Where Jesus Is
Luke 17:11-19[1]
There’s an ancient
saying that has defined what “church” meant for hundreds of years: “Where
Christ is, there is the Church.”[2] For most of church history, it really meant the opposite: “where the church is,
that’s where you find Christ.”[3] It was another way of saying that there’s no salvation outside the church,
which was what Christians believed for centuries. But I find that vision of
what Christ is doing in the world to be too small. God is working in Christ
through the Spirit to accomplish his work of salvation in this world in all
kinds of ways that we may never even know about. And that means nobody can put
limits on where Christ is!
One of my favorite
theologians insists that we should read this ancient saying differently: “Where
Christ is, there is the church” is more of a mission statement.[4] In other words, where we can perceive that Christ is working in the world, that’s
where the church should be working. As the Matthew 25 initiative of the PCUSA
reminds us, Jesus said he was with the hungry, the thirsty, the naked, the
strangers, the sick, and those in prison. In fact, Jesus told his disciples
that he was the hungry, the thirsty, the naked, the strangers, the sick, and
those in prison whom they had encountered. My favorite theologian concludes
that if that’s where Christ is, then that’s where the church should be.
We’ve already heard
the message in Luke’s Gospel that Jesus came bringing the kingdom of God that
breaks through all kinds of prejudices and boundaries. In our Gospel lesson for
today, we see that played out with the bitterness that separated the Jewish
people from the Samaritans. The Samaritans were descended from those who were
left behind when the Northern Kingdom of Israel fell. But they were also
descended from the gentile peoples that the Assyrian conquerors brought in to
solidify their hold on new territory. That took place 700 years before Jesus’
day, but the bitterness between the Jewish people and the Samaritans hadn’t
diminished one bit over all that time.
I find it interesting
that when we meet the group of “lepers” in this Gospel lesson, there’s no
initial mention of ethnic boundaries. Their common illness made them all
unclean and outcast. And like many who are outcast, they bonded together
despite any other boundaries that might have otherwise kept them apart. Because
these men were all “unclean” and therefore socially outcast, they were excluded
from all the normal activities of life—from family to community to worship. When
they cried out to Jesus for mercy, they were obviously asking him to heal them
from their disease so they could go back to their lives.
Jesus’ response that
they go show themselves to the priest might seem strange to us, but when
someone was healed from a skin disease, that person was to appear before the
priest. The priest examined them, and if there was no further sign of disease,
he declared them to be “clean.” That meant being able to re-enter their lives—family,
community, and worship. I wonder whether when these ten men first heard Jesus
tell them to go show themselves to the priest, they might have looked at their
mutilated skin, and then back at Jesus. I wonder whether they may have thought
that he had forgotten something: the part where he was supposed to actually heal
them. But he said “go,” and they went. And in doing so their skin was
restored.
Luke tells us that one
of them, when he saw that he was healed, returned praising God with a loud
voice, and fell at Jesus’ feet to thank him. It’s only at this point that we
learn he was a Samaritan. As a Samaritan, no Jewish priest anywhere was going
to pronounce him clean. Simply because of the fact of his birth and his
heritage, he would always be viewed by any Jewish person as “unclean” and
therefore outcast. But it was this man, who had lived his whole life on the
wrong side of the prejudices of his world, who had the ability to “see” that he
had been healed by Jesus. He had the faith to see that it was through Jesus
that he had been given God’s mercy that healed him.
In response, Jesus said
to him, “Your faith has saved you.” This man’s ability to see beyond his
healing and to recognize the grace of God at work through Jesus was a kind of
faith that not only made him physically well, it also made him spiritually whole.
I think this story reminds us that those who live on the “wrong” side of the prejudices
of our world are often more sensitive to the presence of God’s grace than those
of us who are “respectable.” Jesus asked where the other nine were, and why
only a “foreigner” returned to give thanks. I think part of the answer might be
that they were so excited about being healed they didn’t walk but ran to the
priest. They couldn’t wait to be declared “clean” so they could return to their
lives on the right side of the boundaries and become “respectable” again.
I wonder if this might
provide us with a way to think about the church in our time. I wonder whether
the church isn’t a bit like the other nine men in this story. We can still get
so caught up with living our lives on the right side of the boundaries in our
world that we miss the fact that Jesus is out there working with the “outcasts.”
If that’s where Jesus is, then that’s where we should be. It leads me to think
that if we want to personally experience the new life of God’s kingdom, or if
we want to see renewal in our church, we need to be out there working among the
people on the other side of our prejudices, because that’s where Jesus is.
[1]
©2022 Alan Brehm. A sermon delivered by Rev. Alan Brehm PhD on 10/9/2022 for Hickman
Presbyterian Church, Hickman, NE. For a video recording of this sermon, check out my Pastor Alan YouTube channel: https://youtu.be/91tpPTkHVYo .
[2]
This idea originated in the early Second Century with Ignatius of Antioch, in
his letter to the church at Smyrna: “wherever Jesus Christ is, there is the
universal church” (Ignatius, Smyrnaeans, 8.2; often translated the “Catholic
church” but in the setting of the early Second Century that translation is
anachronistic).
[3]
This development started with Ambrose of Milan in the late 4th
century, who said “Where Peter is, there is the church, and where the church is
there is eternal life” (From his commentary on Psalm 40 [41]). In more recent
days, the phrase has developed in the Roman Catholic Church to “Where Peter is,
there is the church, and where the church is, there is Christ.”
[4]
Jürgen Moltmann, The Church in the Power of the Spirit, 126. He understands
Christ’s presence in the world in two ways: “whoever hears you, hears me” (Lk
10:16), in which Christ promises to be with us in the proclamation of the
gospel, in the sacraments of baptism and the Lord’s Supper, and in the
fellowship of the body of Christ (cf. ibid., 123-25). The second way is the one
alluded to above, “whoever visits them visits me” (Mt 25:40). Moltmann insists
that we can only truly be the Church and truly live in the presence of Christ
if we link the and “seek the fellowship of the crucified one in the poor”
(ibid., 127).
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