THE SAMARITAN WE CELEBRATE BUT MIGHT NOT WELCOME

We’ve preached the ten lepers for generations. But I keep coming back to one detail we tend to rush past.

The one who came back to thank Jesus was a Samaritan. He was not a Jew but a hated and misunderstood outsider. Somebody the religious folks of his day would have kept at arm’s length or even barred from spaces deemed as "holy." Yet this non-Jew cried out to Jesus, a Jew, for mercy. He accepted healing from a Jewish rabbi. And then he turned around, went back to that same Jesus, and fell on his face at His feet to say thank you! Luke made sure we didn’t miss who he was: “and he was a Samaritan” (Luke 17:16).

Here’s what bothers me. I wonder if we’ve preached this story so often that we’ve gotten comfortable with it. We hold up this man as the model of gratitude, but we rarely mention that he was a Samaritan. We just say “one leper came back.”

Too often, when we think of Jesus and Samaritans, we go straight to the Good Samaritan and the woman at the well, as if those are the only two stories. This one gets left out. And if that same man walked into many of our churches today, healed and grateful, I’m not sure we’d make room for him.

I’m thinking especially of our Muslim brothers and sisters right now, and people of other faiths. Yes, Samaritans worshiped the God of Israel, and the Jews still treated them as outsiders. If people that close in faith could be pushed away, how much easier is it for us to push away those whose beliefs are further from our own? Too often people of other faiths get suspicion instead of welcome, and sometimes it comes from the very people preaching about the love of Jesus. You don’t have to agree with someone’s theology to treat them as a person God made and loves.

The Samaritan didn’t have to become a Jew before Jesus healed him. Jesus didn’t wave off his thank-you because of where he worshiped. He received it, and He honored him for it. Jesus even asked, “Where are the nine?” (Luke 17:17), and then pointed out that the only one who came back was the foreigner (v. 18). He wanted that noticed.

So yes, we should ask ourselves whether we’d have been one of the nine who never came back. But there’s a harder question in this story: would we have welcomed the one who did? Or would his religion have mattered more to us than what Jesus had done for him?

Finally, it’s easy to love the Samaritan in Scripture. Yet, the struggle is real for many even today. It’s harder when he’s standing at the church door. We should not be so busy defending our Christianity that we forget to show the love of Christ to our Muslim neighbors, our Jewish neighbors, and anyone else someone decided is on the outside.

This is the truth of the story we all love so much. The one who came back was the one nobody expected, and the one nobody would have accepted.

Luke 17:11-19