Sermon for the Fourteenth Sunday after Trinity
“And one … turned back”
Metanoia, as we have suggested on occasion, literally means a thinking after, though it is usually translated simply as repentance. Repentance is a turning back to the one from whom we have turned away. It signals the profound nature of our relation to God, a kind of constant circling around the principle of our being and knowing, a retire ad principia, as Lancelot Andrewes puts it, that marks our going to and from God in understanding and love.
Last Sunday and this Sunday present us with two Gospel stories both of which center on a Samaritan: the parable of the so-called Good Samaritan, and the one who “turned back,” “glorify[ing] God,” and “giving him thanks,” who was “a Samaritan.” In both accounts from Luke’s Gospel, it is Jesus who tells us that it was “a certain Samaritan” who “had compassion” and “showed mercy” on the one who was “wounded” and “half-dead,” and that the one who “fell down on his face at his feet, giving him thanks” was “a Samaritan.” In one way, Jesus is providing a critique of what we might call denominational chauvinism where one group denigrates another and asserts their own superiority. But in another way, Jesus is teaching us something more radical about ethical teaching and ethical living. It has very much to do with our encounter with the other, what Jesus calls here the “stranger.”
“There are not found that returned to give glory to God, save this stranger.” It is, to be sure, an indictment of Israel. Ten lepers were healed; only one returned to give glory, but “he was a Samaritan”, a kind of outsider or stranger. The Samaritans were a sect within Judaism but despised by the Jews. At issue is their view of the Law and the place of the giving of the Law. But Jesus is not simply pitting Jews against Samaritans and choosing sides. He is not saying that the Samaritans are right on these questions about the Torah and the giving of the Law. In fact, quite the opposite. What then is the significance of these two back-to-back Gospels about Samaritans?
