Strange and Suspicious

Loving without limits like Jesus

11/13/2019

Luke 17:11-19 As Jesus continued his journey to Jerusalem, he traveled through Samaria and Galilee. As he was entering a village, ten lepers met him. They stood at a distance from him and raised their voice, saying, "Jesus, Master! Have pity on us!" And when he saw them, he said, "Go show yourselves to the priests." As they were going they were cleansed. And one of them, realizing he had been healed, returned, glorifying God in a loud voice; and he fell at the feet of Jesus and thanked him. He was a Samaritan. Jesus said in reply, "Ten were cleansed, were they not? Where are the other nine? Has none but this foreigner returned to give thanks to God?" Then he said to him, "Stand up and go; your faith has saved you."

The Samaritans are arguably some of the strangest and even suspicious people in Scripture. The Samaritans were spurned by the Jews and yet Jesus had a soft spot in his heart for Samaritans. You remember how lovingly he treated the Samaritan woman at the well in John 4, suggesting that he himself was her real husband (Jn. 4:18). Jesus tells the surprising story of the “Good Samaritan” in Luke 10, where the Samaritan is the hero of the parable, not the priest nor the Levite. And today in Luke 17, Jesus heals 10 people of leprosy and the only one who returns to say “thanks” was the Samaritan, “a foreigner.” Who are these strange and suspicious Samaritans? Let me say three things about them so you get to know them, and more importantly, so you get to know the limitless love of our Lord for them and for us.

First, try to imagine a mental map of the Holy Land. The distance from Galilee in the north to Jerusalem in the south is about 100 miles, and roughly the distance between Bella Vista and Barling. This area can be divided into three distinct zones: Galilee in the north (with Nazareth and Capernaum and the Sea of Galilee), Samaria in the middle (with Mt. Gerizim) and Judah in the south (with Jerusalem and the Dead Sea). So, if you compare the Holy Land with Northwest Arkansas, Galilee would be the area of Fayetteville/Springdale, Jerusalem the Holy City would be Fort Smith (of course!), and in the middle would be Samaria, basically Mountainburg. The people of Mountainburg would be the strange and suspicious Samaritans. That’s the geography and location of the Samaritans.

What was their ethnic make-up, their gene pool? The Samaritans were half-Jews and half-Babylonians, that is, their pedigree was not pure. That’s why Jesus called the Samaritan in the Luke 17, “a foreigner.” Think of someone from Mountainburg marrying an Okie from Oklahoma – a foreign state! Clearly his or her credentials as a card-carrying Razorback would be called into question. Loyalties would be divided between rival family backgrounds. Indeed, the Jews and Samaritans belonged to countries that were at war with each other. When the Hogs go to war with the Sooners, who do you root for?

A third difference between Jews and Samaritans was religion. Samaritans believed the holy mountain to worship God was Mt. Gerizim. Jews, on the other hand, insisted God’s holy mountain was in Jerusalem. Again, think of people from Mountainburg saying Catholics should only go to Mass in Winslow, in the Boston Mountains, at Our Lady of the Ozarks. Meanwhile, we in the River Valley, insist people should worship here in Fort Smith, at God’s temple of Immaculate Conception. We alone offer God fitting and faithful praise. Every time you hear Jesus traveling from Galilee in the north through strange and suspicious Samaria, down south to Jerusalem, picture our Lord trodding the turf between Fayetteville and Fort Smith, and you’ll have a rough estimate of his route and the people he passed along the way.

The larger message, however, is the message of love (that’s always the larger message), namely, the Jesus’ love has no limits. Even though Jesus’ target audience is the Jewish people headquartered in Jerusalem, his salvation will encompass everyone. Our Lord’s love will break through barriers of location and land and nationality. He doesn’t care if you live on a mountain or in the valley or on the moon or on mars. His love overcome ethnic hatreds and histories by inviting everyone to become part of the family of God born again by baptism. Abandon your ethnic family of birth to be adopted into the eternal family by baptism. And our Lord does not care where you worship, as long as you worship “in Spirit and truth,” as he shared with the Samaritan woman, not Mt. Gerizim, not Mt. Jerusalem, not Mt. Gaylor. Indeed, wherever God’s family gathers to celebrate the Eucharist, there the heavenly Father finds those who “worship him in spirit and in truth.”

The question we have to ask ourselves today is simple. Jesus’ love is unlimited by land or nationality, by ethnicity or culture, or even by religious rivalries. But is our love limited in any of these ways: by nationality or ethnicity or religion? The Samaritans were indeed strange and suspicious people but Jesus loved them. We should likewise love those who seem a little strange and suspicious to us.

Praised be Jesus Christ!