The anniversary I’m thinking of — one that should never be forgotten — is of Matthew Shepard, who died on this day. Matthew, just 21 years old, was beaten, tortured, and left tied to a fence a few days earlier. He was found after two days in a coma from which he never recovered — he died October 12, 1998. Matthew was an outcast in the small town where he lived. It was a hate crime, because Matthew was gay. I have told his story many times in classes I have taught.
Every year I find myself thinking of him, and of how our world still creates outcasts.
Today’s lectionary reading is also about an outcast — though this story has a very different ending (Luke 17:11–19).
At first glance the story of the ten lepers is about thankfulness: being grateful, acknowledging gifts and kindnesses — the sort of practices we’re taught from a young age. Teaching manners and gratitude is part of the parental task. (Incidentally, this evening is also the anniversary of when I went into labour with our first child — the beginning of a new life. Birth and death side by side; love and violence entangled, as they so often are.)
In the text, Jesus meets ten people with leprosy who call to him for mercy. All are healed, but only one returns to give thanks. It’s easy to read the story as a moral lesson about gratitude, but I think the heart of it lies elsewhere: in how the outcast is treated.
The account is brief, with little detail. We aren’t told if the lepers were men, women, or even children. We only learn that they kept their distance, as required: “Keeping their distance, they called…” (v.12). Jesus tells them to go and show themselves to the priests — a deceptively simple instruction that hides a long and complex process.
Under Levitical law, the priest was the authority who could declare a person free from disease. The rituals of cleansing were lengthy and precise: inspections, offerings, sacrifices, washing, and anointing with oil and blood on the right ear, thumb, and toe. Only then could the person be declared clean and allowed back into community life.
When the healed leper returned to Jesus and fell at his feet, it meant that the long process was complete. No longer shouting from a distance, this person could finally approach others again.
And then comes the line that leaps from the page: “And they were a Samaritan.” A double outcast — both leper and Samaritan — and yet the one who returned in gratitude. The author of Luke thought it important enough to note. Perhaps because it is often the one who has been twice excluded — by body and by identity — who shows the rest of us what wholeness really means.
This brief story, describing events that must have taken place over many days, holds a simple but profound truth: Jesus saw the one no one else saw.
Outcasts often blend into the background, hidden on the edge of society. It’s easy to pretend they don’t exist. While reflecting on this passage, I read about the history of leprosy and leper colonies. I was startled to learn that the quarantine on the last leper colony in the United States was lifted only in 1969 — within my lifetime. People still exiled to the margins, invisible. And, as in Matthew’s case, when the outcast dares to be seen, society too often responds with cruelty, tying them again to the fences of fear and indifference.
If this short gospel text offers any challenge, it is surely this: outcasts still exist on the edges of our communities — unseen, unheard, and unwanted. A spiritual calling is to notice them, to see them as Jesus did, to find Christ within them and to resist any form of “them” and “us” mentality.
