On not missing out
Luke 17:11-19 Pentecost 18
Then one of them, when he saw that he was healed, turned back, praising God with a loud voice. He prostrated himself at Jesus’s feet and thanked him. And he was a Samaritan.
At first blush, our text for this week would make our parents proud: it is always good manners to say thank you.
However, there’s a lot more going on here and not all of it is what we might expect.
The first thing is geography. This event takes place in a border region: the region between Samaria and Galilee. Border regions are liminal, in-between places. Think airports or bus stations – you are not yet at your destination, but nor are you still in your place of departure. Liminality, in a cultural and societal sense, refers to the experience of transitioning from the certainty of what was into the uncertainty of what might be. To be in a liminal space is to be both disoriented – what can now be relied on? And anticipatory – what new thing will come?
This border region, this liminal space, is exactly where we might expect to encounter ten men suffering from a skin disease. They inhabit liminal spaces because, in a very real and tangible way, they are neither dead nor alive. Skin diseasein Jesus’ time encompassed a range of afflictions. Some of these diseases were highly contagious, some were fatal and, operating from fear and caution, sufferers were ostracised and forced into liminal space: alive (for now) in a physical sense but cast out, dead in every other way that made them human. Skin disease sufferers were, in the original meaning of the word, limbo: a state between heaven and hell.
And border regions—culturally liminal spaces—are precisely where we might expect to encounter the Jesus of Luke’s gospel. With Jesus’s constant and relentless abandoning of convention (Luke 5:33-39, 6:1-5), his denunciation of the hypocritical and corrupt religious leaders (Luke 11:37-54), and his embrace of the marginalised (Luke 1:52-53), where else would he be?
Border regions are places of last resort for the ten sufferers. With nothing left to lose, they too defy convention and approach Jesus and do what skin disease sufferers must always do to survive: they beg. Jesus, Master, have mercy on us! And Jesus did, and they were made clean.
“Go and show yourselves to the priests.” And as they went, they were made clean.
If this story had ended here, it would have been enough. It aligns with many other healing stories in the Gospels, and it is in harmony with Jesus’ stated aim in Luke to bring release to the captives and to set the oppressed free (Luke 4:18). The number ten is one of the Hebrew numbers that represent completeness. This story is of a piece with God’s project of global and cosmic liberation, healing, and restoration (Luke 1:48, 2:10, 2:31, 3:6, 6:19, 13:21, 24:47).
All ten of the diseased men recognised something of who Jesus was: they called him Master. All ten asked for mercy, the very thing that, in the opening of Luke’s gospel, Mary and Zechariah both prophesy will come with the arrival of the Messiah. All ten trust Jesus and obey his instructions. All ten were made clean.
And, to underscore Jesus’s cosmic mission, in case there was anyone still doubting the radical and all-inclusive scope of God’s mercy, we learn that one of the ten is a Samaritan. A perfect ending to a Luke Jesus story.
Then one of them, when he saw that he was healed, turned back, praising God with a loud voice.
But the story does not end here. Instead, it emphasises the cultural gap between the Samaritans and the Jews who lived the lie that they were separate people. They amplified their small differences in religious and cultural practices to create a dividing line, a border region between them. This sad absurdity has been repeated ad infinitum down to our own day: for Samaritan and Jew insert any artificial division we have made using gender, skin colour, religion, ethnicity, etc. etc. etc. etc.
Perhaps when Jesus calls the one who returns a foreigner, he is being ironic and is highlighting the destructive and persistent lie of difference and separateness. After all, he had just demonstrated that there are no foreigners, no one outside the community/commonwealth/kingdom of God – all were made clean. It mattered not whether any of the ten had the ‘correct’ creed, the ‘proper’ cultural practices, or the ‘right’ ethnicity. Their cleanness, their restoration into community, their resurrection into life, was a gift. It was their very own good news to the poor (Luke 4:18).
If the gospel of Luke can be read, as many scholars suggest, as a kind of manual for followers of The Way (as the early church named themselves), why is it vital for us to know that one of the ten turned back?
As we have seen, all ten received the same gift of restoration and wellness. There were no entry requirements, no visas to obtain, and no code to follow. Everyone was inside the borders of God’s world!
The difference, such as it is, is not in result but in response. The one who returns is a study not in how one must act to achieve wellness, but in how one might act in response to wellness.
The one who returned did so glorifying God with a loud voice. A surface reading of the Psalms and other scriptures might lead one to think that God is an egotist who needs human beings to continually tell God how extraordinary God is. However, the idea of glory might be better experienced as truth.
When the angels address the shepherds, it is the truth and authenticity of divinity that shone round them (Luke 2:9). When, in the transfiguration, the disciples saw His (Jesus’s) glory, they were seeing his true and authentic reality (Luke 9:32). When Jesus says: Consider the lilies, how they grow: they neither toil nor spin; yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not clothed like one of these, he is saying, among other things, that the truth and authenticity of Solomon is not in his title or trappings but in his normal and glorious humanity and creatureliness (Luke 12:27).
The difference, such as there is, between the nine and the one is that the one spoke the truth about God out loud. Ten received the glory—the truth of God. Ten experienced the world as God made it to be – a world of fullness, wholeness, goodness, interdependence, and interconnection, a cosmic community: One spoke that truth aloud.
“Were not ten made clean? So where are the other nine? Did none of them return to give glory to God except this foreigner?”
This is not a story of petty moralities where nine are chastised for failing to listen to the lesson of their parents and say thank you. This is a story about joyful response. And it is a story about missing out on joy.
Jesus, here is less accusatory and more incredulous. Do the nine not know what they are missing out on!
The ten who are restored are like people eating. What is eaten gets turned into fuel to build up the body and give life. The one who spoke aloud is like one who eats, paying attention and marvelling at the taste of a single tomato, at the aroma of a slice of cheddar, at the colour of a crisp lettuce leaf. All eat and are fed; one eats, is fed and celebrates in joyful thankfulness.
The one who returns is like a person who knows and experiences the love of another and, for no other reason than the sheer delight of it, kisses and hugs the other. It is not that in doing so they receive more love or a superior kind of love; it is not that, in hugging and kissing, they demonstrate that they are a better or more committed lover; it is simply that they experience the pure joy of that love.
All are loved; some allow themselves to revel in the experience.
If the healing of all ten of the sufferers is Luke’s version of John’s: And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself (John 12:32). The experience of the one who returns is Luke’s version of John 10:10: I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly.