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The Twentieth Sunday After Pentecost
Almighty and everlasting God, who in Christ hast revealed thy glory among the nations: Preserve the works of thy mercy, that thy Church throughout the world may persevere with steadfast faith in the confession of thy Name; through the same Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen. (Proper 24)
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The Twentieth Sunday After Pentecost
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Scripture citation(s): Luke 17:11-19
A Sermon by
Fr. Mead
on
Luke 17:11-19
✛
Follow the Samaritan Leper
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Then said Jesus, “Were not ten cleansed? Where are the nine?”
In the Name of God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Ghost. Amen.
There isn’t much leprosy left in the world now, thank God, but it has certainly had its successors, diseases whose destructive power, mystery and contagion have gripped societies with fear. There was the bubonic plague, which took a third of Europe’s population in the Middle Ages. Then there have been more recent epidemics of cholera, yellow fever and influenza. Still very recently there has been, and is, AIDS. Although cancer is not apparently contagious, until recently cancer was an unmentionable word, equal to death.
Leprosy terrified people. “Leper” remains a word associated with being quarantined, shunned, left to suffer and die in the company of others similarly afflicted. The disease may be nearly eradicated, but the social meaning of the word, leper, remains vivid. Many people who suffer, no matter what afflicts them, know something of the experience of the leper.
In the ancient world, including Jesus’ time, lepers were separated from society. In the Law of ancient Israel, they were supposed to shout, “Unclean, unclean!” to warn others to stay away from them. (Lev 13:45-46) In today’s Gospel of Saint Luke, ten lepers meet Jesus as he enters “a village between Galilee and Samaria.” They shout, but here they cry for help, “Jesus, Master, have mercy on us.” In response, Jesus tells them to go show themselves to the priests. There was a prescribed ritual whereby a person who was healed or cleansed from leprosy was certified by the priest, declared to be clean, and restored to society. The implication is that the ten lepers’ faith was shown by their obedience to Jesus’ command to go show themselves to the priests. “And as they went,” says Saint Luke, “they were cleansed.”
One of the ten, seeing that he had been healed, “turned back, praising God with a loud voice; and he fell on his face at Jesus’ feet, giving him thanks.” St. Luke observes pointedly, “Now he was a Samaritan.”
Samaritans were looked down on by Jews and despised by the strict Pharisees for being a sort of ethnic, cultural and religious half breed. They were the descendants of people who survived over the centuries after the destruction of the kingdom of northern Israel, its capital the city of Samaria, and the deportation of the lost ten tribes by the Assyrians. Only the tribes of Judah and Benjamin were left in southern Judah, its capital in Jerusalem; these were the remnant of the Jews. In the north, the Assyrians forcibly removed the Israelites and replaced them with other peoples, who mixed with the poorest people left in the land. Their descendants were the Samaritans. (II Kings 17:1-41)
One of the most beloved and famous of all Jesus’ parables in Saint Luke is of course The Good Samaritan. The parable embarrasses the lack of charity and the hypocrisy of the Levites, Pharisees and other religious people by pointing up the heroic kindness of the Good Samaritan; and Jesus concludes, “Go and do thou likewise.” (Lk 10:25-37) Today, a Samaritan is the one leper among the ten healed by Jesus who returns to give thanks and praise to God, falling at Jesus’ feet in gratitude.
The point I want to make today is that Jesus in the story and Saint Luke in the narrative are showing us that the healed Samaritan leper is exemplary and representative. He is among those who walked in darkness and have seen a great light. He is exemplary by his faith and gratitude. The loud shout of the leper, “Unclean, unclean,” has changed to “Jesus, Master, have mercy,” to “Thanks be God” or “Praise be to thee Lord Christ!” The Samaritan leper is representative. He stands for all redeemed believers and followers of Jesus Christ. He represents the true Church as he falls at Jesus’ feet.
To be a Christian is to know in some way the grace and healing power of God as it is seen in the Gospel of Christ. You don’t have to have leprosy in order to know what it is to experience life as a dead end or a living death. You don’t have to be a leper in order to know what it is like to feel, or be made to feel, unclean. You don’t have to be a Samaritan in order to know what it is like to feel, and be made to feel, like a foreigner, an outsider. There are many ways to have many different kinds of “leprosy.” There are many ways to feel and be treated like a “leper.” There are many variations on what it was that made the Samaritan disliked and even despised by the standard-setters, the official or self-appointed critics and guardians of the day. If you think about it, our Lord himself, God incarnate, could very rightly be called, in the words of John Meier the biblical scholar, “A Marginal Jew.”¹ His conception and birth, his upbringing and home in Galilee, not to mention his later ministry, certainly put him on the margin of the religious mainstream of his own people. Now here he is, holding up a Samaritan leper, healed of his disease, as an example and representative of what it means to believe and follow him.
Look into your own life and faith, and ask yourself: Is it not true, that I have much in common with the Samaritan leper, one way or another? If you find some commonality, then praise God! Listen to the prayers of the Church in the Eucharist, from the opening collect for purity (“Cleanse the thoughts of our hearts by the inspiration of thy Holy Spirit”) to the Confession of Sin and Absolution, to the Prayer of Humble Access before Communion. They all speak to the experience of the Samaritan leper, and all who have known new life in Christ, and they resonate with his gratitude.
Thanksgiving, gratitude, is a sure sign of life in Christ. Nine other lepers were healed and went their way. They received God’s grace, but they did not thank or follow Jesus who incarnated and gave that grace to them. But the Samaritan leper did. This is a good time to follow his example and renew our own gratitude—Every Member Canvass time. Make a pledge to Christ’s Church, as it presents itself to you at Saint Thomas. Pledging and supporting the Church with your money is not all there is to thanksgiving – gratitude characterizes a whole way of thinking, speaking and living. But a sacrificial pledge is a good sign and expression of it. Let’s see if we can do better than the ratio of one in ten lepers who gave thanks in today’s Gospel. By all means, let us rejoice and be thankful, not only with our lips but in our lives, for the mercy and love of our Lord.
In the Name of God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Ghost. Amen.
___________
¹This is the title of John Meier’s monumental three-volume (so far) work on Jesus, A Marginal Jew.
