Who is the Foreigner? (18th Pentecost / Proper 23C)

A sermon by the Rev. Guillermo A. Arboleda, written for and delivered at All Saints' Episcopal Church, Tybee Island, GA, on Sunday, October 12, 2025, which is the 18th Sunday after Pentecost (RCL Proper 23, Year C).

Image Credit: https://orthochristian.com/109246.html

Primary Bible Reading(s)

(Click on October 12, 2025, to see all of the Lectionary Texts)

Luke 17:11-19 (NRSVue)

11 On the way to Jerusalem Jesus[e] 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[f] 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.”

Who is the Foreigner?

By the Rev. Guillermo A. Arboleda, Program Manager for New Starts, ELCA

One of my favorite approaches to Bible study is to ask the question: What surprises you when you read this story? What makes you pause and go, “huh,” when you hear it? 

In this Gospel story, Jesus is on his way from Galilee, where he lived, south to Jerusalem. And this story takes place in the borderlands between Galilee and Samaria, which is in between Galilee and Jerusalem. Ten men with skin diseases (which the Bible calls leprosy), approach Jesus from a distance and ask him to help them. They don’t get too close because, according to the Law in Leviticus 13, if you touch someone with leprosy (or any skin disease), you become ritually unclean and you cannot enter the Temple to worship. So these ten men have been outcast from their village, quarantined to prevent the spread of their disease. Jesus heals them simply by instructing them to follow the Law. When you are healed, you go to the priest for an inspection, and then you can be welcomed back into the fellowship. The healing happens when they take the step of faith to go to the priest as if they are already healed. Cool, right?

But the line that struck me this time was Jesus’ comment about the grateful Samaritan returning to thank Jesus. Jesus does not address the man directly at first. He exclaims in exasperation, “Were not ten made clean? So where are the other nine? Did none of them return to give glory to God except this foreigner?” (Luke 17:17-18). He called him a “foreigner.” It’s kind of an icky line coming from Jesus. It’s not quite an insult, but Jesus probably does not mean it as a compliment either. But part of why it’s icky is that “foreigner” is a strange way to identify a Samaritan man in the borderlands between Samaria and Galilee (Luke 17:11). Where they were, he wasn’t a foreigner; he was practically in his homeland. 

But, of course, Jesus’ comment wasn’t about where they were, but rather about how Jewish people in the 1st Century viewed Samaritans. In general, the two groups hated each other. There is a long, tragic history there. The animosity between Jews and Samaritans goes back hundreds of years to the Old Testament period. The twelve tribes of Israel split into two kingdoms: in the south they were called Judah or Judea, but in the north they came to be called Samaria. 

The Judeans and Samaritans fought wars against one another, and their religions diverged over time. The northerners didn’t like going south to Jerusalem to worship, so they worshiped at their own shrines throughout the northern kingdom. Eventually, Samaritans established their own temple on Mt. Gerizim, and they rejected the Temple in Jerusalem. Today’s reading from 2 Kings takes place during this period of the two divided kingdoms. 

Over the following centuries, Samaritans and Judeans were both conquered by foreign empires. The Samaritans were forcibly moved around the Assyrian empire and eventually intermingled and intermarried with many other surrounding nations. Later, Babylon conquered Judea and razed Jerusalem to the ground. They took the Judeans into exile in Babylon, but eventually many of the exiles returned. From the 400s BC until Jesus’ lifetime, the rivalry between Jews and Samaritans became more vicious. Samaritans refused to help Jews rebuild Jerusalem. Jews attacked Samaritan villages. Samaritans allied with the Greeks to put down a Jewish rebellion. Jews destroyed the Samaritan temple on Mt. Gerizim. Then, when Jesus was a child, around 7 AD, Samaritans entered the Jerusalem Temple on Passover and desecrated the altar with human remains (Josephus, Antiquities, 18.2.2). It was back and forth, escalating violence and insults for centuries. Both sides thought the other started it and at some point they didn’t care, they just wanted revenge.

That’s why it’s important to pay attention every time the Gospels tell stories that involve Samaritans. These are always very tense stories. They bring up all the past injuries, hurt feelings, and rage. And in just about every Gospel story about Samaritans, Jesus subverts his Jewish culture’s expectations. The Samaritan is the hero of the “Good Samaritan” story. Jesus made a follower out of a Samaritan woman while sitting next to a well. Instead of avoiding or rejecting Samaritans out of hand, Jesus worked across their divisions and honors them. Jesus lived like the “prince of peace.”

In this story, it’s easy to hear Jesus calling the Samaritan a foreigner and think that he was acting out of his prejudice, that Jesus was falling into the same us-them polarization that his culture encouraged. But that’s missing the point. Jesus could have sorted the ten lepers and only healed the Jewish ones. He didn’t. Or he could have insisted that the Samaritans he healed go to the Jewish priests in Jerusalem rather than Samaritan priests in Gerizim. He didn’t. Jesus did not discriminate against the Samaritans when he healed. He just healed. His Good News was for everyone. 

But the healed Samaritan is the only one of the ten who returns to say thank you. And that disappoints Jesus. Because, while Jews and Samaritans worshiped the same God, their religion differed enough that Samaritans weren’t even waiting for a Messiah the way most Jews were in the 1st Century. Samaritans used a smaller Bible that didn’t include, for example, Isaiah and his prophecy about the “Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace” (Isaiah 9:6). Many of the Jews who met Jesus heard his preaching about the love of God, saw his miracles, believed that he was the Messiah, and followed him. But nine of these ten men didn’t, and that clearly frustrated Jesus. It was only the Samaritan who came back. It was only the “foreigner.” The Samaritan man glorified God. He told anyone who would listen about the great works of mercy and healing God accomplished through Jesus. He broke through his own cultural bias to see God at work as a Jewish rabbi, of all people.

Maybe that means that we should be careful about what we assume. Maybe the people we think of as insiders are not the wisest. Maybe God is active among all people from all places and backgrounds. Maybe foreigners can be our greatest teachers, the best at glorifying God and proclaiming the Good News. Maybe we have something to learn from even the people we least expect. May God give us the faith to be well, and the faith to be joined with all of our human siblings. Amen.