable mob of the most despised people in the ancient world. These are the walking dead.

Why were these people despised? They were despised because they were sick and the rest of the world was terrified. There was very little medical knowledge. What people knew instead was that leprosy was horribly disfiguring. Of course there were lots of people who got sick but this was different. This made you look horribly different. Therefore, out of a fear of catching this disease, lepers were forced to the outer edges of towns. They were required to wear bells and announce their presence by yelling, “Leper!” so that everyone could flee their presence. They survived on the food that was left for them out pity. However, no one would have actually handed that food to them. They were literally “untouchable.”

When the mob of lepers see Jesus, they do two things. First, they keep their distance. They are “good” lepers who have internalized how the world feels about them. (This makes me think of Curtis, an African-American friend in Georgia who used to help us on work trips. When he was with us, he would never enter a building before us. That was the rule down there: white people go first.) So, probably much to the disciples’ relief, the lepers don’t bull rush Jesus. However, they do shout out to him: “Jesus, Master, have mercy on us!”

Jesus looks at them and tells them to go break the rules. The last place in the world that a leper should go is the temple. (This, of course, is the rule which often keeps people in need away from churches. Church is for people who have it all together, right? Church isn’t for people with needs, especially needs that make us uncomfortable!) The last person in the world that the lepers would expect to help them are the priests but that’s who Jesus tells them to go see. (Again, it is so tempting as a pastor to surround ourselves with the people with whom we are comfortable!) The lepers hear Jesus’ command and do what he tells them to do. How rare is that?

They never even make it to the priest. Doing what Jesus tells them to do, they don’t need a priest to heal them. They choose differently and they are healed. Presumably, nine out of ten of those former lepers dance off into the sunset. And I’ve always wondered, how did they treat the next leper they ran into? Did they avert their eyes and make a beeline in the other direction? In their unease did they run from the disease?

There is a “Good Samaritan" in this story, though. One of those former lepers circled back to thank Jesus. He is not only healed. He has become whole. How can you tell? He is grateful. Having received great grace, he chooses to live gratefully. The question we are left with is whether we could ever live as gratefully as a rule breaking, Samaritan and former leper? Let’s cross a few boundaries and break a few rules as a matter of faith. Let’s do this out of gratitude to God.