Luke 17:11-19, Second Essay; When Turning Back is the Right Thing to Do II

Well, one of the lepers, upon being healed, turned around and glorified God. This is what we would expect in Luke's work--the one who is healed usually glorifies God. See Luke 5:25-26; 7:16-17; Acts 4:21, for example. But he does two unexpected things, things "beyond" the call of duty--he falls at Jesus' feet and he thanks Jesus. But before commenting briefly on these words/actions, a word should be said about the flow of the language. The text says that when one leper "saw" that he was healed, he turned back. Sight is the sense that is here kindled or touched.

This isn't always the case. Recall when the woman with the flow of blood approached Jesus she thought that if she only touched his garment, she would be healed. Jesus felt strength going out of him; he saw nothing. But here, the sense of sight is engaged. By emphasizing that it was the leper's "seeing" of his own condition that stimulated his "turn around," Luke is reminding us of the theological center of his Gospel and of Jesus' proclamation. Recall from Luke 4: 18:

"He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free..."

We might say here that the "sight" the leper recovers is his "insight." He is one of the oppressed that now goes free. But the story of the leper's healing and turning back in gratitude ought also to be read along with the story of Naaman the Syrian in II Kings 5, which I exposit also for this week.

By having the man fall at Jesus' feet and thank him, Luke skillfully begins to shift the action center of the narrative from the leper back to Jesus. Even though a healing happens here, it is Jesus who is the focal point of the narrative. So the action will shift to Jesus. If this were a movie, the lights would begin to move gently from the healed leper to Jesus.

But not so fast. There is one other interesting little tidbit thrown in, a tidbit that is so delicious, in fact, that it becomes a sort of mini-bomb in the narrative. At the end of v. 16 the text just says, "And he himself was a Samaritan." The word "autos" (the intensive pronoun) is not really necessary in this context, but here it is. Thus, Luke wants us to pause over it for a second. Its meaning is something like, "This guy, the one who was healed, yep, HE was a Samaritan." Anyone who reads the Gospels knows that the Samaritan is the despised outsider, the "1/2 Jew," the one who worships at Mount Gerizim rather than at the Jerusalem Temple, the one who isn't quite "equal" to the rest of the Jewish people.

But now we have it. Jesus has broken through two barriers in his healing. He has spoken to and cleansed the lepers; the one grateful leper was a Samaritan. The one that was forgiven more loved more. Isn't that a principle that comes right from the heart of Luke's Gospel in ch. 7? And Jesus really won't let the point go. In this spare narrative of nine verses (vv. 11-19), two verses are spent (vv. 17-18) with Jesus wondering about the others who were healed. It is as if Luke is secretly dropping in the fact that the healed man was a Samaritan and then Jesus takes the secret thing and blows it up on a big screen. It is like a person who whispers a sort of private thing to another person, and that person then stands up and says, "Do you know what X has just told me? Let me tell you..."

Jesus, then, won't let the narrative proceed without commenting in detail about the Samaritan's faithfulness. It isn't so much that he criticizes the others; he wants to commend the unique response of the Samaritan to him. And, then, Jesus uses a word that is unique in the NT in describing the Samaritan. How is it, Jesus wants to know, that no one else was found to return to give glory to God except this foreigner, this person who comes from the outside? It is almost as if Jesus now points his finger at the healed Samaritan and poses the moral dilemma not only to the original listeners but to all of us who read the story. It is as if he says:

"This guy, this guy from the outside, the guy with the accent, with the strange history, with the "weird" commitments, with the wasting skin disease; this guy is the only one who returned to thank me. Don't you think that this is a bit unusual?"

That is the tone of Jesus' reponse. I wonder if I had been in the crowd that day how I would have responded. How would you have responded? Maybe we wouldn't rush in such a headlong fashion to try to become "insiders" if we really understood what Jesus was saying.

Conclusion

This powerful narrative paints a picture of how porous are the barriers (for God) that we humans erect to separate ourselves from others. They may seem like they are definitive dividers to us, but not to Jesus. And, if not to Jesus, then why to us?

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