Patrick Comerford
We are in the Kingdom Season, the time between All Saints and Advent. This week began with the Third Sunday before Advent, which was also Remembrance Sunday.
I hope to attend a meeting of local clergy in the Milton Keynes area at lunchtimes, and later this evening I hope to be part of the choir rehearsals in Saint Mary and Saint Giles Church, Stony Stratford. But, before today begins, before having breakfast, I am taking some quiet time early this morning to give thanks, and for reflection, prayer and reading in these ways:
1, today’s Gospel reading;
2, a short reflection;
3, a prayer from the USPG prayer diary;
4, the Collects and Post-Communion prayer of the day.
Luke 17: 11-19 (NRSVA):
11 On the way to Jerusalem Jesus was going through the region between Samaria and Galilee. 12 As he entered a village, ten lepers approached him. Keeping their distance, 13 they called out, saying, ‘Jesus, Master, have mercy on us!’ 14 When he saw them, he said to them, ‘Go and show yourselves to the priests.’ And as they went, they were made clean. 15 Then one of them, when he saw that he was healed, turned back, praising God with a loud voice. 16 He prostrated himself at Jesus’ feet and thanked him. And he was a Samaritan. 17 Then Jesus asked, ‘Were not ten made clean? But the other nine, where are they? 18 Was none of them found to return and give praise to God except this foreigner?’ 19 Then he said to him, ‘Get up and go on your way; your faith has made you well.’
Today’s Reflections:
In the Sunday and daily lectionary readings these weeks, we are reading from Saint Luke’s Gospel, and in recent weeks, we have had a number of readings that refer to the Samaritans, including:
• the Parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10: 25-37, Sunday 13 July 2025 and again on Monday 6 October 2025);
• the disciples’ suggestion of bringing down fire to consume a Samaritan village (Luke 9: 51-56, Tuesday 30 September 2025);
• the Samaritan among the ten people with leprosy who are healed (Luke 17: 11-19, Sunday 12 October 2025, and again today).
There are other Gospel stories about Samaritans, most noticeably the story of the Samaritan woman at the well in Sychar (see John 4: 5-42), and there is one moment when Jesus is asked whether he is, in fact a Samaritan (see John 8: 48).
We celebrated Saint Luke in the church calendar a few week ago (18 October 2025), and it could be said that as a Gospel writer Saint Luke has a distinctive interest in Jewish-Samaritan relationships.
This morning’s Gospel reading at the Eucharist (Luke 17: 11-19) once again provides opportunities to reflect on faith and healing, inclusion and exclusion, how Christ meets our every need, how we need conversion, on the connection between healing of the body and healing of the soul, perhaps even on the value of good manners and learning to say thank you.
Many people may be drawn to the one Samaritan who returns and says thank you. Others may think the about nine others who did exactly as they are told, go and show themselves to the priests, received a clean bill of health and are restored to their rightful place in the community of faith and within their families.
But which is the greatest miracle for you: the healing of these 10 people?
Or their restoration to their rightful places in the community of faith?
Perhaps it is worth noting that it is the 10 men, not Christ, who keep their distance on the outskirts of the village, because they are forced to behave this way, to be marginalised and to live on the margins.
Christ keeps his distance, as might be expected. Yet, from that distance, he sees. Many Bibles have verse 14 to say that ‘he saw them.’ But the Greek says simply, καὶ ἰδὼν (kai idon), ‘and having seen,’ without any object, there is no ‘them.’
For Christ, we are not mere objects; and for Christ there is no ‘us’ and ‘them.’ He sees the future without the limits of the present.
This is a story about trusting in God’s plans for the future, rather than living in the past, living with the fears of the present, living without hope for the future … precisely the context for the urgings and exhortations to the exiles by the Prophet Jeremiah in the Old Testament reading (Jeremiah 29: 1, 4-7), precisely the hope the Apostle Paul has for Saint Timothy in the epistle reading (II Timothy 2: 8-15).
But we foil those plans, we quench those hopes, we continue to live in the past, when we continue to limit Christ’s saving powers with our own limitations, continue to look at him with our own limited vision.
Christ sees … sees it as it is in the present, and as it could be in the future.
Perhaps this is why Saint Luke has placed this story in a location that is an in-between place, the region between Galilee and Samaria. The place between Galilee and Samaria is neither one nor the other, neither this earthly existence nor what the future holds, but still on the way to Jerusalem.
Even the village here is not named.
We should not forget that not one but 10 were healed. Christ does good – even to those who will not be thankful.
And even then, we do not know why the other nine did not return to say thanks. It took an eight-day waiting process for a person with leprosy to be declared clean by the priests.
After those eight days, did they then go and give thanks to God in their local synagogues?
Did they first breathe sighs of relief and return to the families they loved but had been isolated from for so long?
Did they return to that unnamed village, and find that 10 days later Jesus had moved on … the next named place we find him in is Jericho (see Luke 19: 1-10, the Fourth Sunday before Advent, 3 November 2025)?
Christ is not passively aggressive in this story. He is not seeking to control. He sends the 10 on their way … and they go. If he had expected them to return, he would not have been surprised that one returned; he would have waited around in that unnamed village until the other nine had time to make their humble ways back there to thank him.
Instead, it is more important what Christ frees them for, and where he frees them.
He frees them to regain their place in the community, in the social, economic and religious community that is their rightful place.
For the Samaritan, his ‘faith has made him well’: ἡπίστις σου σέσωκέν σε, or, more accurately, your faith has saved you, rescued you, restored you. The word σῴζω is all about being saved, rescued, restored, ransomed, and not just about regaining health and physical well-being.
That land between Samaria and Galilee is where we find Christ today. The in-between place, the nowhere land, the place where people need to be saved, ransomed, rescued, restored.
We all find ourselves in the in-between place, the nowhere land … to borrow a phrase from TS Eliot, wandering in the ‘Waste Land.’
Perhaps, just for one moment, it is possible to imagine that Christ has arrived in that particular in-between place for a reason. For the land between Samaria and Galilee is neither one place nor the other.
And that in-between place is a place where I might find myself unsure of who belongs and who does not, where I might be uncertain, untrusting, even frightened and afraid. It is a place where the usual rules may not apply, where I do not know my place, where I do not fit in, where I appear not as the person God see as the true me, but as others want to see me.
This is the place where Christ is travelling through in this Gospel story this morning. It seems to me that I am often travelling in that place every day, today.
It is difficult travelling in this in-between land. When we realise we are there, then it may be easier to identify with the 10 Lepers, cast out into the in-between land, not knowing where to go, rather than with those who appear certain about where they are going.
When we get to where you are going, we should remember how we feel about the present unknown, whether it is fear – ‘I will show you fear in a handful of dust’ – whether it is trepidation, anticipation, or joy that is tinged with all of these, in this in-between time, this nowhere place.
When we move from an in-between place and a nowhere land, we should not hold back from the call to join the task of cleansing, healing, restoration. We do it not for ‘Thank Yous’ and plaudits. It is not about you, it is not all about me.
Indeed, it is not this one man’s thanks that is important, but that his thanks is expressed in turning around, conversion, and praising God, bowing down before Christ as his Master and as the Lord God.
Some ideas shared in a sermon on this reading in Saint Mary and Saint Giles last month (12 October) caused me to think again this passage.
In the Gospels and in the New Testament, the Greek words for foreigner often include:
• ξένος (xenos), stranger, guest. This term is used when there is an emphasis on hospitality and the welcoming of outsiders. It is the words that gives us the modern words philoxenia and xenophobia.
• πάροικος (paroikos), sojourner, alien resident, resident foreigner. This term refers to a temporary resident who is not a native-born citizen. br />
Both words highlight the New Testament's expanded concept of community to include all believers, regardless of origin, moving beyond a strictly national or ethnic identity (see Ephesians 2: 19).
The New Testament emphasises that in Christ, ethnic and national barriers are broken down. Believers become fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God, they are no longer strangers and foreigners to one another (Ephesians 2:19).
The only word connected with the ‘foreigner’ category of the Old Testament that the New Testament uses with any regularity is ‘foreigner’ (ξένος, xenos). Even though it appears only nine times in the Greek Old Testament, it becomes a more common word for outsiders in the Second Temple period and is the main word for them in the New Testament, although it is still used only 14 times.
The New Testament chooses the word foreigner (ξένος, xenos) to recall the Old Testament command to love the immigrant, even though the Greek Old Testament only uses the word ξένος to translate גֵּר one time.
The most direct reference to loving the immigrant (גֵּר) in the New Testament is in the parable of the sheep and the goats, when Christ designates the person helped as a foreigner (ξένος, Matthew 25: 35, 38, 43, 44). Since the foreigners are also described as ‘brothers’ (Matthew 25: 40), it seems most likely that they are fellow Christians.
The Hebrew Scriptures talk about non-Israelites with two different word groups: foreigners who remain different (the Hebrew words נָכְרִי and נֵכָר) and immigrants who assimilate into Israelite culture and are generally poorer (גֵּר).
However, the line between the two words is often blurred, even undefined, and people may appear on a spectrum in terms of their relation to Israel, from those who remain opposed to God and worship other gods, to those immigrants who assimilate into Israel. To complicate matters even further, the category of foreign-worker (תושב) does not exactly overlap with either category, landing somewhere between the two.
The New Testament continues the theme of loving the immigrant, but due to linguistic changes speaks of the command using the broader word foreigner (ξένος).
Interestingly, the story of the Good Samaritan does not use any of the words for foreigner or immigrant, and instead it focuses on the word ‘neighbour’, and Jesus expands the category of neighbour to include even a Samaritan. Here he follows the similar expansion in Leviticus 19 from love your neighbour as yourself (Leviticus 19: 18) to love the immigrant as yourself (Leviticus 19: 34).
In the New Testament, the Greek word ἔθνος (ethnos) is used to mean ‘gentile,’ which refers to people who are not Jewish. The term denotes nations or ethnic groups in general, and its meaning evolved to specifically identify non-Jews.
The English word gentile derives from the Latin word gentilis, meaning of or belonging to the same people or nation, and in turn from the Latin gēns, a clan, tribe, people or family.
Two other Greek words for foreigner also appear in the Bible: ἀλλότριος (allotrios) and ἀλλόφυλος, allophilos, but they appear rarely in the New Testament.
Yet the word used in today’s reading (Luke 17: 11-19) to refer to the healed Samaritan as a ‘foreigner’ (verse 18) is the very rare word ἀλλογενής, (allogenes): ‘Was none of them found to return and give praise to God except this foreigner?’
The word ἀλλογενής (allogenes) identifies someone who does not belong to the covenant people of Israel – an outsider by birth and by nation. This word does not appear anywhere in classical Greek writings, and the only other known contemporary use of it is in the inscription on the Temple barrier in Jerusalem warning:
Μηθένα ἀλλογενῆ εἰσπορεύεσθαι ἐντὸς τοῦ περὶ τὸ ἱερὸν τρυφάκτου καὶ περιβόλου
Ὃς δ᾽ἂν ληφθῇ, ἑαυτῶι αἴτιος ἔσαι διὰ τὸ ἐξακολουθεῖν θάνατον
Let no foreigner enter within the screen and enclosure surrounding the sanctuary.
Anyone who is caught will be held accountable for his ensuing death.
The tablet with this inscription was discovered in 1871 outside the al-Atim Gate to the Temple Mount, and was published by CS Clermont-Ganneauthe of the Palestine Exploration Fund. It was taken by the Ottoman authorities, and it is now in the Istanbul Archaeology Museums.
The Samaritan among the ten healed from leprosy may have well known that taking the advice from Jesus to go and show himself to the priests in the Temple would have resulted in a sure and certain death for daring to seek to enter the Temple.
Instead, he turns back, praises God, prostrates himself at the feet of Jesus and thanks him. It is an act of acknowledging that he is in the presence of God, that the discovery of new life has replaced the threat of death, and he gives thanks with an expression of gratitude (εὐχαριστέω, eucharisteō) that speaks too of being included in the community and communion of the Eucharist.
This is the sole and only use of the word ἀλλογενής (allogenes) in the New Testament, yet its theological weight is profound. The appearance of this word in this context is a deliberate theological signal, illuminating how God’s gracious kingdom reaches beyond ethnic borders, and challenges us to continually push out the boundaries, so that instead of excluding we include the foreigner, the disabled, the marginalised, the outcast, the different, those who are threatened that should they challenge the grounds on which they are excluded they face punishment and even death.
Have we got words for foreigners in our vocabulary today that are part some type of insider language, understood by only the few, yet used to keep them on the margins of social life and economic activity, that tell them that no what they do or believe they are going to be kept on the margins, on the outside, that imply they may as well be dead, that threaten.
Today’s Prayers (Wednesday 12 November 2025):
The theme this week (9 to 15 November) in Pray with the World Church, the prayer diary of the Anglican mission agency USPG (United Society Partners in the Gospel), is ‘Hope for the Future’ (pp 54-55). This theme was introduced on Sunday with Reflections from Laura D’Henin-Ivers, Chief Executive Officer at Hope for the Future, to mark COP30 in Brazil this week.
The USPG Prayer Diary today (Wednesday 12 November 2025) invites us to pray:
Merciful God, we remember our brothers and sisters suffering the consequences of environmental destruction. Comfort the displaced, sustain those who have lost their livelihoods, and move our hearts to stand in solidarity.
The Collect:
Almighty Father,
whose will is to restore all things
in your beloved Son, the King of all:
govern the hearts and minds of those in authority,
and bring the families of the nations,
divided and torn apart by the ravages of sin,
to be subject to his just and gentle rule;
who is alive and reigns with you,
in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever.
Post Communion Prayer:
God of peace,
whose Son Jesus Christ proclaimed the kingdom
and restored the broken to wholeness of life:
look with compassion on the anguish of the world,
and by your healing power
make whole both people and nations;
through our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ.
Additional Collect:
God, our refuge and strength,
bring near the day when wars shall cease
and poverty and pain shall end,
that earth may know the peace of heaven
through Jesus Christ our Lord.
Yesterday’s Reflections
Continued Tomorrow
Scripture quotations are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible: Anglicised Edition copyright © 1989, 1995, National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide. http://nrsvbibles.org
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