Luke 17:11–19
On the way to Jerusalem [Jesus] was passing along between Samaria and Galilee.
This account of Jesus’s journey between extremes shows us that gratitude, more than ancestry or purity or rote obedience, is the key to a genuine relationship with God. Jesus was taking a journey through “the region between Samaria and Galilee.”
“The region between ….” This innocent sounding locator is filled with assumptions. Here is the zone between borders, boundaries, the fine line that separates different people, different cultures, different attitudes, different religions, different understandings of what it means to be human. Here is the region between, where differences mix, blend and come together, resulting in who knows what kind of a combination? This is where we find Jesus today: on a journey through the middle-ground. He is on the border; in “the region between Samaria and Galilee.”
Samaria is the land, within the traditional boundaries of Israel, which had come to be occupied by people that the Israelites regarded as foreigners, outsiders and maybe even borderline turncoats. Samaritans are the descendants of the people from foreign nations that the conquering empires of Assyria and Babylon brought in to occupy the land of Israel. Those empires had overrun Israel. To keep Israel weak and defeated, they dragged the people of Israel, the important people, anyway, into exile in faraway lands. And outsiders, from other foreign lands, were forcibly relocated by Assyria to Israel. They became the “Samaritans.” Over the centuries since, the Samaritans had come to worship the God of Israel, but they did so in ways traditional Israelites regarded as watered down or unacceptable.
And that feeling was mutual. The Samaritans didn’t regard the worship of the Israelites returned from exile as pure or legitimate. They regarded the returned exiles as having been tainted by their decades among foreign people. Whatever the case, we’re left with two religions worshiping the same God in different ways and different places. For Israelites, the temple, the true center for worship (not to mention the “Center of the Universe”!), was in Jerusalem. For Samaritans, true worship happened at Gerizim.
The fact that Jesus is traveling “along the border between Samaria and Galilee” seems to indicate that He favors neither one nor the other, though Jesus Himself, of course, being descended from the tribe of Judah, should have been firmly committed to the traditionally Jewish camp.
So, Jesus is traveling “in the region between,” “along the border.” Jesus has apparently chosen to place Himself in a place where He has access to both: to the traditional religion, and to variations and modifications of the traditional religion. Which one, in our contemporary Christian situation, is the true, “traditional” expression, and which is the “variation” is best left alone or perhaps even untouched! In His travel through “the region between,” Jesus encountered ten men with leprosy.
We don’t know which side of the border the ten came from. They may be foreigners to one another, thus under normal conditions suspicious-to-hostile of one another, but they have in common a physical breakdown in health which has brought them together. They have been afflicted with leprosy, and for one reason or another, been struck by an angry God and out of fear of being contagious and classified unclean and wasn’t allowed and contact in the life of their communities.
We learn later that at least one of them was from Samaria. So, by the standards of Israel, which would be Jesus’ home country, that one would have been considered an outsider, a foreigner, and “unclean” as much from his religion as for his disease.
Jesus, apparently, doesn’t care about whether they are from Samaria or Galilee, or wherever. He’s having none of that. He doesn’t even ask.
“Have mercy on us!” they cry, and He just says: “Go show yourselves to the priests,” in effect, telling them to show themselves to the appropriate officials who have the authority to pronounce them healthy and restore them fully to life in their communities. He doesn’t even specify Gerizim or Jerusalem, He just says, “Go ….” He doesn’t say “your faith has made you well,” or anything like that. He doesn’t touch them or lay hands on them or spit on mud and smear it on them or repeat any stentorian healing formula. He just says, “Go show yourselves to the priests.” It’s almost as if He’s saying, “consider yourselves already healed. Just go on to the priests and have them certify it.” And as they turn to obey His command and go, sure enough, they “[are] made clean”, made clean by who or what? Obedience? Faith? We don’t know for sure.
As they turn to do exactly what He tells them to do, they’re healed. That’s all we need to know. That is, nine of them do exactly as Jesus tells them. It could be said that one of them, the Samaritan, seems to disobey Jesus. “… one of them, when he saw that he was healed, turned back, praising God with a loud voice.” Instead of going to the Temple, he turns back to give praise to God in the presence of Jesus, whom he obviously sees as the source or the conduit of the divine power that has healed him. He turned back as soon as he saw that he was healed, which implies, at least, that he didn’t go to the priests. Not directly, anyway. And Jesus receives his thanks. And Jesus wonders aloud, where are the other nine? Could they not return and give thanks also? And He says to the foreigner, the outsider, the one who did return to give glory to God, something we hear Jesus say a number of times to those he’s made whole: “your faith has made you well.”
The Samaritan is grateful, to say the least. What about the other nine? A good question! Were they grateful at all? Or did they just, figuratively speaking, wipe their foreheads and say something like “Whew! That was a close one! Better now!” and go on about their lives?
What constitutes gratitude, to God, to one another? Suppose Jesus had said, before the sound of their cries for mercy had even died out, “make sure you come back and give thanks to God!” Would it have been genuine gratitude that motivated them to return?
Jesus praises the one who did turn back to give thanks, yes, the one who perhaps disobeyed Him. Does that Samaritan ever go and show himself to the priests, as he was initially ordered to do? We are not told. Perhaps it isn’t really important.
So. what is important, in Jesus’ eyes? Is it fulfilling a religious obligation, in this case, showing yourself to the priests, to obtain an official pronouncement, maybe even a certificate of healing?
Or is what is truly important simple gratitude, thanking God for what you’ve received, for the healing?
In this case it’s gratitude, not obedience, which receives Jesus’ highest praise. This is certainly not to downplay obedience. It’s obedience that sets us on the right path. It’s obedience that takes those guys wandering sick in the border regions and sets them on the straight road to healing.
However, that obedience is not necessarily the highest goal. Our greatest, most perfect worship comes out of gratitude. It’s gratitude, a thankful heart which goes above and beyond obedience, that moves us to our ultimate goal, which is a real connection with the One who cares for us, rather than a master/servant relationship which goes no higher than that. It’s gratitude that earns this outsider the assurance, straight from Jesus: “Your faith has made you well.”
There are two extremes presented in this journey of Jesus through the region between. The extremes are “Galilee” and “Samaria”; the keepers of the tradition, and the ones who have “watered down” the tradition or altered it in the eyes of the traditionalists. Jesus, here and in other places, receives more faith from outsiders than from those firmly, even belligerently, planted in His own tradition. How about us? Do we sometimes, anyway, see more faith in Jesus from non-Christians? Should we look harder for such faith, in such places?
Ultimately, it is your faith, the faith that brought you here today, the faith that led Freya’s family to bring her here to the font and the washing of her sins, the faith that leads all of us to cry out to Jesus. It is that faith that will make you well. It is faith that opens the gate to Jesus’ power, faith that completes the circuit. The Samaritan’s thanks has healed him in ways that the unthankful non-foreigners will never experience.
Have faith and go in peace.