The Untouchables

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Thanks to all who were so kind about my sermon this morning. 

Several people have asked me for the story about the two men under the viaduct - versions of this story have previously appeared in The Christian Century and in my book "Giving it Up: Daily Readings from Ash Wednesday to Easter"

The Untouchables

On the way to Jerusalem Jesus was going through the region between Samaria and Galilee. As he entered a village, ten lepers approached him. Keeping their distance, they called out, saying, ‘Jesus, Master, have mercy on us!’ When he saw them, he said to them, ‘Go and show yourselves to the priests.’ And as they went, they were made clean. Then one of them, when he saw that he was healed, turned back, praising God with a loud voice. He prostrated himself at Jesus’ feet and thanked him. And he was a Samaritan. Then Jesus asked, ‘Were not ten made clean? But the other nine, where are they? Was none of them found to return and give praise to God except this foreigner?’ Then he said to him, ‘Get up and go on your way; your faith has made you well.’

Luke 17: 11-19

Some years ago I worked in central London with a mission organization that worked among people living on the streets. For most of them all we could offer was food, clean clothes and a listening ear, but every now and then we met someone who wanted to find a new life. For people like this, we ran a half-way house with a simple rule of life where a few people at a time could come and live with us, and re-learn the basic life skills of living indoors. This may sound easy, but for people who have grown accustomed to living on the streets, it represents a huge challenge. Some of those who came to live with us managed the long, difficult process of re-integration, but more than half gave up and later returned to their hard but autonomous life on the streets.

Like most people who work in missions, I started out with an idea of what I could offer other people. But living among people whom many consider "untouchable", I quickly discovered that I had more to learn than I had to give. One thing I learned that made a deep impression on me was the way that people living on the margins re-invent their social values. On regular visits to a little community under a viaduct near the famous Portobello Road market, I met two men who had a gruff but loyal friendship, short on conversation but long on mutual care. One was an aristocrat who had been educated at one of the finest universities in the land, and then inherited a huge country estate. Eventually, under extreme pressure, he had abandoned his fortune, and he now walked the streets with just a few possessions in a supermarket trolley, his cut-glass accent being the only hint of where he'd come from. His friend, however, was a working-class man from the tenements in the poorest area of Glasgow, who had dropped out of the education system in his early teens and come to London to seek his fortune. The likelihood of these men becoming close friends in normal society was slim, but in the community under the viaduct, the Scotsman and the English Lord found that their differences were immaterial compared to their common purpose surviving on the streets in a cold climate.

Luke tells us about another community that lived on the margins. Before the advent of modern medicine there were leper colonies on the edge of most towns, where the rest of society kept them at a distance for fear of contagion. But Luke tells of ten lepers who hoped against hope for healing from the dread disease that ate away at their bodies and consumed their souls. When they heard that Jesus the miracle worker was nearby, they came as close as they dared, and called out for healing.

The story is familiar. Jesus told them to go to the priests, and along the way they found themselves healed, but only one returned to say thank you. Often we focus on the one who came back as an illustration of healing, faith, worship and salvation in the life of the individual. But there's an equally interesting undercurrent to the story. Why did Jesus send them to the priests? Why not just heal them on the spot? I think the answer has to do with prejudice, and the way we exclude people from society.

In first-century Israel, priests not only confirmed leprosy, but also declared a leper ritually unclean. By sending the ten back to the priests, Jesus raised the possibility that they would not only be healed, but declared pure, which was essential if they were to re-integrate into society. But the twist in the tale is that this particular leper colony was near a village on the border between Galilee and Samaria, communities that were deeply and acrimoniously divided. Jews considered all Samaritans ritually unclean, and would travel miles out of their way to avoid having any contact with them.

Stigmatisation, of course, is a great leveller, and while they were ill the ten lepers had discovered that what side of the border you are from meant nothing if you had leprosy. Like my friends under the viaduct, whose differences of class and education were wiped away by the taboo of homelessness, these ten lepers had all become untouchables, and had forged their own community on the margins. But once they were healed, the old divisions kicked into play again. Ten were healed but only nine would be accepted; the tenth would always be unclean, not because he was a leper, but because he was a Samaritan. He knew the barriers to his joining in with society on the Galilean side of the border run far, far deeper than his leprosy. And perhaps it is precisely for this reason that he doesn't bother with the priests, but turns back to find Jesus.

It was only to the Samaritan that Jesus said, "your faith has made you well". Maybe Jesus was talking about a different kind of well-ness. Maybe he meant that deep-seated human divisions are a much more serious malady even than leprosy; that our souls can be far sicker than our bodies and yet most of us do nothing to heal the breach. Maybe he wasn't commenting on the attitude of the nine who didn't return, as much as on the system that would accept them and reject the Samaritan.

We'll never know exactly what Jesus meant. But the challenge to our concept of the gospel, and faith, and healing, is that they are not merely gifts for the individual, but bring consequences and responsibilities. Jesus healed with compassion and generosity, but he also consistently drew people's attention from their own problems to the bigger picture. We are not healed in order to return to our former life, but to live differently, breaking down divisions in society that exclude people because of their nationality, gender, religion, or education.

Where do we place borders that cannot be crossed? Who do we think of as untouchable because they come from cultural and religious backgrounds that we fear or despise through ignorance or misinformation? "Where are the nine?" asked Jesus. The nine were right back where they came from, safely on the right side of the border, healed of their exterior problems but locked back into their prejudices. Only one, through faith, became well in the broader sense of the word, realized his freedom and walked away from prejudice. Only one had truly discovered that under a viaduct, an aristocrat really can become best friends with a man from the tenements.