Sermon preached at the Sung Eucharist on the Seventeenth Sunday after Trinity 2025

Our readings today focus on healing, specifically healing from leprosy. Naaman the mighty Syrian is healed by Elisha (the prophet in Samaria) and the ten lepers on the borders of Samaria and Galilee, are healed by Jesus.

Naaman, the military commander, took some convincing to follow Elisha’s advice; unimpressed to be receiving it from the mouth of a mere messenger, and to be sent to the muddy Jordan when more impressive, Syrian rivers would have been much more convenient.

The 10 Lepers, however, had far less dignity upon which to stand. They were outcasts, who had banded together outside the village, and who knew that they are expected to keep their distance from decent society. Socially-distanced, they cried out in order to be heard – Jesus, Master, have mercy on us.

Like Elisha with Naaman, Jesus sent the lepers on a journey – go and show yourselves to the priests, he told them; to the people charged with determining whether you are safe, clean enough, for integration into the community. Unlike Naaman, grumbling on his journey to wash in the Jordan, the 10 lepers were cleansed after only a few steps.

Naaman, having been made clean, as he was promised, returned to the prophet to praise the God of Israel. Only one of the 10 lepers returned to Jesus. That one fell at the Master’s feet and gave thanks to Israel’s God incarnate. Naaman was a Syrian, the grateful leper a Samaritan – both of them foreigners, outsiders as far as mainstream Judaism was concerned.

This year, our Sunday gospel readings have been predominantly from Luke’s gospel; a learned gentile, writing for gentiles, with a not entirely unsurprising focus on inclusion. Luke’s writing includes the book of Acts, that extraordinary account of the gospel’s spread, especially among Gentile communities, from Jerusalem to Rome. Luke charts the disputes over the inclusion of Gentiles into what began as a predominantly Jewish sect, including that extraordinary vision received by Peter that finally convinced him to make no distinction between Jewish and Gentile believers. Luke tells how Jesus and his resurrection fulfils the hope of Israel, and democratises that hope to all people without remainder.

So, the fact that the one leper who showed gratitude was a Samaritan, an outsider, might have served Luke’s particular take on the gospel rather well. Preachers often remind us that interactions between Jesus and Samaritans, in particular, are especially freighted. We are rightly reminded that Samaritans were not just outsiders, but a people distrusted, even hated by Jews. The level of antagonism between them was made even sharper, it seems, because of their close cultural proximity; Samaritans claimed descent from the Israelite tribes of Ephraim and Manasseh, and had a parallel system of worship on Mt Gerazim, with similarities to that on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. There is both cultural similarity and cultural rivalry at play. It may not be too much of a stretch to compare their antagonism with contemporary Russia and Ukraine – Moscow and Kiev having deeply entwined cultural and religious roots, and yet a sad history of deep mistrust.

So we imagine Jesus poking at Jewish prejudice when telling stories of a GOOD Samaritan, and in today’s gospel comparing the thankfulness of a Samaritan against the heedless nine other, we presume Jewish, lepers, who are rushing off to get their seal of approval from the priests, completely forgetting their manners.

We hear and we nod approvingly. Prejudice is a bad thing. How right Jesus is to shame those who indulge in racial stereotyping. How courageous to risk whatever opprobrium it may have excited from his own people.

But it might be important to remember that this is Luke’s gospel we are dealing with here. These two approving mentions of Samaritans do not appear in Matthew, or indeed Mark. That is not to say that these Samaritan stories are therefore less historically reliable, but it is at least interesting that Luke, the gentile writing for gentiles, includes them, while Matthew, in particular, likely to be written for a Jewish audience, does not. The only mention of Samaritans in Matthew’s gospel is when Jesus sends out the twelve and tells them not to go to Gentiles or Samaritans, but only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.

Could it be that Luke had more licence, more freedom, to make more of the prejudice between Jews and Samaritans, in order to advance his story of gospel inclusion; the gospel for the poor, for the marginalised. Perhaps Matthew, in particular, knew that this would play rather badly with much of his audience – that shaming people with their own prejudice only risked stirring up hostility and anger, obscuring the message, the gospel, he was trying to convey?

In our polarised culture, many are appalled to see prejudices that were thought to have been largely dealt with, or at least diminishing, being revived and amplified through social media, and increasingly through the older media of print and broadcast and voices in the public square. This is all part of free speech, we are told. Simply calling-out the prejudice seems to achieve little more than a hardening of hostility, and an ever louder insistence that there must be freedom to say even the most inflammatory things. Even incitement to violence doesn’t seem to be entirely off the table.

Luke makes his point about inclusion by inviting his audience to observe a prejudice in which they were not directly implicated, being neither Jewish nor Samaritan. There is a safe distance here; a space which might allow a gentile readership not just to applaud the actions of Jesus, but perhaps to consider where they might be called to address their own prejudices and antagonisms for the sake of the gospel.

Confronting and shaming people with their own prejudice is a risky strategy. I suspect none of us responds to it terribly well. It can easily, almost instantly, become patronising; implying an intellectual or moral superiority that I doubt any of us can safely claim. It may not be physically violent, but there is a kind of violence done to those who are, however subtly, deemed to be stupid, and told to shut up. Populist politicians know very well how to weaponize that grievance.

Jesus, clearly, did not shy away from controversy, but I don’t think he was in the business of shaming people. His principal form of teaching, the parables, including the Good Samaritan, open up imaginative spaces in which difficult ideas can be explored, and new vistas of the Kingdom of God can be opened. Yes, sometimes people responded with hostility, perceiving or imagining that they were being spoken against, but Jesus’ purpose does not appear to be to divide or condemn – he did not, does not, seek to create a community that might consider itself morally superior, but a community of repentant sinners, called to serve and to heal in his name.

His ultimate teaching, in his submission to silencing, suffering and death, invites us, compels us to see that our anger, grievance and violence always involves some kind of scapegoating; piling our petty antagonisms on those whom we feel we can safely reject; declare to be alien, foreign, the problem.

This is a kind of stupidity, in that it fails to address the real issues, but it is a stupidity that none of us ever quite escapes – it is the common stupidity which requires us all to keep coming back to the Cross; to keep the Cross ever before us to constantly remind us of what we do to one another. It calls us back into the one space where we are not shamed for our stupidity, our prejudice, but forgiven, redeemed. This is the gracious, generous space created by God in Christ; Christ, the only one who can forgive, because he suffered everything we could throw at him; everything we throw at one another.

Our job is not to judge who is clean enough, who has the right opinions; not to shame those whose prejudice we think we can easily condemn, but to come into the space that Jesus has created, into which he invites anyone, like the Samaritan leper, anyone who approaches him with thankfulness; into the space where we are none of us put to shame, but in which we might give thanks for the healing, the forgiveness that is already being offered, already being poured out for us. We come to the crucified One who alone can wean us off our scapegoating, through the gift of himself, his own body and blood, inviting us into the space where previously unimagined vistas can begin to be discerned of a Kingdom in which everyone belongs.