Patrick Comerford
In 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).
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). But it could be said that as a Gospel writer Saint Luke has a distinctive interest in Jewish-Samaritan relationships.
We are about to celebrate Saint Luke in the church calendar on Saturday next (18 October 2025), and some ideas shared in the sermon in Saint Mary and Saint Giles on Sunday (12 October) caused me to return in the days since to the Gospel reading about the Samaritan who was in the group of ten who are healed of leprosy.
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) to recall the Old Testament’s 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 Sunday’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 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 their very life, and that suggest all this has religious and divine sanction?
