Don’t Forget to Say Thank You
Luke 17:11-19
Remember when you were a child, and stories tended to have a ‘moral’ or a object lesson at the end? So, for ‘The boy who cried wolf’ the moral was ‘don’t lie’. And for ‘the hare and the tortoise’ it was ‘slow and steady wins the race’. Well, whenever I was told the story of the ten lepers, the moral was always ‘don’t forget to say thank you’.
Now, I’d hate to discourage anyone from saying thank you when someone is kind to them. It is a very nice thing to do. One should also eat with the correct cutlery and queue correctly. But to diminish the narrative of Jesus and the ten lepers to a lesson about manners is an example of eisegesis. That is, finding in the text one’s own biases, presemptions and agendas. It is hardly surprising that Sunday School and regular school teachers read this text to groups of children, and land on ‘good manners’ as the take-away lesson. Adults in charge of children have a vested interest in good behaviour. But as disciples of Jesus, we do exegesis – we try to let the text first speak from its own context, with its own emphases. What we then do with interpretation and application is another matter – we call that hermeneutic, but before anything else we try to have a sort of scientific, objective view of the text, putting aside (to the greatest extent possible) our own agenda.
So let’s consider some of the detail of the story, so we can get a good handle on it. According to the text, Jesus is ‘going through the region between Samaria and Galilee’. He is a long way north of Jerusalem, in his home country, heading south. He has to pass through the Samaritan area – an area populated by sort-of Jews, who observed different rituals and food laws, and who were considered highly suspect by the ‘real’ Jews. Jesus is approached by ten ‘lepers’ who keep their distance. Firstly, we should be clear that its unlikely that they were actual lepers – they didn’t have Hansen’s disease, the disease raised to consciousness for some by Princess Diana’s willingness to interact with sufferers. In all likelihood, they had a range of skin ailments, perhaps the sort of thing we might today call eczema, or a rash, or an allergic reaction. Before modern medicine, these painful conditions were neither life-threatening nor curable, and in Jewish culture it made the person ritually unclean, and they were routinely excluded from village life. These ten so-called lepers clearly understand the rules – they don’t come close to Jesus or touch him, because that would make him unclean. Instead they keep their distance and call out to him.
Jesus instructs them to go the Temple and present themselves to the priests at the temple. To put that into perspective, we’re talking about journey of around 200km. The distance from here to Bunbury. By the time of Jesus, the religious infrastructure was centred on Jerusalem, and the prescriptions for lepers were laid out in Leviticus 14 in great detail. So Jesus instruction to the ten was significant. They were to walk for 200km, then on arrival, one of the priests would come out and inspect them, and, if they were clean a complicated ritual would follow. A bird had to be slaughtered, and rope dipped into its blood, then the blood sprinkled over the (now clean) leper. Then the person had to shave of all his body hair and bathe (presumably in a mikhveh, a ritual bath). Then they wait eight days. On the eighth day, offerings were made of a lamb and flour mixed with oil, except for some of the oil which was put on the right earlobe, the right thumb, and the right big toe. There’s also a cut-price version of the ritual for poor lepers, which involves a turtle dove instead of a lamb.
So, what we hear about in a couple of verses, is actually a very complex process requiring a long journey by foot, more than a week in Jerusalem and some money. Times ten.
According to the story, the lepers are all healed along the way - quite soon after they left Jesus by the sound of it. Nine of them, presumably, continued on to Jerusalem to do their religious duty. But the Samaritan turns back, praising God. The Samaritan, of course, had no business going to Jerusalem. His temple was not there, but on Mt Gerizim near modern day Nablus. Actually, there is still a Samaritan community there today.
Jesus notes that the only one to turn back and give thanks to God is a foreigner, and he dismisses him with an extraordinary statement for a Jew ‘your faith has made you well’.
So having considered the text in its literary and historical context, we can now consider its application to our own lives and context. We can do a hermeneutic. I should emphasise that there are as many hermeneutics as there are people, so this is my hermeneutic (or interpretation) for this time, not the only interpretation for all time.
Two power systems are being confronted. Firstly the religious domination system of the temple and secondly the barrier between nations and peoples.
The Temple authorities were the arbiters of purity and inclusion – highly corrupt and centralised. There is a cold reality that, in every generation, the centres of religious authority must be held to account. This weekend is Diocesan Synod, and holding to account is not its only purpose, but one of its purposes. Decisions made are scrutinized, questions are asked (not least by our own representatives), and votes are cast. Beyond our local sphere, we have to ask serious questions of our fellow Christians about their alignment with and support for corrupt politicians and corporations.
In just the last few days, the Turks have been given carte blanche to attack Kurds in Syria. The rivalry, jealousy and mistreatment of Kurds is well documented, and there are many Kurds in Australia who have managed to escape, often at great personal cost. Likewise in Myanmar, the Rohingya people continue to be corralled into camps and abused, and Ang Sung Suu Kyi can’t seem to stop the military officials from continuing. In China, the Uyghur people are likewise being rounded up. Of course, it’s not just in non-English speaking countries that such behaviour happens. One only needs to look to Ireland to see that same scapegoating and race-based oppression played out. In the face of those demanding racial and ethnic purity, .Jesus makes it clear that he is not merely for one group, but for the whole world.
There will always be those who wish to be arbiters of purity. People who use phrases like ‘unAustralian’ or ‘go back where you came from. Thosw with hard edges and hard hearts. But as we return again and again to Christ in the scripture, Christ in the gathered body, Christ in the sacrament, we discover that he calls foreigners and outcasts, praises their faith, returns them to wholeness, and presents them to the world as models to be emulated rather than ignored.
The Lord Be With You