Readings — 2 Timothy 2: 8–15; Luke 17: 11–19
“As he entered a village, ten lepers approached him.”
In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
Dividing ourselves into insiders and outsiders is one of our most basic human instincts. It would be nice to think that, as we are all equally loved by God our heavenly Father, we could see all eight billion people in the world as our brothers and sisters. But human psychology doesn’t work like that. We know that not everyone can be trusted, but we also know that we need to trust strangers sometimes.
Us and Them – the West Belfast Peace Line at Conway Street, 6 June 2020.
Subconsciously, whether we admit it or not, when we meet strangers we are always hunting for clues about whether we can trust them or not. This might be whether they look and sound like us, which can have damaging consequences for society, but we also often trust people who are different from us if their behaviour is what we expect, or their beliefs are like ours. The Samaritans were the most dangerous kind of outsiders – they looked and sounded similar to the Second Temple Jewish community that Jesus came from, and their beliefs were largely similar, but very different in some important respects. All of us who lived in Northern Ireland during The Troubles became very adept at looking for subtle cues about whether people who looked and sounded just like us were indeed from our own tribe – or were potentially dangerous outsiders.
In the Roman Empire of St Paul’s time, to claim that an executed criminal was God made human was a weird, even creepy, belief. So to be a Christian was to make oneself into something of an outsider. Therefore in the Second Letter to Timothy, which our Epistle this morning came from, there is a repeated theme of Paul telling Timothy not to be ashamed of the Gospel. For Paul himself, the Gospel is so valuable that he has allowed himself to suffer what must have been the ultimate indignity for this proud Roman citizen – he was a jailbird.
What was so valuable that it was worth being “chained like a criminal”, treated as the ultimate outsider? It was that Jesus Christ was “raised from the dead” and that: “If we have died with him, we will also live with him.” That was the treasure worth paying any price for.
For over a thousand years, in this country and across this continent, almost everyone believed that Jesus Christ rose from the dead, and that if people truly followed His teachings, they would too. It was unusual to believe anything else, even as late as, for example, Queen Elizabeth’s coronation. We Christians were the insiders. That has been turned on its head in less than the span of a human life. Nowadays, to believe that God exists and there is anything beyond this lifetime is a sign of perhaps not being the sanest or the brightest. Christians are now the outsiders.
Faith is dismissed as pie-in-the-sky-when-you-die stuff: what matters is the here and now, enjoying it to the full and maybe even making it better. The Church often colludes with this, trying to justify its existence by talking about its record on good works. Now, good works are wonderful and we should do them for their own sake, as Jesus Christ commanded us to. But I have a number of problems with the idea that Christian good works are a credible argument for the Christian faith.
Firstly, doesn’t this just lure us into that tendency to break the world into insiders and outsiders? Christians aren’t the only people who do good works. In fact, day in and day out, we Christians work together with people of all faiths and people of no faith to do good works, especially for the neediest. I don’t want to have to pretend that I’m a better person than my atheist friends or my Muslim friends, because I don’t think that. I certainly don’t feel that I’m any better than, say, the courageous women of Iran.
Secondly, this just isn’t a believable basis for evangelism. Everybody knows plenty of Christians and they know there’s both good and bad in us. They certainly know that the Church is a deeply flawed institution, and we know that too.
Perhaps embracing the fact that we Christians are flawed people, as the Bible repeatedly tells us to do, might be the very way we can offer something valuable to the secular society around us? Because that society seems gripped by delusions of its own kindness, and its superiority to anyone or anything that came before it, despite all the evidence to the contrary.
What Christianity offers isn’t a way of being better, but a better way of dealing with the darkness that lurks somewhere in everybody’s heart.
In the decades after the Second World War, the mainstream churches suffered a failure of nerve and reduced the Gospel to what they thought the world wanted, which was that a wise holy teacher inspired an eternal community of caring people. But we never explained why anyone should get up early on Sunday morning for this, rather than just joining Amnesty and Friends of the Earth. We chained the Gospel to the requirements a world that we thought was inevitably on a journey to secularism, but the world wasn’t interested in what resulted.
Yet Paul writes, “The word of God is unchained”; it disturbs all our efforts to domesticate it, to reduce it to a particular political or cultural agenda or a churchy formula. Paul therefore warns Timothy rightly to “avoid wrangling over words”. So much damage has been done to the cause of Christ by Christians dividing themselves into competing groups of insiders because they were wrangling over words, and then radicalising themselves into doing beastly things to one another. Yet the Truth of God in all its fullness is simply beyond human understanding. That doesn’t mean our efforts to find the truth and live truthfully don’t matter – on the contrary. Full truth may be beyond us but abandon the quest to find it and we soon find ourselves in living in a quagmire of lies. What we do need is to be humble about our limitations as truth-bearers.
So we come to this morning’s very familiar Gospel story: lepers are bad enough, with all their disgusting disfigurements, but the only one to thank Jesus is even worse – a foreign leper! – someone doubly contaminated, both biologically and culturally.
When we hear this story, we like to think we’d stand with Jesus, courageously praising the diseased and despised outsider, who comes from a place and time remote enough from ours that he can be repackaged to suit whatever our purposes might be. We never think of ourselves as the leper, nor as the sort of people who would be shocked by Jesus engaging positively with this dirty Samaritan.
Yet we all have people we detest, people whom we fear might contaminate us. We all stand under the judgement of the Gospel; we all have those who play the same role in our imagination that the Samaritan leper played in the role of pious Palestinian Jews of the 1st Century.
So let me leave you with a challenge. Imagine the bit of our society you are secretly most contemptuously suspicious of – it will be different for each of you. Perhaps immigrants, or Tories, or Muslims, gays, Eurosceptics, anti-housebuilding NIMBYs… whatever it happens to be for you. Remember that among those you frankly detest there will be those who fulfil the Word of God more faithfully than you could begin to attempt. There is good and bad in each of us. Just like me, you are a wonderful creation of God; you also have the capacity for wickedness, and sometimes you indulge in it. Part of your makeup, to return to where we started, is to divide the world into insiders and outsiders, sheep and goats – but only Jesus Christ has the right to do that.
So trust Him to heal your soul, and that He has already done all that is necessary for that on the Cross. Be grateful to Christ for His sacrifice and for all the good He does for you. Trust that there is more than this world. Take your Faith seriously – but not too seriously, for we’ll all find, when we see God face-to-face, that we were wrong about some very important things.
And now to the Father who made us for Love, to the Son who paid the price of Love, the Holy Spirit who breathes perfect Love, be ascribed all glory and majesty, dominion and power, as is most justly due, world without end. Amen.
