This text from Luke’s Gospel is one that is most often used during Thanksgiving services for obvious reasons. Jesus praises the one leper who returns to give thanks. Being thankful is a good thing, obviously.
Read this passage again, though, in its context and you begin to see that there’s an even greater emphasis. It’s no so much about a foreigner who give thanks, but about a foreigner who gives thanks. Here’s what I mean…
As the passage opens, Jesus is on his way to Jerusalem (in the south) from Galilee (in the north). Problem was that most pious Jews didn’t walk a straight line from north to south because in between Galilee and Jerusalem was the land of the Samarians. The Samaritans and Jews were enemies even though they shared a common heritage. The feud went all the way back to the split of the northern and southern kingdoms of Israel after the death of Solomon. The Samaritans didn’t recognize Jerusalem and the Temple as the center of worship, were somewhat different ethnically, and were thus despised by the Jews. Look back in Luke and you’ll see the tension between Jews and Samaritans all the way through. The Samaritans had earlier rejected Jesus himself because he had “set his face to go to Jerusalem” (Luke 9:51-56). Yet, interestingly, Jesus did not reject them.
Rather than go around Samaria, as most Jews would have done, Jesus takes his disciples right through. Not only is he going through foreign territory, he also encounters ten lepers on the way. Leprosy is a disfiguring skin disease that affects everything the infected person touches—even causing mold to form on fabrics and in houses. Lepers were thus sent out of the community, which was a requirement of the Law (Leviticus 13:46). People with leprosy lived as outcasts and had to shout “Unclean! Unclean!” when they would come near others. To suffer from leprosy meant that you were cut off from the rest of the world—untouchable.
The lepers approach Jesus, shouting as they come in both warning and in a plea for healing. Jesus heals them with a word—“Go and show yourselves to the priests.” That was also a requirement of the Law—only the priest could verify that a healing had taken place and only the priest could authorize a leper’s return to the life of the community. The ten go to the priest as they are told.
The passage clearly implies that all the lepers were healed and made whole. Only one, however, returns and seeks out Jesus to say thanks “and,” says Luke for emphasis, “he was a Samaritan.” The others may have been Jews, we don’t know. The point is that it is the foreigner, the double outcast (a leper and a Samaritan), who returns to Jesus with praise and worship.
What about the other nine? They had done what Jesus told them to do. Perhaps Jesus’ question, though, says more about the issue of outsiders and insiders. Many of Jesus’ teachings, particularly in Luke, were aimed at the Pharisees—the religious critics who charged him with “eating with sinners.”
The Pharisees saw themselves as insiders—they had done everything right in their minds, had followed the religious laws, done the proper rituals, etc. They no doubt felt secure in their faith and practice. At the same time, they were very clear about demarcating the lines that prohibited outsiders from enjoying that security—the sick, the sinful, the foreigner, the outcast.
When you’re an insider, you tend to look at everything from an insider’s perspective. You expect things to be a certain way, and what were once considered gifts are now considered to be rights. That’s big in our culture—everyone is quick to assert their “rights” when it comes to any kind of conflict with another. Witness the number of frivolous lawsuits we hear about every day—spill hot coffee on yourself and call it a violation of your “rights.”
But here’s the thing—we give thanks for gifts, but who gives thanks for their rights? The other nine lepers may have seen their healing as a natural right. In their minds, Jesus was only giving them what they should expect. Why bother to return and say thanks?
Sometimes the Church gets to be an insider club, too. I’ve served churches where people saw worship, for example, as something to be crafted especially for them. I was sitting in the chancel one Sunday morning in another church and the sanctuary was about half full. I saw a visiting couple come in an sit down in one of the pews. Now, I knew that this was the regular pew of a woman I’ll call Nellie. Nellie sat there every Sunday. She even had a stool with her name on it that she left under the pew from Sunday to Sunday so that she’d have somewhere to put up her feet.
Well, Nellie walked in and saw this couple sitting in “her” seat. Mind you, the pew in front of them and in back of them were both wide open. I watched as Nellie stood there a minute, a shocked look on her face, then spun on her heel and walked out. True story! I had another visitor one Sunday tell me on the way out that a member had confronted them because he was “sitting in her seat.”
A lot of religious people, a lot of church people, believe that “membership has its privileges.” That’s why this story is, I believe, directed at the insiders—a reminder that being part of the Body of Christ means not focusing on ourselves but on the outsiders, the foreigners, the strangers, even the outcasts.
Read the Gospels and you’ll soon realize that Jesus was in constant conflict with the Pharisees and religious insiders precisely because he constantly broke those boundaries, eating with sinners, healing lepers, redefining who’s in and who’s out. The hated Samaritan becomes the hero of this story, just like a Samaritan was the hero in Luke 15—we even call him “The Good Samaritan” when in first century Jewish thought there really was no such thing!
This passage gets one thinking, then, about who the Samaritans are that we deal with in our own day—those who are poor, outcast, sick, on the margins of society.
What’s the 21st century equivalent of a leper colony? Well, it might be the fastest growing population in the US—those who are in prison. I got to thinking about this because of an article I read in The Christian Century. The specter of serving time in prison is seen by most of society as the best deterrent to crime. Legislation that promotes “three strikes and you’re out” and “get tough on crime” policies is usually popular at election time. Problem is, however, that building more prisons hasn’t been working. Some 2.2 million people are incarcerated in the U.S. today — more than any nation at any time in the history of the world. In the 1990s, prison cells were the fastest growing sector of the U.S. housing market. Many of these prisoners are mentally ill, have suffered unimaginable abuse from others, are victims of crushing poverty. Many suffer from addictions and have never been taught how to cope with life. Jens Soering, who is a Christian convict serving time in a Virginia prison, identifies the problem: “Prison does not deter crime because criminals are too crazy, too drunk, too high, too uneducated, too unintelligent, and too young to fully comprehend what they were doing at the time they broke the law.”
If prison is a failure as a deterrent, the criminal justice system itself is also failing at trying to “rehabilitate” prisoners for reintegration into society. Some 600,000 prisoners are released every year, but two thirds of them will return to prison in three years or less. The criminal justice system is based on the model of punishment, retribution, and isolation and any efforts by corrections officers to evoke real and lasting change are often pushed aside by other priorities like simple order and discipline within the prison. The result is that prison becomes a kind of graduate school for crime. A prisoner released into a world without support systems, mentoring, and the on-going care that is essential for real transformation and change is a natural candidate for a return to prison life.
For Christians, these statistics and attitudes should raise alarms. Church growth experts are always telling us to engage emerging trends and minister to niche populations. Well, if the fastest growing population in our country lives behind prison walls it follows that the church should be there, too.
This is a hard truth for “nice,” insider Christians who would never dream of experiencing life behind bars. But the hard truth is that of all the places Jesus told his followers to go prison is near the top of the list. In Matthew 25:45, Jesus makes it clear that the eternal future of those who claim his name is directly tied to visiting “him” in prison. Jesus identified himself with the least, the last, the lost and even with those whom society has warehoused in an attempt at justice. Jesus himself would be processed into the Roman criminal justice system for crimes against the state. That fact alone should convict us. Christians are, after all, people who have themselves been saved by a death row convict.
Mark Earley, who is the current president of Prison Fellowship, a prison ministry, puts it this way: “What if instead of spending billions of dollars building more prisons to warehouse offenders, Christian men and women around the country rolled up their sleeves, moved out of their comfort zones, and began going behind bars to teach and mentor inmates? What if instead of seeing the revolving door herd hundreds of thousands of re-offenders back to prison each year, the Church opened its arms to embrace the returning prisoner with the Gospel and with life-on-life discipleship? And what if Christians just like you began to have such an impact on the culture around us that broken families, violence and poverty — all of which fuel crime — began to disappear? Yes, sin and crime will be with us until Christ returns, but what if we made such an impact that prisons were forced to start shutting down?”
Ministry in prisons? That may be the equivalent of touching lepers in the current world. I’ve been thinking about this a lot and I wonder what kind of impact we’d have on our community if we were to begin a ministry of some kind with prisoners in our local jail. It’s hard to imagine a bigger move out of one’s comfort zone than that, but I can tell you that it bears fruit.
When I was in Colorado Springs I once got a call from a man living somewhere in the Midwest whose son was in the local Colorado Springs jail on charges of domestic violence, disorderly conduct, and other issues. He had called random churches in the Springs to see if anyone would go and visit his son—just visit. He couldn’t get anybody to listen. Someone at one of the churches I guess referred him to me. The son, who I’ll call Sam, had been in the Gulf War in the Special Forces and was carrying a lot of anger that spilled over into his life. I listened to the father’s story and somewhat reluctantly agreed to go to the county jail to see Sam. There are times when God’s call is crystal clear—usually when God is calling you to do something very uncomfortable. This was one of those times.
Mind you, I had never been inside a jail and the prospect was frightening. It took me a couple of weeks to screw up the courage to go (it’s amazing what kinds of trivial things you can find for your calendar when faced with an ominous task). I finally got the visitation schedule and went down to the jail.
Checking in just to visit requires a lot of processing, searches, and moving through many series of locked doors and sliding bars. The deeper you go into a jail, the more hopeless it looks. I was taken to a small holding area with very small glass windows. It was there that I would first meet Sam—brought in to the little room on his side of the glass by a guard. We had fifteen minutes to visit. Even through the small window I could tell that Sam was a huge guy—typical Green Beret. Clear eyes, focused look. He sized me up and asked what I was doing there. I told him his dad had called me and he softened almost instantly. We chatted awhile, told me some of his story. I think he was relieved in some way because I knew how to “speak Army” and I knew what questions to ask. I offered to pray with him and he hesitated but then said ok. The fifteen minutes went very quickly. I asked him if he’d like me to visit again and he said he would. He disappeared through a door behind the glass and I was escorted back through the maze of bars and doors back out into the open air of the free world.
Visitation hours were limited, so I wasn’t able to arrange a visit until two weeks later. This time when I went, though, they didn’t put me in the windowed visitation room. Instead, it was a holding cell with two chairs. It quickly became clear to me that Sam and I were going to have a face to face discussion—I would be in a locked room with a convicted criminal who could break me in half. There must be some mistake, I thought, but no. You want to talk about prayer? I did some right then. Sam was ushered in, no handcuffs or anything like that. The guards locked the door. Literally ten minutes later an alarm sounded throughout the jail. Sam said, “That’s a lockdown—we’ll probably be here awhile.”
“Awhile” became two and a half hours.
As I talked with Sam, though, my fear quickly dissipated. “I can’t believe you came back,” he said. We had lots of time to talk so I listened to the details of his story, his regret for what he had done, his failed attempts to control his anger, his admission that he needed help, the tough and brutal realities of life inside a jail. A guard would come by every so often to check on us and gave me an “Are you alright?” kind of look. I just nodded. I had an overwhelming sense that this was where I was supposed to be. God is like that sometimes.
Sam realized that he was at fault and that his punishment was just. The treatment he and others received in prison, though, wasn’t always just. “Treat people like animals and that’s how they’ll act,” he said. I imagine that’s true. Sam was a guy looking forward to his release after serving the remaining 9 months of his 18 month sentence—a chance to start fresh. I wondered how that would work for him.
I stayed in touch with Sam over the next several months, dropping him notes of encouragement in the mail. Visitation was harder as the rules kept shifting. I had also taken on some new responsibilities at the church that kept me hopping.
One Sunday morning after worship I was standing at the door greeting people when a man came through the line dressed in a nice leather jacket. He shook my hand firmly. It was Sam. I’m not much of a hugger, as many of you know, but I gave him a hug. Things were going better for him. He was going to live with his dad for awhile, was working on getting a new job, had been in intensive counseling. Here was a guy trying to put his life back together. “I just came here today to tell you thanks,” he said. I reminded him that all I had done was show up—and that I had been afraid to do that.
“That’s all I needed,” he said, “someone to give a damn.” The church ladies nearby were shocked at his language. I smiled.
Sam taught me a lot about the kind of disciple Jesus calls us to be. In a world where we teach our children to never talk to strangers, that doesn’t mean that we adults get off the hook. Jesus was willing to go places that upstanding, respectable, insider people don’t usually go. He calls us to go there, too.
Retired United Methodist Bishop Kenneth Carder tells the story of hearing a judge give a speech in which he said, “Pastors should be as familiar with the inside of the local jails and prisons as they are the local hospitals.” We visit people in hospitals all the time who have the support systems of family and people devoted to their healing with them around the clock. People in prison, by contrast, receive little support and are surrounded by people whose only job is to confine and punish them.
I’ve been convicted lately (interesting choice of words) that I need to be more willing to go where Jesus goes. That may mean the county jail. I’m committed to finding out how we can be involved in helping to change the lives of this population. I wonder who would be interested in taking that journey, too? The jail is one place, but there are also plenty of other places we can go and make a difference, bringing welcome to the stranger and healing to the outcast. Folks like the Samaritan, men like Sam, call us to consider just how serious we are about our faith and discipleship.
Truth is, if we’re really following Jesus there should be no such thing as a stranger.
Jim Wallis tells of how on Saturdays the Sojourners Community opens a food line to the hungry and homeless of Washington who live within sight of the White House. Before they open the doors, they gather around the food, hold hands, and are led in prayer by Mary Glover, the best pray-er of the community - someone who herself stood in that food line a few years earlier. Wallis says "she prays as if she knows the person with whom she's talking," and this is what she prays: "Lord, we know you'll be coming through this line today. So help us to treat you well."
Where the Samaritans are, where the outcasts are, where the prisoners are, there Jesus will be. Will we meet him there?
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