St Aidan, Des Moines
Sunday 24 September 2000
Trinity XIV
"…and he was a Samaritan": Luke 17:16
Who is he? Who are you? Who am I?
Those are questions which have puzzled mankind from the earliest days of his self-consciousness.
St Luke doesn’t tell us why a Samaritan, one type of social pariah in our Lord’s time, should be found in company with nine Jewish lepers – another kind of pariah. So we are at liberty to guess.
My guess is that the ten lepers decided to make a common cause of their leprosy, and ignore the convention that "Jews and Samaritans have no dealings with each other" as St John tells us in chapter four of his Gospel.
In other words the ten lepers had redefined themselves and drawn a new boundary line around their lives. Their enclosing fence, so to say, was no longer Jewishness but leprosy: instead of thinking of themselves as "Jews" they were using their disability, leprosy, to redefine themselves as "lepers"; and therefore the Jew/Samaritan distinction, up till then so central to their outlook on life, became of secondary importance to their leprosy which accurately identified who they were.
In every walk of life fences or boundaries are more important than people realize. As one of your poets, Robert Frost, wisely said:
Good fences make good neighbors
…but alongside his words of wisdom Christians need to remember those famous saying of an Eastern Orthodox theologian, whose comment on the many divisions that afflict the Christian Church was:
Remember that the walls which divide us do not reach to heaven
Rightly used, fences and walls define – they help us to distinguish between good and evil, truth and falsehood, right and wrong. By doing so they make good neighbors. This they do by bringing together those who have everything to gain and little to lose by making a common cause with each other. Indeed, without fences or walls communities quickly degenerate into rival groups of individuals whose only interest lies in pursuing their own advantage at the expense of everybody else’s.
However, there is an opposite tendency, as that Orthodox theologian reminds us, simply to build walls around ourselves for the sake of building walls; wall-building becomes an art-form, the walls get higher and higher, until at length nobody has the slightest idea what’s happening on the other side of their wall, let alone of deciding to leap over tha wall and take a look for themselves over their neighbor’s one.
When this wall-building program is taken to its ultimate conclusion as it sometimes is, then the Church of God on earth comes to resemble nothing so much as a condominium of single-occupancy apartments – but without the "con-" part which, as you know, implies togetherness. The feet of these apartments are squarely on the ground, their top is in the skies ("reaching to heaven" as the sales brochure might say) but with no means at all of intercommunion between one apartment and all the rest. The word apartment reaches its literal conclusion – a place where people stay apart; and God’s Church starts to look like a collection of factory chimneys, standing side by side, but totally and irreversibly separated from each other, with the occasional puff of smoke coming out of the top of some of them.
If you want a good example of what happens to the first sort of people, the ones who try to live without either fences or walls then take a look at ECUSA. Over the years they’ve turned fence-smashing into something like an obsession. The result of them pulling down all the barriers is painfully obvious. Concepts like Truth and Falsehood, Right and Wrong, Good and Bad either lose their meaning altogether or, worse still, take on an entirely different meaning defined by "what Joe Public presently approves or disapproves of". Since popular opinion can be taught to approve or disapprove of almost anything, and believe whatever it wants to believe, especially if it’s given a little massage in the right place by politicians and the media, that process of fence-destruction is bound to end in something very different from "the Catholic faith, once delivered to the saints" for safekeeping and which was perfectly and finally revealed in the Incarnation of the Son of God in the Person of Jesus Christ our Savior.
But it has to be said that there are other Churches who are so concerned with being "separate and different" from all the others (remaining "uncontaminated by error" as they would put it – especially the supposed errors of their closest neighbors) that they shy away from any approach those neighbors make to come closer together with them. However well-intentioned or mutually advantageous such a coming-together might be for them, these good souls are suffering from a kind of "vertical tunnel-vision" which makes them shy of anything which is unfamiliar or strange to them. Yes, their God is right up there in their field of vision, but he’s a long, long way off; from the bottom of the chimney he looks like nothing so much as a minute speck of clear blue sky. And that’s where, and how, they prefer him to remain.
Those ten lepers had the good sense to overcome this barrier of "chimney-vision". As outcasts from the mainstream of Jewry they discovered that their leprosy, horrible affliction though it was, gave them something in common with each other which transcended the conventional barriers which separated them from their fellow Jews, and could even surmount the enormous barrier which had grown over the years between Jews and Samaritans. This discovery led to them including the Samaritan as one of their number.
Now, as you’ve probably discovered, one of the things that happens when you start getting to know outsiders is that they tend to come up with a whole lot of new ideas. Some of these ideas will be bad ideas, of course, and we know from St John that theologically the Samaritans had a great deal to learn from the Jews.
But together with those bad ideas which need putting right they will have other ideas which will be thoroughly good ones. Not because the outsiders are necessarily cleverer than we are, but because, as outsiders they see the same things as we do, but they see them in an entirely different way. As a result, ideas and patterns and strategies and concepts which may have been staring us in the face for years but simply hadn’t occurred to us until they point them out, seem quite obvious to the outsider when he sees them for the first time.
So let’s suppose that the Samaritan leper was a friend or relation of the Samaritan woman of Sychar with whom Jesus had that long discussion described by St John. We know that Jesus made a profound impression on the Samaritans for, as St John tells us, "many Samaritans of that city believed on him". We know, too, that Jesus pointe out to his disciples’ that the Samaritan mission-fields were "white already to harvest". So the Samaritan leper, putting two-and-two together, said to his newly-found Jewish colleagues, "How’d it be if we asked this guy Jesus who’s in this neighborhood if he can help us? I’ve heard the most amazing things about him from my sister-in-law at Sychar. OK, so he’s an outcast with the religious authorities, but then so are the rest of us. At least he’d understand how we lepers are situated."
Well, it may, or may not, have been like that. What we do know is that the ten decided to give the idea a try, an idea which would never probably have occurred to them if the stranger-Samaritan hadn’t suggested it. The result? They were all cured of their disease.
And that might have been the end of the story; but it wasn’t quite. St Luke, with his unerring eye for detail, adds a footnote onto the end of his account. The moment that things started going right for the lepers their newly-found unity began to disintegrate. Ten men were healed; but it was only the oddball, the Samaritan who perhaps suggested the idea in the first place, who "turned back, glorifying God with a loud voice and fell at Jesus’ feet, giving him thanks."
So ten men were healed, ten men got what they wanted most; but once they had got what they wanted nine of them, it seems, took no further interest in where it had come from. They simply went back to being orthodox, practicing Jews like they were before they got ill.
The exception was the Samaritan, the outsider. Instead of going back to being an outsider Luke tells us that this man gave thanks. In other words he crossed another fence and became part of the eucharistic (that is to say the Thanking) community of Jesus’ followers. Whether his advent to the Eucharistic Community made any obvious difference to it we don’t know, but if he was indeed the man who was responsible for bringing his fellow-lepers to Jesus then it’s certain that he was a man of ideas and vision and his insights would have been just as valuable to his fellow-Christians as they had been to his former colleagues-in adversity. Just one such person joining a small and struggling church-group can, if accepted, transform it over a very short period of time.
So here are just some of the lessons to be learnt from today’s gospel: