In the days of the Lord, lepers were totally marginalized. In fact, those ten lepers met Jesus as He entered a village (Lk 17:12), as they were not allowed in the villages, nor could they get any close to people (keeping their distance, they called to him). Today, so many people are relegated to an outer edge by our society, and who look at us Christians as their only possibility to find Jesus' love and goodness.
Lepers were outcasts, required by the law to stand at a distance from people (Lev.13:45f). But in the story of the Ten Lepers, shared misery had brought Jewish and Samaritan lepers together! Had they not been lepers, they would never have been found in one another's company! There was deep religious hatred between the Jews and the Samaritans. The Samaritans were heretics and foreigners in the eyes of the Jews, and their region a melting-pot of different cults and customs, and Jews despised it as a blot on their country.
It was a very inconveniently situated blot: right in the middle. So when Jews wanted to travel between Galilee in the north and Judea in the south, they had either to pass through Samaritan country or to skirt it. Things could be unpleasant for them if they passed through, but the journey was twice as long if they went around.
There may be Samaritan territory in the middle of our life. It is the part of our life that is a mess, which we don’t want to face: where we are at our very weakest and worst, where our thoughts and motives are all mixed up and unclear, where we have never had peace and hardly dare to hope for it. Instead of skirting around it if we invite Jesus into it we will find the mess cleaned up. Many of the heroes and heroines of Jesus' stories were Samaritans! – the one leper, the Good Samaritan, the Samaritan woman at the well. And so there’s hope for us all!
The Indian poet and philosopher, Rabindranath Tagore, wrote, “We are beginning to discover that our problem is worldwide, and no one people of the earth can work out its salvation by detaching itself from others. Either we shall be saved together or drown together into destruction.” If love doesn’t bring us together, adversity will. Martin of Tours is one who reached out to share the adversity of others. His famous legend of cutting his coat in half to cover a beggar who was freezing, and later realizing that it was Christ himself who received it and returned his half cloak when he reached home shows our sharing in others misery will be rewarded.
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