"Where It Happens"--October 10, 2019

"Where It Happens"--October 10, 2019

"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." [Luke 17:11-14]

Yes, this is a miracle--but the real wonder to me in this scene is something completely un-supernatural.  What happens in this story is amazing, but so is the sheer fact of where it happens.

We are looking in these days at how we see Christ in "the ordinary," and you might think at first that a miracle is automatically disqualified from our conversation because it is, by definition, extraordinary.  Miracles are by their nature not an everyday occurrence--our standard description of a miracle is "something that defies explanation" or "something that violates the rules of physics or biology."  And that's surely what you've got here in this scene: an honest-to-God, beyond-explanation miracle of healing, where Jesus calls out to this group of men who are all living with a chronic and terminal case of leprosy, and he heals them without even touching them.  The gospel writer gives no other explanation or rationalization beyond saying, "This is Jesus.  This is how he operates.  It was a miracle."

True enough.  And sure, it is easy to spot the presence of God in a miracle.  Since none of us can pull one off through sheer concentration or willpower, the healing has to be evidence of God.  

But let's pause for a moment and back up to before any of the special effects.  While the miraculous healing of ten people with an incurable condition all at once is supernatural, the  location of the healing doesn't require any suspension of the laws of nature at all.  This healing doesn't take place on the moon, or in Wonderland, or on the way to the Emerald City.  And Jesus isn't magically whisked away from, say, a breakfast in his hometown Nazareth to suddenly find himself at this unknown border village. (I mention that possibility because, as you may well know, there are in fact occasional stories in the Bible where someone is minding their own business when the Spirit "snatches them up" to set them down somewhere else, like Philip's encounter with the Ethiopian eunuch, or where God sends a flaming chariot to lift someone up to heaven.  This not one of those times.)  Jesus ends up where he does--walking along the border in "the region between Samaria and Galilee"--by his own two feet. It is entirely natural.  In that sense, the set-up for this scene is completely ordinary.

And that is what makes it remarkable.  Jesus chooses to be in this place.  Jesus deliberately creates the possibility that this sort of miracle can happen because he chooses to walk through this border territory.  Jesus enters the space between "us" and "them" intentionally, knowing it will be provocative, knowing it is risky, and yet also knowing that it is precisely where he needs to go.  He carries no official papers, he has no legal right to cross through this border territory so freely, and he has no legitimately recognizable reason that guarantees him safe passage as he goes between his own familiar territory of Galilee and the land of the "other," Samaria.

Now, it's probably old hat to say that there were deep animosities between Jews and Samaritans in the first century.  It was a centuries-old division between sides, and by the time of Jesus it carried ethnic, religious, political, and cultural overtones.  The lines and borders between Galilee and Samaria had shifted plenty over time, but it was still clearly a boundary--much like Texas used to be part of Mexico, then was an independent nation for a while, and then was part of the United States, then left to side with the Confederacy, and then once again was a part of the Union, but nevertheless there is still a definite feeling of "otherness" between sides at the present border.  The tension in a place like that would have been palpable, just as Jesus walked through it.

And because this was an in-between place, and because of the hatred and suspicion between these groups (however well-founded or imaginary), you can imagine that border territory being the kind of place that respectable people don't want to raise their kids.  In the empty land between villages, well, you could end up with outcasts creating their own little enclaves, because this was not prime real-estate for new housing developments at the time. You don't find leper colonies in the heart of a downtown district of a major city--you find them in the margins, at the edges of society, and in the frontier and border regions where Jesus has chosen to go.  (And as a side note, there were plenty of Respectable Religious folks who wanted to go from Galilee to Judea and who would just travel far out of their way around the region of Samaria to avoid interaction with those dirty, rotten, sickness-infested, dangerous Samaritans.)

All of this is to say that Jesus, who is nobody's fool, deliberately sets his course right into this place of tension, knowing he could get in trouble for crossing this border without having a significant reason to be in this place in the first place.  And he goes knowing that this is the sort of place where there could well be leper communities--because again, when you are sick and driven from your old village to seek refuge somewhere else, you will take whatever in-between place you can find, including with other sick people.  Lepers don't judge lepers--they all know they're sick; it is the un-infected who can be so cruelly vigilant to cast out the sick ones.

And up to this point, I think we can all agree, Jesus hasn't done anything that is not also in your or my power to do, too.  He has walked from one region to another, but there is nothing magical or miraculous about that.  He has simply chosen his course and gone.  That much is completely ordinary.

But it is this choice that sets up the miraculous healing that includes, as you may well know, both fellow Jews like Jesus and at least one Samaritan, this "other" who receives the healing just as much as all of Jesus' fellow kin-folk.  The miracle can happen--or at least, this particular miracle for these particular people, can happen--because Jesus has made the perfectly ordinary, non-supernatural choice to walk through a place that everyone else is afraid to go through.  Others would be afraid of getting to close to roving leper groups and getting sick... or that there could be violent robbers in this empty borderland between territories... or that his own people would be upset at him for crossing into Samaria and--gasp!--helping Samaritans... or that the Samaritans themselves might be suspicious of Jesus and assume he was hostile to them.  There are a long list of sound reasons why Jesus shouldn't go through this border region... but he does it anyway.  That choice is remarkable to me.

As we live through this day, we cannot predict or control the miraculous.  We can't heal someone's illness by sheer willpower, walk on water, or raise the dead like Jesus does.  But we can choose where we walk today, which will affect where God might use us.  Like they say in basketball, you miss one-hundred percent of the shots you don't take, and Jesus cannot heal lepers he never encounters.  His choice to go into this borderland, knowing it is the sort of place where people might need him and where no one else wants to go, makes him available to be a help to the people there in that place.

You and I can keep to our routines today, certainly.  We can keep our heads down, stay inside our homes and cars and keep our office doors shut, and never risk going beyond, if we so choose.  But as long as we are keeping ourselves in those safe routine places, we will never be available for the folks to whom God might have sent us if we dared go into the margins.  You'll never meet someone who is struggling to make ends meet if you only ever stay inside your gated suburban development.  You'll never meet anybody who has been followed through a store because of their skin color if you only ever talk to people whose ancestors came from Germany or England.  You'll never be in the position to tell someone who has been told God's love is not for them that they are indeed beloved and precious in God's sight if you only make friends with Respectable Religious people.  And you'll never be able to be used to bring healing to someone's life if you never go where the hurting people might be.

Jesus knows the risks and the provocations he might incur for setting his feet on the pathway through the border... but he does it anyway, because that is what the Reign of God looks like.  Before any miracles happen, the Reign of God is clear and present just in Jesus' ordinary walking into the space between "us" and "them."

God give us the courage to go where you would lead us today, and to love the people you send across our path today.