Manners

I often get Jesus and my mother confused.  It is understandable.  My mother spoke on his behalf with some regularity. One of his lessons according to my mother was this:  “Remember the magic words—please and thank you.”  And that for a long time was how I understood this story about the healing of the ten lepers (Lk. 17:11-19), the fact that only one of them went back to say “thank you.” That’s the one who was the good boy.  But I had missed the details of the story. 

One of those details is that the only one of the ten lepers to come back after being restored to health was a Samaritan.  I have always thought that detail was there because Samaritans were not noted for having good manners. 

I now don’t think that is what this story is about at all.  The thing to note is that there is no reason at all for the Samaritan leper, even though healed, to go show himself to the priests, as Jesus has instructed all of them.  The priests at the Temple in Jerusalem would have had no more use for this Samaritan as a healed leper than they had before.  He was just as much an outcast as he was before he got rid of the leprosy.  He could no more be restored to the life of the community now than before.

And so this one leper, the Samaritan, does what people who could not be accepted anywhere else typically did in those days, and typically do still.  He returned to Jesus.  The place for the outcast, the marginalized, the oppressed, the misfit, the foreigner is in Jesus.  Polite society—the priests and the Pharisees and the decent folks in town—has nothing to do with these people.  Jesus, however, did.  And if we seek Jesus, we will, too.

Peace,
+Stacy