Readings — 2 Timothy 2: 8–15; Luke 17: 11–19
“As he entered a village, ten lepers approached him.”
In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
Dividing ourselves into insiders and outsiders is one of our most basic human instincts. It would be nice to think that, as we are all equally loved by God our heavenly Father, we could see all eight billion people in the world as our brothers and sisters. But human psychology doesn’t work like that. We know that not everyone can be trusted, but we also know that we need to trust strangers sometimes.
Subconsciously, whether we admit it or not, when we meet strangers we are always hunting for clues about whether we can trust them or not. This might be whether they look and sound like us, which can have damaging consequences for society, but we also often trust people who are different from us if their behaviour is what we expect, or their beliefs are like ours. The Samaritans were the most dangerous kind of outsiders – they looked and sounded similar to the Second Temple Jewish community that Jesus came from, and their beliefs were largely similar, but very different in some important respects. All of us who lived in Northern Ireland during The Troubles became very adept at looking for subtle cues about whether people who looked and sounded just like us were indeed from our own tribe – or were potentially dangerous outsiders.
In the Roman Empire of St Paul’s time, to claim that an executed criminal was God made human was a weird, even creepy, belief. So to be a Christian was to make oneself into something of an outsider. Therefore in the Second Letter to Timothy, which our Epistle this morning came from, there is a repeated theme of Paul telling Timothy not to be ashamed of the Gospel. For Paul himself, the Gospel is so valuable that he has allowed himself to suffer what must have been the ultimate indignity for this proud Roman citizen – he was a jailbird.
What was so valuable that it was worth being “chained like a criminal”, treated as the ultimate outsider? It was that Jesus Christ was “raised from the dead” and that: “If we have died with him, we will also live with him.” That was the treasure worth paying any price for.
