Luke 17:11-19
It sometimes seems to be thought that Jesus spent his life among the marginalised, to set us an example. This is not exactly true, at least in so far as the Gospels present things.
Palestinian society at the time of Jesus was certainly riven by enormous disparities of wealth and power, but Jesus lived almost the entirety of his life as a relatively well-off artisan, helping with the family business. According to Luke, Joseph was able to take several weeks off work every year in order to go to Jerusalem for the Festivals, as was Jesus, according to John’s account of him frequently present in the city at Festival time. This implies a degree of comfort which not many others would have enjoyed. The last few months of Jesus’s life were quite different, but this contrasts with what went before, and is clearly illustrated by the violent reactions of his family, who wanted him to stop his itinerant preaching and come home.
In today’s reading, though, the idea of ‘margins’ plays an important part.
On the way to Jerusalem Jesus travelled along the border between Samaria and Galilee.
Luke reminds us that Jesus was on a journey, and the Synoptic version insists on it, to Jerusalem, both as the capital city and as the centre of Israel’s religion. It was a personal journey, one he chose to make. It took him along the place where his homeland met the place of historic enmity. At some point, he would have had to cross the border with Samaria, unless he was to make a wide detour down the Jordan Valley. As Jesus and his family were frequent travellers to Jerusalem, they must have had a preferred route. According to John’s Gospel, on one occasion Jesus travelled back from Jerusalem via Sychem/Shechem, which would have been on a north-south route through the middle of Samaria. Such a possibility suggests that any animosity between Jews and Samaritans was mostly in the head and no longer on the ground. (The parable of the ‘Good Samaritan’ points to the same conclusion.)
Crossing a border is always a significant moment, so much so that we have applied the phrase to many aspects of life – drawing a line, overstepping the mark, out of court - as well as its original geographical meaning.
Lines on a map, according to the great Renaissance scholar Erasmus, were drawn only for the amusement of princes. The land of Palestine continues to be afflicted by this sort of division. Borders are the places where unwelcome realities and unsolved problems show their face. The idea that separation is the best remedy, and that drawing a line is the way to a solution, is still very much with us.
As he entered one of the villages, ten lepers came to meet him. They stood some way off and called to him: ‘Jesus! Master! Have pity on us!’
Jesus does not seek them out; they approach him. Jesus has his own preoccupations. The village is not named. It could have been anywhere. But it might have been one on the road that Jesus had often taken before, and now that he was famous the ten men were waiting for him outside the village, because that was the line they could not cross. They cannot enter the village. They observe the Law, keeping their distance, as does Jesus, in his dealings with them. Isolation was the normal protection against incurable infectious diseases. It is not an unheard-of response, even now, in modern medicine, as part of the management of some conditions. The self-sacrifice of the 14th century inhabitants of the Derbyshire village of Eyam is a dramatic example of communal defence.
So there were ten of them. It must have been a pathetic sight, and also rather threatening, so many of them together, almost a gang. The odd one, we could cope with; a group of them might get out of hand. Presumably, they stuck together for their own protection. Taking it in turns to sleep, keep watch, out in the open.
Here’s one problem with labels. ‘Lepers’ cannot be taken to mean what is meant nowadays by the same term. Specialists in the medical field are quite adamant about this. Modern medicine’s definition of ‘leprosy’ is very specific, whereas the Hebrew term is a generic term for a variety of skin conditions, undifferentiated, erring on the side of caution, at the time. Research suggests that leprosy, strictly speaking, spread to the Middle East about three centuries before Jesus, probably along trade routes (cf. the spread of the Black Death) from China, under the impetus of the conquests of Alexander the Great. The word comes to us from St Jerome’s inaccurate translation of the Hebrew text into Latin in 383 AD.
Nevertheless, the Law’s treatment of the ten men of the story left them literally on the margins of society, unable to interact in any meaningful way with others, until their condition changed enough for them to be allowed back in.
When he saw them he said: ‘Go and show yourselves to the priests.’
Jesus performs no special actions or signs here, to draw attention to the effecting of the cure. He also assumes that they are all Jews. There must have been some hesitation on their part, even though they knew that going to the priests was a necessary part of being declared disease-free. They were not cured immediately, then, and so there is implied an element of faith, trust at least, in this Jesus. I suppose, they must have told themselves, by the time we get to the priests we will be cured.
Now as they were going away they were cleansed. Finding himself cured, one of them turned back, praising God at the top of his voice, and threw himself at the feet of Jesus and thanked him.
This is not a proof-text about the divinity of Jesus. The man did not go back to Jesus because he thought he was God. He had already thanked God. Jesus was a healer. Healers worked on behalf of God. The man thanks God first, and then Jesus. In his gratitude, he forgets to complete the official business of verification, but no doubt he would get that done eventually. But first he has to follow Jesus, literally, down the road.
The man was a Samaritan. This made Jesus say: ‘Were not all ten made clean? The other nine, where are they? It seems that no one has come back to give praise to God, except this foreigner.’ And he said to the man: ‘Stand up and go on your way. Your faith has saved you.’
Nowhere else does Jesus expect to be thanked for his cures. Was he just taken by surprise here, and doubly surprised that he should be thanked by one who turned out to be a Samaritan? It had not mattered to Jesus that one of the men he was curing was ‘a foreigner’; maybe there had been others of that sort in the group.
Jesus remains conscious of the political distinctions present in the region. If anything, he reinforces the division by drawing attention to it. For him, a Galilean, this man was ‘a foreigner’. Different, yes, but also different in a good way: this man set the standard. Like the Syro-Phoenician woman who obliges Jesus to broaden his outlook beyond his own people, and the Samaritan woman who persists in conversation with him, these individuals represent a steep learning-curve for Jesus.
Disease, on the other hand, knows no frontiers. We are here on the borderland of Galilee and Samaria. Jews and Samaritans were all prey to infection and the social consequences. Did the priests examine all who came, or just Jews? It’s an idle point, probably. Could they tell by looking whether a candidate for restoration to the ‘camp’ was of one ethnicity or another? Would they have cared? Were their diagnoses reliable?
As so often happens in the Gospel stories, individuals seem to be roped in to make a point, and then dropped. But this Samaritan came from somewhere; somewhere there was a family, a workplace, a previous life disrupted. What would ‘go on your way’ mean to this man? Go back to your village? Get on with life? But how?
And the implications of all this?
(*) J. Murphy O’Connor, Jesus and Paul, 2007, p.107
It sometimes seems to be thought that Jesus spent his life among the marginalised, to set us an example. This is not exactly true, at least in so far as the Gospels present things.
Palestinian society at the time of Jesus was certainly riven by enormous disparities of wealth and power, but Jesus lived almost the entirety of his life as a relatively well-off artisan, helping with the family business. According to Luke, Joseph was able to take several weeks off work every year in order to go to Jerusalem for the Festivals, as was Jesus, according to John’s account of him frequently present in the city at Festival time. This implies a degree of comfort which not many others would have enjoyed. The last few months of Jesus’s life were quite different, but this contrasts with what went before, and is clearly illustrated by the violent reactions of his family, who wanted him to stop his itinerant preaching and come home.
In today’s reading, though, the idea of ‘margins’ plays an important part.
On the way to Jerusalem Jesus travelled along the border between Samaria and Galilee.
Luke reminds us that Jesus was on a journey, and the Synoptic version insists on it, to Jerusalem, both as the capital city and as the centre of Israel’s religion. It was a personal journey, one he chose to make. It took him along the place where his homeland met the place of historic enmity. At some point, he would have had to cross the border with Samaria, unless he was to make a wide detour down the Jordan Valley. As Jesus and his family were frequent travellers to Jerusalem, they must have had a preferred route. According to John’s Gospel, on one occasion Jesus travelled back from Jerusalem via Sychem/Shechem, which would have been on a north-south route through the middle of Samaria. Such a possibility suggests that any animosity between Jews and Samaritans was mostly in the head and no longer on the ground. (The parable of the ‘Good Samaritan’ points to the same conclusion.)
Crossing a border is always a significant moment, so much so that we have applied the phrase to many aspects of life – drawing a line, overstepping the mark, out of court - as well as its original geographical meaning.
Lines on a map, according to the great Renaissance scholar Erasmus, were drawn only for the amusement of princes. The land of Palestine continues to be afflicted by this sort of division. Borders are the places where unwelcome realities and unsolved problems show their face. The idea that separation is the best remedy, and that drawing a line is the way to a solution, is still very much with us.
As he entered one of the villages, ten lepers came to meet him. They stood some way off and called to him: ‘Jesus! Master! Have pity on us!’
Jesus does not seek them out; they approach him. Jesus has his own preoccupations. The village is not named. It could have been anywhere. But it might have been one on the road that Jesus had often taken before, and now that he was famous the ten men were waiting for him outside the village, because that was the line they could not cross. They cannot enter the village. They observe the Law, keeping their distance, as does Jesus, in his dealings with them. Isolation was the normal protection against incurable infectious diseases. It is not an unheard-of response, even now, in modern medicine, as part of the management of some conditions. The self-sacrifice of the 14th century inhabitants of the Derbyshire village of Eyam is a dramatic example of communal defence.
So there were ten of them. It must have been a pathetic sight, and also rather threatening, so many of them together, almost a gang. The odd one, we could cope with; a group of them might get out of hand. Presumably, they stuck together for their own protection. Taking it in turns to sleep, keep watch, out in the open.
Here’s one problem with labels. ‘Lepers’ cannot be taken to mean what is meant nowadays by the same term. Specialists in the medical field are quite adamant about this. Modern medicine’s definition of ‘leprosy’ is very specific, whereas the Hebrew term is a generic term for a variety of skin conditions, undifferentiated, erring on the side of caution, at the time. Research suggests that leprosy, strictly speaking, spread to the Middle East about three centuries before Jesus, probably along trade routes (cf. the spread of the Black Death) from China, under the impetus of the conquests of Alexander the Great. The word comes to us from St Jerome’s inaccurate translation of the Hebrew text into Latin in 383 AD.
Nevertheless, the Law’s treatment of the ten men of the story left them literally on the margins of society, unable to interact in any meaningful way with others, until their condition changed enough for them to be allowed back in.
When he saw them he said: ‘Go and show yourselves to the priests.’
Jesus performs no special actions or signs here, to draw attention to the effecting of the cure. He also assumes that they are all Jews. There must have been some hesitation on their part, even though they knew that going to the priests was a necessary part of being declared disease-free. They were not cured immediately, then, and so there is implied an element of faith, trust at least, in this Jesus. I suppose, they must have told themselves, by the time we get to the priests we will be cured.
Now as they were going away they were cleansed. Finding himself cured, one of them turned back, praising God at the top of his voice, and threw himself at the feet of Jesus and thanked him.
This is not a proof-text about the divinity of Jesus. The man did not go back to Jesus because he thought he was God. He had already thanked God. Jesus was a healer. Healers worked on behalf of God. The man thanks God first, and then Jesus. In his gratitude, he forgets to complete the official business of verification, but no doubt he would get that done eventually. But first he has to follow Jesus, literally, down the road.
The man was a Samaritan. This made Jesus say: ‘Were not all ten made clean? The other nine, where are they? It seems that no one has come back to give praise to God, except this foreigner.’ And he said to the man: ‘Stand up and go on your way. Your faith has saved you.’
Nowhere else does Jesus expect to be thanked for his cures. Was he just taken by surprise here, and doubly surprised that he should be thanked by one who turned out to be a Samaritan? It had not mattered to Jesus that one of the men he was curing was ‘a foreigner’; maybe there had been others of that sort in the group.
Jesus remains conscious of the political distinctions present in the region. If anything, he reinforces the division by drawing attention to it. For him, a Galilean, this man was ‘a foreigner’. Different, yes, but also different in a good way: this man set the standard. Like the Syro-Phoenician woman who obliges Jesus to broaden his outlook beyond his own people, and the Samaritan woman who persists in conversation with him, these individuals represent a steep learning-curve for Jesus.
Disease, on the other hand, knows no frontiers. We are here on the borderland of Galilee and Samaria. Jews and Samaritans were all prey to infection and the social consequences. Did the priests examine all who came, or just Jews? It’s an idle point, probably. Could they tell by looking whether a candidate for restoration to the ‘camp’ was of one ethnicity or another? Would they have cared? Were their diagnoses reliable?
As so often happens in the Gospel stories, individuals seem to be roped in to make a point, and then dropped. But this Samaritan came from somewhere; somewhere there was a family, a workplace, a previous life disrupted. What would ‘go on your way’ mean to this man? Go back to your village? Get on with life? But how?
And the implications of all this?
- Borders are dangerous places. They are often protected. Things are done differently, depending on which side you are on. They mark the place where something ends and something begins. Our current political turmoil illustrates this all too well.
- Borders are also places of opportunity. As in the reading, they can be places of recovery, discovery and a fresh start. Refugees and asylum-seekers know this better than anyone.
- The borders we set up, and the problems we face, do not operate on the same logic. It makes no difference to the disease which side of the border you are on. Ecological dependence and collapse don’t stop when they reach the red line.
- Both the healers and the healed have to move on. Their point of intersection is just that – a point on their different trajectories, a place on the way to somewhere else.
- Jesus lived in his own time and place. What these taught him is what he knew, and acted on. He was a human being. And being human, he had to put up with the people he met, the roads he took, the places he went, the lessons these taught him – to discern his vocation, to shape his destiny, to confront his death.(*)
(*) J. Murphy O’Connor, Jesus and Paul, 2007, p.107