A sermon on Luke 17:11-19 by Nathan Nettleton
A video recording of the whole liturgy, including this sermon, is available here.

A couple of the major symptoms of the political and social breakdown that is increasingly afflicting our world, are tribalism and polarisation. They are, of course, closely related to one another. More and more of us forge our identity by aligning ourselves with the social norms, beliefs and attitudes of particular groups, and those groups increasingly define themselves by their vehement opposition to the norms, beliefs and attitudes of other groups.

This is easy to illustrate from the USA at present, partly because it is always easy to see things more clearly in cultures other than our own (what did Jesus say about logs and specks in our eye?), and partly because the USA always seems to do everything on a bigger scale than anyone else.

According to various polls (see here), 77% of American voters believe that people who strongly support the other political side are “a clear and present danger” to the nation, and 45% of Americans think members of the opposing party are “downright evil.” 77% have few or no friends from the other side. 48% of Republicans placed their feelings about Democrats at 0 on a 100-point scale, and 39% of Democrats did the same about Republicans. And in case you think it has always been thus, those last stats have risen 76 fold and 43 fold in just 5 years.

On top of this, 86% of Americans say that they feel exhausted by the division in their country, and say that they think political polarisation is a threat to America. Voters identify “political polarisation and division” as a major threat to democracy, and 70% say America has become so polarised that it can no longer solve the major issues facing the country, and that those differences will only continue to grow. If you line those stats up, it tells you that many of those who think polarisation is a major problem are, themselves, examples of it.

Now here in Australia, the picture is a little bit different – not necessarily any better, but different. For the most part, we Australians just vote for political parties, we don’t identify ourselves as belonging to them. We mostly don’t much like any of them, so the things we demonise each other about are less likely to be party political. But if you were to ask issue by issue, I think you’d find that our levels of polarisation are trending in the same direction as the USA. 

Progressive vs conservative. Pro-vax vs anti-vax. Christian vs Atheist. Climate change activism vs climate change denial. Open borders vs anti-immigration. Vegan vs double beef and bacon cheeseburger. Australia day vs change the date. Evolution vs six-day creation. Trans-affirming vs anti-trans. And of course, so big in the news this past week, pro-Palestinian vs pro-Israeli. 

I don’t have a set of statistics for here, but from my observations, it seems that Australians too are becoming more and more reluctant to listen to one another and respect one another across these divides. If you hold certain views, you are deemed not worth listening to. And because where you fall on one of those issues is often a pretty reliable indicator of where you will fall on many of the others, we seem to be becoming more and more siloed into opposing tribes with clear-cut boundaries and non-negotiable orthodoxies.

Of course, tribalism is not new. The fact that the word itself evokes images of pre-historic times should be enough to make that clear. It is probably true that our tendencies to tribalism have risen and fallen many times down through the centuries, and it is most certainly true that we are most prone to reverting to tribal thinking when we feel that everything we hold dear or even our very existence is under threat. 

So with the increasing existential threats of all out war and of global climate catastrophe, it is probably no surprise that we would be again seeing an upswing of polarisation. But what is really scary this time, is that the polarisation itself is super-charging the existential threats. And even if you think that’s over-stated, you’d have to agree that polarisation is undermining our capacity to cooperate with one another in addressing these threats.

Another reason we know that tribalism and polarisation are not new is by the significant role they play in so many of the stories in the Bible. We don’t always notice though, because when the dividing issues are not our issues, references to them can seem like innocuous details. In the gospel reading we heard a few minutes ago, there’s a little comment about one of the characters: “And he was a Samaritan.” 

Unless we have a reasonable grasp of first century middle eastern society, we might not know whether that’s an innocuous comment like, “And he was a South Australian”, or a highly-charged comment like, “And he was a neo-Nazi.” In fact, a geographically and socially accurate translation of that line could be, “And he was a West Bank Palestinian”, and the tribal impact of that in today’s Israel would be much the same as it was in Jesus’s day.

In the story we heard though, it goes further. This guy was a West Bank Palestinian leper. There are layers and layers of marginalisation in this story. Luke’s account of it begins with a reference to the geographical margins. The story takes place in the border region between the lands of two polarised tribal groups. And in this marginal place, ten lepers approach Jesus and call out from a safe distance asking for his mercy. At this stage, we are not told anything about their ethnic identities, just that they are lepers – very marginalised people in a marginalised place. 

The early stages of the COVID pandemic gave us a taste of what it is like when a society is terrified of an illness and of anyone who has it. Any of us who tested positive had to notify everyone around us that we were “unclean” so that they could avoid us, and we had to take responsibility for isolating ourselves from the healthy people. If you can remember that feeling, take that and multiply it up for being in a society with no scientific understanding of infection or transmission, for being an illness that produced frightening physical deformities, and for there being no likelihood that it would pass in seven to fourteen days, and you may be beginning to understand what these ten lepers were living with. 

In the little Palestinian town of Burqin that claims to be the site where this miracle took place, there is an archeological ruin of an old Roman cistern, an underground water reservoir. And according to local legend, it was already disused in the time of Jesus and was the place where the local lepers had to live, with food and drink being lowered in to them through the opening where the rain water ran in. Whether that is true or not, it tells you a lot about how isolated and shunned lepers were in that society.

So these ten lepers, who are not yet differentiated from one another, call out to Jesus for help, and he tells them to go and show themselves to the priests. Showing yourself to a priest was what you had to do if you were no longer leprous, and you wanted to be allowed to integrate back into your family and community. Today it would be a doctor; then it was a priest.

There is an interesting sermon that could be preached about how much trust in Jesus it took for these ten to head off towards the priests before their symptoms cleared, because the story tells us that it only happened on the way. And there is another interesting sermon which I’ve seen under the title of “When it is right to disobey Jesus?”, because it is actually the nine who didn’t return who did what Jesus told them to do. But I’m not chasing either of those tantalising rabbits today. Nor am I going with the most common sermon topic picked up from this story: the importance of gratitude.

One of the ten, when he saw that he was healed, turned back, praising God with a loud voice. He prostrated himself at Jesus’s feet and thanked him. And he was a West Bank Palestinian. And Jesus asked, “Is this foreigner the only one who comes back to give praise to God?”

It is only at this point of the story that we are told that this one of the ten had a different ethnic or tribal identity to the others. So while all ten were incredibly marginalised by their illness, this one was further marginalised. It is one of the unfortunate truths about human nature that even the most disadvantaged and marginalised groups will usually have someone among them that even they look down on. Why? Because nobody wants to be the absolute dregs of society. As long as someone is lower than us, we can feel like we still have some worth.

Perhaps the only real difference between scapegoating and hyper-polarised tribalism is whether we are pointing the finger at a tiny minority or at a whole half of society. Either way we are dehumanising people in a way that is probably one of the fundamental dynamics of original sin.

Luke could have told this story without mentioning that the man was a Samaritan, and Jesus didn’t need to draw attention to it either, and then this sermon probably would just be about the importance of gratitude. But when the otherwise unnecessary is highlighted, it usually becomes the main point.

I’m a little bit embarrassed that I’d never noticed that about this story before, and it’s strange, because I have noticed it and preached on it numerous times in relation to the parable of the good Samaritan. I’ve pointed out that if Jesus was to use that parable in different contexts, like ours perhaps, he would have tweaked it to make it the good homophobe, or the good transexual, or the good manosphere influencer, or the good whoever it was that was the most despised group among the particular audience of the occasion. 

The connection to the parable of the good Samaritan is probably a deliberate move by Luke, the gospel writer. You see, if you were to ask the Jews of that day why they despised Samaritans so much, you would have been told that it was because their worship was all wrong. They didn’t worship God in the prescribed ways. But what the Samaritan leper does in this story is do an exemplary job of offering appropriate praise and thanksgiving to God. “Is it only this outsider who can come back and give praise to God appropriately?” asks Jesus.

And where that connects to the good Samaritan is that Jesus has said that the greatest two commandments, in fact the two that contain all the rest, are to love God and to love your neighbour. So here we have, in these two stories, Jesus holding up a couple of Samaritans as the role models in how to love God and how to love your neighbour.

Now, it seems to me that by deliberately choosing to hold up as role models members of the rival tribe that his audience most despised, Jesus is directly addressing their tribalism. And it is probably not too much of a stretch to say that he wants them to hear that their polarisation, their inter-tribal hostility, is the biggest obstacle to their capacity to fulfil the most important commandments – to love God and to love your neighbour. 

Now I don’t know who it is for you that is the group you most think of as completely beyond the pale, as depraved and a danger to everything that is good and decent. Maybe its these neo-nazis who’ve been in the news a lot lately. Maybe it is the far right faction of the Israeli parliament. Maybe it is the gambling industry strategists who send inducements to known problem gamblers. Maybe it is those who want trans kids sent to psych hospitals. Maybe it’s just Collingwood supporters. 

Whoever it is, Jesus is going to challenge you and me to recognise one of them as providing an outstanding example of love of neighbour, and another of them as an outstanding example of not taking God’s mercy for granted, but offering genuine, heartfelt praise and thanksgiving. And in that, then, the ultimate challenge that Jesus is laying before us is to overcome our tribalism, our polarisation, our bitter rivalries, and to recognise and honour in this most uncomfortable other, the image of God.

We can be on the right side of history about any number of important social causes, but if we are refusing to see and honour the image of God in our opponents, we will be on the wrong side of what God is seeking to do in the world. No matter how much energy we put into fighting for the right causes, if we demonise our opponents and refuse to listen to them with respect or even just gentle curiosity, then all our activism will achieve is a backlash from our opponents that counteracts our work and ensures that nothing really changes. As long as we are allowing the orthodoxies of our tribe, however good and right they may be, to blind us to any good in the members of rival tribes, we will be increasingly part of the problem, not part of the solution.

Jesus was remarkably hardline and resolute about this stuff. I’m guessing that he would be at least as hardline about it today. Because today, our tribalism and polarisation is armed with the technology and the weapons to destroy all life on earth, and avoiding that depends on enough of us taking our lead from Jesus and calling out the best in one another and learning how to respect one another and cooperate together. 

You and I can’t make that happen. We can’t save the world. But what we can do is follow Jesus and, like him, become role models of loving our enemies and seeing all people, no matter how unlike us they may be, as one global family, equally loved by God, and capable to great love and beauty. And in that lie the seeds of the salvation of the world.