Luke 17:11-19 NRSVUE
11 On the way to Jerusalem Jesus was going through the region between Samaria and Galilee. 12 As he entered a village, ten men with a skin disease 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’s feet and thanked him. And he was a Samaritan. 17 Then Jesus asked, “Were not ten made clean? So where are the other nine? 18 Did none of them return to give glory to God except this foreigner?” 19 Then he said to him, “Get up and go on your way; your faith has made you well.”
Back in the 1900’s, when I was a teenager, when somebody said the word, “foreigner,” my first thought was the late 70’s early 80’s rock band, Foreigner, who’s hits:
Urgent (urgent, urgent, emergency!)
Cold as ICE, and
I Want to Know What Love is
Which all seem like important discussion topics here in 2025.
God help us!
But in First Century Judea, when Jesus walked the earth calling someone a foreigner was a serious religious distinction.
Biblically, the distinction between foreigners and God’s people is explicitly stated in Deuteronomy chapter 7, as a part of Moses revealing what we now call the 10 commandments, which are in chapter 6. So according to the author of Deuteronomy, Moses tells the people:
- Do not make any treaties with the people already living in the promised land
- Do not intermarry with them!
- The directions given in Deuteronomy 7:5-6 for dealing with foreigners are: “5 But this is how you must deal with them: break down their altars, smash their pillars, cut down their sacred poles, and burn their idols with fire. 6 For you are a people holy to the Lord your God; the Lord your God has chosen you out of all the peoples on earth to be his people, his treasured possession.”
So. According to Deuteronomy:
We don’t negotiate with foreigners…which means no peace treaty, just total war.
We don’t marry foreigners…so their children don’t matter.
Hulk Smash foreigners.
Yikes!
When did this start?
If you look back before Moses in the Bible, the Family of Abraham is just one family, so they definitely married outside the faith. So what happened to make them so anti-everybody else?
First of all, Deuteronomy is not a Live at 5 reporter’s account of what happened.
Most scholars agree that Deuteronomy was written and edited by many people over time. The earliest writings dating from the time of King Josiah around 621BC with the later writings from the return from the Babylonian Exile during the time of the Prophet Nehemiah, who wrote extensively on his campaign to get all Jewish men to cast out their foreign wives and children.
Exodus chapters 20-23 is an older, but still not an eyewitness reporter account of the giving of the commandments. And while Exodus 23 does have a passage in Exodus 23:20-33 that says that God is going to displace the Canaanites, Hittites, and the other peoples from the promised land, and the Hebrew people are not supposed to make any treaties with them…
Exodus 23:4 also reads: “When you come upon your enemy’s ox or donkey going astray, you shall bring it back.
And more importantly Exodus 22:21-24 reads:
21 “You shall not wrong or oppress a resident alien, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt. 22 You shall not abuse any widow or orphan. 23 If you do abuse them, when they cry out to me, I will surely heed their cry; 24 my wrath will burn, and I will kill you with the sword, and your wives shall become widows and your children orphans.”
In Exodus we’re returning lost animals, and doing no wrong to resident aliens and in Deuteronomy we’re smashing and burning foreigner’s stuff.
That’s quite a contrast between the Exodus version and the Deuteronomy version isn’t it?
When people criticize the Bible for being contradictory, this is the kind of stuff they are talking about!
As United Methodists, we take the Bible seriously, not literally, therefore we know that only the Tablets themselves were carved in stone by the hand of God.
The Bible was written by people.
The Bible was written by many people, in different places and times with different theological axes to grind. Sometimes Prophets were writing at the same time and arguing with one another on what they thought God was up to.
As United Methodists we believe that the Bible is inspired by God, but not written by God, and certainly not infallible in translation and editing!
But we also look to scripture for guidance in difficult times like this!
And when scripture is saying two very different things about how we should treat the foreigner among us… well, we know exactly what happens because we’re living through that right now.
A perspective that has been helpful for me, is from Professor Emertis of New Testament, John Dominic Crossan. Crossan wrote a little book called, “How to Read the Bible and Still Be a Christian: Struggling with Divine Violence from Genesis Through Revelation.”
The main idea of Crossan’s book is that the Bible is not only a discussion between the various authors and editors, but that the Bible is a discussion between God and Humanity.
God demonstrates the value of hospitality to foreigners (often translated strangers) when Abraham welcomes the strangers who turn out to be Angels.
But then people are like – the Egyptians were totally mean to us, so we get to be mean to foreigners like them, right?
But then God says, “You shall not wrong or oppress a resident alien, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt.” You know how awful it is to be treated that way, and don’t do it to others!
But then people – the authors of Deuteronomy write their own version of the story that totally justifies oppression of foreigners. Because they wanted to re-establish Temple Judaism.
But then God, through the Prophet Isaiah calls the foreigner Cyrus, the Anointed One who saves the Jewish people. Because Cyrus told them to go home and rebuild their Temple and cities.
Then people – the Prophet Neihemiah tells all the Jewish men to divorce their foreign wives and cast out their foreign children. While rebuilding Jerusalem under the rule of Cyrus.
Then God shows up subtly in the story of Ruth, the Moabite – a foreign widow of a Jewish man who converts to Judaism and who ends up being an ancestor of Jesus.
And in today’s reading, God godself, Jesus honors the Samaritan – who were the people who constructed the sacred pillars for worship (the ones Deuteronomy says to smash!) rather than going to the Temple. The Samaritan foreigner is the one who gives glory to God.
The Samaritans who were actually the descendants of the people of Northern Israel who were not carried into the Babylonian Exile. People whom the writers of Nehemiah and Deuteronomy may have considered to be their religious competition.
But Jesus doesn’t see the Samaritans as the religious competition.
God isn’t insecure like we are.
Jesus extends the invitation to participate in the Kingdom of God to, “whomsoever will.”
Or as the Apostle Paul, and this was the actual Paul, not Pauline fan fiction, wrote in Galatians 3:28: “There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.”
