Father Stephen De Young: Okay, so when we get started in just a moment, we’ll be starting Luke chapter 17, verse eleven. We stopped in kind of an odd spot again, but we are moving in now on sort of the last chapter, using the term “chapter” more loosely, the final act maybe would be better, of St. Luke’s Gospel now.

As we’ve seen Jesus’ journey from Galilee down through Samaria to Judea, he’s been coming closer and closer to Jerusalem. He still has crowds following him, but there have been a lot more Pharisees popping up at those crowds than other people who have been challenging him and questioning him. Resistance to him is starting to rise and so we’re sort of moving in now on when he’s going to come into Jerusalem. And I don’t want to give any spoilers but we already read Matthew and Mark so you kind of know where this is going.

So we’ve been in sort of the midst of a section here in St. Luke’s Gospel where there have been a series of sort of discourses by Jesus. Remember there was the one at the dinner party he went to, at the Pharisee’s home, where he told a number of parables and got a little bit hostile with the Pharisees there who were challenging him. And then we’ve seen some other interactions with his disciples, with the Pharisees, with the crowds and we’re still in that section now. It’s drawing to a close and we stopped at sort of a break. Jesus had just been talking to his disciples about their role as leaders in what was going to become the church and how they were to exercise that leadership and sort of comparing it to the way in which the Pharisees and the other religious leaders in Judea had been exercising their leadership in sort of a negative way, that they were not to be like them and were to conduct themselves differently.

And so, then we had sort of a break in the text as we’ve talked about before here in verse 11, it has that “now it happened” which is what was translated back in the old King James “and it came to pass”, which is basically, as we’ve mentioned before, it’s a cover for Hebrew and Aramaic word henai, which is basically a conjunction in the text that starts a new section of the text. In the Old Testament, it’s usually translated as “behold”. “And behold, a man arrived,” et cetera, et cetera. So this is a break and we’re now starting a new sort of subsection, although Jesus is continuing to teach and to interact with people while he’s on the road.

So, unless anybody has any questions or clarifications or anything else. We’ll go ahead and get started in chapter 17, verse eleven.

Now it happened as He went to Jerusalem that He passed through the midst of Samaria and Galilee.

Now he’s already been in Judea for a while, right? So, why did we now back up and say, “Oh by the way, remember this trip started in Galilee and he went through Samaria and he’s heading to Jerusalem.” Probably as we mentioned it’s got that conjunction. So this is a new section. And remember that as we talked about at the very beginning way back in the first Bible study on Luke, when I did the introduction to the Book of Luke that you could still listen to on the website, forgot to say that earlier, we talked about how St. Luke as he introduced the Gospel, said that he made inquiries, he went and talked to people. He said a lot of people have said about writing down about Jesus’s life and the things he said and the things he did. He said, “I went and made a thorough investigation and I put this together.”

And we’ve seen as we go along that St. Luke for example, will mention people’s names, sort of for no reason, seemingly. He’ll just name drop somebody “Oh, this person was there and saw this”, and you’re sort of like “Well who’s that and why do I care?” Well, originally, when St. Luke was writing it, this was a person who his audience would have heard of. This is a person who was in the church. This is one of the people he talked to. He’s telling us, this is sort of a footnote, he’s telling us where he got this, because St. Luke wasn’t one of the twelve disciples. He was an associate of St. Paul, but even St. Paul wasn’t here for this. And so St. Luke is getting this information from people who were.

And so, what we probably have here we’ve talked before about how St. Luke when we’re reading his gospel there’s these two contexts, right? There’s what originally happened when Jesus originally said it, and then there’s St. Luke taking these different stories that he’s gotten from these different people and then arranging them into one sort of overarching story, right, one overarching narrative. And so what we probably have here is one of those junctions where this is information, this is part of the story that he got from a different person.

So, that is most likely why we have this all of a sudden, “Oh by the way, yeah, while he was on the way Jerusalem, he went through Galilee and Samaria”, because this is now sort of beginning a new piece, a new telling, because everybody he would have gone to and he said, “You met Jesus, right?” “Oh yeah, I met Jesus.” “Tell me about it.” They say, “Well, he was on his way to Jerusalem and a Pharisee came up and asked Him this and he said that,” and he relates it that he’s talking to another person.  Well, you met Jesus, right?” “Yeah, I did.” “What happened?” “He said, well, he was still in Galilee and he was teaching and he said….”

So he’s taking all of this and he’s putting it together. And so this is probably one of the sort of seams where it’s sewn together. So we’re beginning now sort of a new story piece here. That’s why I stopped there last time, even though it’s verse 11 of a chapter.

Remember, the chapter and verse marks didn’t exist until… these chapters and verse marks that we’re working with now didn’t exist until the 16th century. So the fact that the big “17” is there in the text is just sort of to help us find things starting in the 16th century. Because before that, there weren’t printed copies of the New Testament, because the printing press didn’t exist. So all the copies of the New Testament before that were written by hand. They were just copied by hand. And they were arranged the way they’re arranged in the gospel book or the epistle book that we have in the church. Meaning they were broken up into readings for a particular day.

You’re going through Luke, right? Monday you read this chunk, Tuesday, you read this chunk, Wednesday you read this chunk and all the way through. And that’s how they were broken up. They were broken up by the date, basically, not by chapter and verse. When it came time to print the New Testament in printed form for people to just read, where they were just printing the whole book of Matthew, the whole book of Mark, the whole book of Luke, it wasn’t broken up by the days, it was just you could have the whole text, you had to have a way to find things. If someone said to you, “Read this story in the Gospel of Mark,” and they go…. you’re flipping, you’re going through the text. It makes it really easy, if we all have the same numbers, you could say, go to chapter 17, verse 11. When I said that earlier, everybody flipped open and got there relatively quickly.

So that’s why they were introduced. But they were very late, so there’s nothing special about them. They’re not always in sort of, quote-unquote, “the right place”. The place where we’d want them to be, they don’t correspond to. And if you look at the calendar with the daily readings for the church, you’ll notice the readings we have don’t correspond to the chapter breaks very well either. They usually will overlap. You’ll start with verse two, because they weren’t done with any reference to that. They were mostly done just to break things up into even chunks and then number the sentences as verses.

Interlocutor: You said the New Testament was just written up in the 16th century?

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, everywhere. And then it started being printed in Western Europe. In Greece, they were using handwritten gospel books in the churches until the beginning of the 20th century.

Interlocutor: They were still writing books?

Fr. Stephen: Yes, they’re still handwritten, because the Turks wouldn’t allow Christians to own a printing press in the Ottoman Empire. Because they didn’t want them to be able to disseminate Christian materials. So they couldn’t own a printing press. So there were no printed editions. So, they were just copied by monks by hand until 1911. That’s when the first printed Greek New Testament came out in Greece.

The New Testament wasn’t widely available in Arabic until the 20th century either. That was one of the big controversies that St Raphael got involved in in the old country, was they were still doing their liturgics in Greek. The whole liturgy would be in Greek. Everyone in the church would be Arabic speaking. But everything in the liturgy, the Bible was in Greek. Everything was in Greek. They had Greek bishops. And so there was a huge controversy about that at the beginning of the 20th century. But it was because of ultimately the Ottoman Turks who hadn’t allowed Christians the printing press, and so there was no way to do translations and then disseminate them.

Greece got its independence before the Ottoman Empire fell, so it was the first place able to print it. But of course, they printed it in Greek. They weren’t going to print it in other languages, they printed it in Greek. And so those Greek copies were the only thing available at Orthodox churches until even later. But yeah, that’s where the chapter and verse markers come from. They come from, once they started printing the New Testament in Western Europe.

And the verses of the Old Testament is a little more complex because those were actually based on the sort of the way we do in synagogues. The Hebrew text was chanted, and so they broke up the Hebrew text into lines, and then they split each line in half so that it could be chanted. So you’d have two halves of the verse. And so the chapter and verse markers in the Old Testament mostly follow those that came from the synagogue. So, the Old Testament, the verse situation is a little different because it was aimed at chanting it, but the New Testament was purely a product of the printing press and mass market New Testaments being available.

So, all that is to say we have here at the beginning of a new sort of subsection of the Gospel of St. Luke, even though it’s verse eleven. And so we’re sort of beginning again, the narration of some things that Jesus did and said while he’s on his way to Jerusalem. We’re still in that part, that overarching part of the Gospel where Jesus is on his way to Jerusalem, but this is a new piece, a new section.

Then as He entered a certain village, there met Him ten men who were lepers, who stood afar off.  And they lifted up their voices and said, “Jesus, Master, have mercy on us!”

So, we’ve talked before a little bit about lepers and leprosy, but most people agree that the leprosy we’re talking about in the New Testament is what’s called Hansen’s disease, now, today. And it’s basically a degenerative illness which causes your body, your tissues to necrotize, to die, and essentially sort of rot and fall off, sort of like gangrene. It starts with your extremities, so it starts with your fingers, your toes, your ears, your nose. And at this time in history, there’s no treatment for it. And they had no idea how it was spread or how it was contracted. And so if you had it, you hear like “leper camp” or “leper colony”. It was more like you’re outside the city in the desert, find a rock, find a cave, find a hole in the ground, right? Because you’re now permanently unclean and you’re basically thrown out there just to die because there’s no treatment, there’s nothing you could do.

And so, these people would have their hands bandaged, their feet bandaged because they’re rotting, they’d be missing their nose. They’d look fairly horrific. And so, these are sort of the ultimate outcasts of the ancient world, right? They’re literally just waiting to die out in the desert.

These ten with leprosy, apparently, they were all probably from this village, so they’re all sort of living in the area outside of town. And since they all have leprosy, they can’t give it to each other. So, they form some kind of community, apparently. But so, they come and they stand afar off. That was the law. You had to remain a certain number of paces away from anyone, and if someone was approaching you, you had to yell, “Unclean!” Audibly. So they would hear it and know to avoid you and not accidentally come into contact with you. And the death penalty was what happened if you broke that. I mean, if one of these lepers wandered into town, they would just kill him before he could spread, potentially spread. Not that he would be able to, really, but before they didn’t know. And so before he could potentially spread leprosy to anyone else, they would just be killed if they didn’t follow these rules.

So, they come, they cry out to Jesus to have mercy on them. Now, this is a display of some faith, because what are they asking here? They’re not asking for money, right? Jesus doesn’t have any money. Jesus is not a leper, but as we’ve seen, he’s homeless. He’s living off the kindness of the people who are coming to see him. So they’re not asking for money. And it’s not like he can go and put in a good word for him with the city council and get them back into town. That’s not happening.

So, the only thing this can mean is that they believe Jesus could cure them. They believe Jesus had the power to cure them. So this is a display of some faith on their part.

So when He saw them, He said to them, “Go, show yourselves to the priests.” And so it was that as they went, they were cleansed.

Now, why does he say, “Go, show yourself to the priest”? Well, the reason is if you had a bad diagnosis, let’s say they look at you, they decide you’re a leper, they throw you out of town, right? Let’s say it’s psoriasis, or let’s say it’s some other skin condition that they thought was leprosy, whatever it is, clears up. The way you could be admitted back into the life of the town or the city is you go and show yourself to the priest. And by show yourself, it means stripped naked and be inspected to see if there’s no trace of whatever it was so that the priest could verify, okay, this guy does not have leprosy. And then once he had verified that his word was taken for it, you are allowed to come back in and resume as best you could your regular life.

So, when Jesus tells them this, notice he doesn’t cure them. And then when they say, “Oh, gee, thanks,” say, “Okay, now go do the paperwork to go back to your normal lives.” They’re still standing there fully leprous, and he says, “Go show yourself to the priest.”

So once again, this is going to require some faith, because if you’re standing there with no nose and your hands rotting, you’re going to go and strip naked in front of the priest in the town? What’s that going to do for you? That’s going to get you killed. But they go. Notice it says, “As they went, they were cleansed.” So once they take the step and they go they go to the priest, right, and head there, then they’re cleansed. So, by the time they get there and show themselves to the priest, they’re healed, they are restored.

And one of them, when he saw that he was healed, returned, and with a loud voice glorified God, and fell down on his face at His feet, giving Him thanks. And he was a Samaritan.

So out of the ten, one of them, 10%, not a very good ratio, is excited, he comes back to thank Jesus, and lo and behold, out of ten of them, this one’s a Samaritan. He’s not even a Jew. He’s a foreigner. He’s one of these half-breeds who everybody hates, but he’s the one who comes back and says, thank you.

So Jesus answered and said, “Were there not ten cleansed? But where are the nine? Were there not any found who returned to give glory to God except this foreigner?”

Now, is Jesus being racist? No, that’s not the point, right? He’s pointing out that it’s a foreigner because he’s saying, look, the other nine weren’t. You all look down on this guy because he’s a Samaritan, but he’s the only one who thought to come back and give thanks.

And He said to him, “Arise, go your way. Your faith has made you well.”

Now, it’s important that we don’t misinterpret this, because you say, “Oh, well, his faith made him well.” What made the other nine well? Doesn’t say the other nine got their leprosy back because they were ungrateful, right? “Take that, I’m going to give you double leprosy,” right? No, they didn’t get it.

As we saw, their faith made them well, too. The reason is that they showed faith by asking Jesus. They showed faith by going to the priest. But this one is the one who came back and said “thank you”. The point here being, as we’ve said before, St. Luke doesn’t come to us and say, “Okay, Jesus is God, and Jesus is also a man. He is one person with two natures,” right? He doesn’t lay all that out, but he shows us that. He shows us that by showing us Jesus doing things only God can do, and he shows us that by having Jesus do things only humans do, Jesus does both. He also clearly shows us that there’s only one Jesus, he’s one person, right? So he shows us, rather than telling us. This is part of that showing us. Who can heal leprosy? God. Not a trick question. There’s only one person who could cure leprosy in the first century, and that’s God. Nobody else could do it.

Naaman was healed of leprosy in the Old Testament, right? But that was because a prophet of God came and prayed that God would heal his leprosy. That’s the only way leprosy gets healed. So, when Jesus does this, he’s doing this as God. What’s the point here? The point here is God gives to everyone continuously. God is gracious and loving. What did they say to Jesus when they came to him? They said, “have mercy on us”. God pours out his mercy on everyone. Pours out his mercy on everyone.

But how many people give thanks for that? Now, if you’d asked your typical Judean that lives at this time, they would say, “You’re right, we Jews, we give thanks to God for all the good things he gives us when we worship in the temple. And those no-good Gentiles, God gives them all these good things and they go and they give thanks to idols. That’s right. We’re not like them.” This is why it’s important that the only one who gives thanks here is the one who’s not Jewish. The only one here who renders thanks to God is a Samaritan.

So, this is not an issue of, “I go to the right church or I have the correct form of liturgy, and therefore I’m the good, thankful person and these other people aren’t.” This is an issue of what’s in the heart of the person, right? Because the Samaritan is not worshipping God correctly, right? He’s not doing it in the right place. He’s doing it at a temple they built that was actually destroyed at this point, but they’re doing it in Mount Gerizim where there used to be a temple, which is not where the temple was supposed to be, that God never gave them permission to build. They weren’t worshiping the right way or doing the right things, but the Samaritan realized all the good things that God had given to him, culminating in healing his leprosy, and he was thankful.

And so, that separates him from the other nine, regardless of the fact that they had the right ethnicity, they were technically, if they were going to the temple of Jerusalem, following the right liturgical forms, doing things the right way. So this is somewhat parallel to the parable of the Good Samaritan that we read a few chapters ago, right? Remember the Parable of the Good Samaritan, it’s not just a couple of Jewish people who pass by and then a Samaritan helps. It’s a priest and a Levite. It’s the religious people who are doing the correct things who pass by on the other side.

What St. Luke is showing us here through this story about Jesus is basically the same thing that St. James is going to tell us in his Epistle. St. James says “True religion is this.” Do you know what it is? It’s not reading the Bible every day. It’s not going to the sacraments a lot. It’s not going to the right church. True religion is care for orphans and widows,

He says, “That’s what real religion is.” Because going through the motions without that, as Christ quoted from the Old Testament, God desires mercy, not sacrifice. We saw again and again when we were reading through the prophets where God told them to stop offering sacrifices. He says, “You come and you offer these sacrifices to me. And then the rest of the week you’re lying, you’re cheating, you’re stealing, you’re swindling, you’re sexually immoral, everything under the sun, and then you show up and you want to offer me sacrifices and worship me. Stop. Stop going through the motions. You don’t care. You’re not really worshipping me. You don’t love me. Just be honest. One more day to go spend sinning, right? Don’t play pretend.” 

Same thing is true here. The core of our worship, what’s at the core of our worship, what’s at the core of the liturgy we had this morning? The Eucharist. The word Eucharist in English that we use for communion is from the Greek verb efcharisto, which means to give thanks. Give thanks. That’s the core of what we’re doing on Sunday morning, is we’re coming here to give thanks to God for everything he has done for us. And we come and we offer him bread and wine that are the fruit of our labors. We take the grain and we make the bread, we take the grapes and we make the wine. We come and we offer that to Him, and we offer ourselves to Him and our lives to Him. We commend our lives, ourselves to Him, and he in return gives us Himself, his body and blood. But that’s the core of what we do, is we give thanks. That’s the core of what it means to be a Christian, is to give thanks.

And so that’s why this Samaritan leper here is remembered for 2000 years in St. Luke’s Gospel, because he shows us an example of what it means to be a Christian.

Interlocutor: [Question about Samaritans]

Fr. Stephen: Herb was asking about where the Samaritans or where the Samaritans came from. And they’re called Samaritans because they were from the area around Samaria, which was the capital, remember, of the northern kingdom of Israel. There was one kingdom of Israel, under David and Solomon, split in two Judah and Benjamin, where the half tribe sort of split off with some Levites and became Judah. The other ten tribes became Israel. And Israel was centered around their capital in Samaria, which was in the land that was controlled by Ephraim, the tribe of Ephraim, which was descended from Joseph. When the northern kingdom of Israel was destroyed by the Assyrians.

And the Assyrians, their strategy and their empire was when they conquered new territory, they deport the people who were there and settle them in some other part of the empire, and they bring people from some other part of the empire and settle them in the new territory. Why? Well, people are less likely to fight for land that isn’t theirs if I’m on a piece of land that my family has had for five generations, and we were part of a nation that I was proud of and I was patriotic about, and you come in and conquer it. You come in and start taxing my land. That’s a recipe for me to rise up and join some other people, try to have a revolution and overthrow you, right?

But if you take me off that land and deport me and give me some land somewhere else where I’ve never lived before, and you bring someone else in and give them my land, makes it much more difficult to get any kind of revolution. That was their strategy. And so they did that in the city of Samaria and the area around it. They deported, not all, but most of the people. And then they brought new people in, and the new people they brought in intermarried with the people who were still left there.

Well, then we have to go a little further to: Judah falls, to the Babylonian Empire, and they’re deported into exile. But they come back. And when they come back to resettle, the Samaritans, who have intermarried are already there. They’re already there. They’re already a people group that are there. And so as they’re starting Judea, the Samaritans are their neighbors.

And so relations between them have a complex history from there. But they generally go in a negative direction. And that sort of culminated around 140 BC, when John Hyrcanus, who was the king of Judea, and the high priests at the same time, which they weren’t supposed to do, but he went and conquered most of Samaria and destroyed their temple on Mount Gerizim because he said they were heretics. So that kind of cemented the deal where “we’re not friends anymore”. And that was about 150 years before the New Testament, so it’s still kind of fresh. They still hadn’t rebuilt it. And so the Samaritans looked down upon the Judeans. Even now, both of them are subjugated by Rome, they still don’t like each other, it’s sort of like the Serbs and the Bosnians. Yugoslavia… Tito was a dictator. He took over both pieces of land, so they couldn’t really fight, but they still didn’t like each other. And as soon as Tito was gone, sort of the same thing with Rome here. Rome now controls both, but they really dislike each other.

Most of… like Josephus, who was writing in the first century, the Jewish historian, he claimed that there was not an ounce of Jewish blood in the Samaritans. We now know that’s not true because they’ve done genetic testing. There are still Samaritans today. They’ve done genetic testing and we know that’s not true. But he claimed there was zero, that they were just foreigners, they were just Gentiles who were brought in by the Assyrians, who claimed to be Jewish. He hated them. He claimed they have nothing to do with us, not related at all.

But, yeah, so that’s where the Samaritans come in here. But they also are treated in the New Testament. And this is important because we’re going to see this, we’re in St Luke’s Gospel now, but of course, remember, the second half of St Luke’s story is the Book of Acts, and we’re going to see that Samaria is basically the first place they go with the Gospel once they’re done in Judea. So, from the perspective of the early Christians and from the perspective of the New Testament, the Samaritans still had kind of a special place. They’re not really treated the same as Jews, but they’re not really treated like Gentiles either. They’re sort of cousins. They’re sort of in the family, but they’re kind of out on the limb of the family tree.

That’s where this is going. This is a focus on thanksgiving as being the core of what it means to be a Christian and a follower of Christ. As opposed to what? As opposed to ethnicity, as opposed to keeping the Torah like the Pharisees were promoting, the core of what it means to be one of God’s people is thanksgiving for everything that God has given to every one of us.