Allogenes - The Stranger

 Allogenes The Stranger

Luke 17: 11-19 (NRSV)

11 On the way to Jerusalem Jesus was going through the region between Samaria and Galilee.

12 As he entered a village, ten lepers 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 (glorifying) God with a loud voice.

16 He prostrated himself at Jesus' feet and thanked him. And he was a Samaritan.

17 Then Jesus asked, "Were not ten made clean? But the other nine, where are they?

18 Was none of them found to return and give praise (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 (saved you)."

                           

Every morning, our day begins quite strangely. In our UTC chapel, the benediction does not mark the end of every morning worship service. There are always some announcements that keep us on our toes for a few moments. Sometimes, it is only when the either the screen goes off or when a notable few in the congregation get up from their chairs that we know that the Chapel service is over. What follows this strange moment is very interesting. Some of the people crowd up around the Worship leader/s and congratulate and thank them on their effort in either preaching or singing or leading the service. What is even more interesting is to observe that on most occasions it is the people from the close inner circle of the leader who come up to thank them. It is either people from the same class or people from the same hostel and most importantly people from the same region. In a phrase, it is simply Homogeneity personified.

We all know the story from Luke 17:11-19. Ten Lepers were cleansed, one came back praising God and thanked Jesus. This one person, as Luke suggests, is a Samaritan. Luke is the only Synoptist to have preserved this material. Luke was a Gentile, a physician, a loyal friend of Paul, a great scholar, a master of the Greek language, a historian and above all a great storyteller. Luke’s expertise compels us to have a deeper look at this story.

Every UTCian’s go to book for a Sermon, sometimes even before the Bible is the Word Biblical Commentary. Critiquing the form of this passage, the WBC struggles to decide on its form. The suggestion is that it is neither a healing story, nor a pronouncement story and cannot really fit into any categorical form. Strange, isn’t it? Scholars even suggest that Luke may have added a lot to the original story, given that this may or may not have been a historical event. This is arrived at primarily because Luke has a “healing of the leper” story mentioned already in chapter 5. Let us therefore look at this passage simply as a Lukan story.

The nature of exclusions was awful in first century CE Palestinian as is in contemporary times. The Jews and Samaritans at the time of Jesus already had a long standing rivalry. Jews had no dealings with the Samaritans, and yet in this group of 10, a common sickness had broken down the racial, religious, and regional barriers and brought them together as one community. There are three observations on the lifestyle of the leper community that prevailed in those times. First, the fact that the 10 lepers stood at a distance from Jesus and his disciples was in adherence to the commandment recorded in (Leviticus 13:46: The one with leprosy must live alone, and shall live outside the camp). Second, they formed their own colonies (II Kings 7:3) and third, they positioned themselves near traffic ways in order to make appeals for charity.

The story in chapter 5 is almost similar to this story except for some strange things. One of them being, Jesus, unlike in chapter 5, doesn’t go and touch the lepers to heal them. He keeps his distance instead and tells them to go and show themselves to the priest. Yet another strange thing. Showing themselves to the priest was a mandatory duty according to the law in Leviticus 14:1-32, one long chapter which has an 8-day ritualistic practice for the cure of a leper. In this story, however, the healing takes place very instantly. Let us consider two sets of word plays in this passage.

1.     Luke: clean (14); Leper: heal (15); Jesus: save (19)

In the words of Luke, the story writer, it is only an event of cleansing. He says in verse 14b, “And as they went, they were made clean.” But the contrasting factor here is that

2.     Luke: Samaritan (16); Jesus: Allogenes (18)

While Luke refers to the leper who returned as “Samaritan”, Jesus prefers to call him a “foreigner” which is in Greek “Allogenes”, a word appearing only once in the entire New Testament. The word allos­ means “another” and genos means “family”, “race”, “nation”, “tribe” or “people”, making up “of another tribe”.

It is the term used in the temple inscription that forbade the entry of foreigners into the Jerusalem temple. In a strict sense, the Samaritans were viewed as only half-foreign and not entirely foreign.

The point over here is neither pro-Samaritan nor anti-Jewish, but pro-allogenes, pro-stranger, pro-foreigner.

In this passage, Luke did a strange thing by limiting his understanding of the event to a process of cleansing. The 9 lepers supposedly did a strange thing by not returning and just walking away while the actual truth is that they simply obeyed the words of Jesus. The leper who did return did a beautifully strange thing, by moving out of his comfort zone and doing something out of his tradition, and Jesus, the personification of strangeness cleansed, healed, and finally even saved this person just through a conversation.

We all do strange things in life. Nonetheless, the strangest thing we can do is building a relationship with a stranger, breaking the wall of separation and the comfort of homogeneity. Often in our minds, we only categorize Women, Dalits, the LGBT and other Queer communities as strange. Yet, we do not realize the extent to which we ostracize the allogenes, the person from another community, who is in our very midst. May God be with us all.