SERMON ONLY
The Thankful Foreigner – Luke 17:11–19
Today’s passage in Luke’s Gospel could quite easily be entitled: The Thankful Foreigner.
The story is simple but powerful. Ten men who are suffering from leprosy, a disease that made people outcasts from society, call out to Jesus from a distance, asking for mercy. Jesus tells them to go and show themselves to the priests, and as they go, they are healed. But only one of them, a Samaritan, a foreigner, someone despised and mistrusted by Jews, turns back to thank Jesus. And Jesus says, “Were not all ten cleansed? Where are the other nine? Has no one returned to give praise to God except this foreigner?”
Only the foreigner returns to Jesus to express his gratitude.
This is very typical of Luke’s Gospel. Luke again and again highlights not only Jesus’ concern for the foreigner, but also the way foreigners, outsiders, and the socially despised often display greater virtue, deeper faith, and more gratitude than those who consider themselves morally superior or closer to God by virtue of their heritage or religion.
Luke’s Gospel is full of such examples:
In chapter 4, Jesus reminds the people in Nazareth that Elijah was sent not to an Israelite widow, but to a widow of Zarephath in Sidon — a foreigner. And that Elisha healed not an Israelite leper, but Naaman the Syrian. And the people of Jesus home town caught up on their own ethno-centricism respond with such anger that they attempt to take Jesus life.
In chapter 7, it is a Roman centurion, a soldier of the occupying army, who shows extraordinary faith, and Jesus says, “I have not found such great faith in all Israel.”
In chapter 10, Jesus tells the parable of the Good Samaritan, again, the foreigner, the outsider,as the one who truly loves his neighbour.
In chapter 19, it is Zacchaeus, a tax collector and collaborator with the foreign Roman power, who is called a “son of Abraham” when he turns his life around.
And even at the cross, it is the Roman centurion, the foreigner and outsider who proclaims, “Surely this man was innocent!” while others stand at a distance.
And in our story today, it is only the foreigner who returns to express gratitude to Jesus.
In each of these moments, Luke overturns conventional expectations. Those who appear to be “inside” often fail to see or respond to God’s grace, while those on the margins, the outsiders, the foreigners, the ones despised or feared, turn out to be most open to God’s transforming presence.
By the time of Jesus, the Jewish people had become an increasingly insular and exclusive community with a very strong ethnocentrism that drew sharp distinctions between Jews and foreigners. Faithfulness to God became tightly linked with belonging to the nation, keeping its laws, and preserving its traditions. What had begun as a way of staying true to God’s covenant gradually hardened into a sense of religious and national superiority.
And it is into this world that Jesus steps, not to condemn his people, but to open their vision wider, to remind them that God’s mercy is never limited to one nation, one race, or one religion.
Luke’s Gospel invites the reader to question the very notion of who are, or are not,the chosen people of God. It challenges nationalistic, ethnic, and religious boundaries that define who is “in” and who is “out.”
Jesus’ mission, as Luke presents it, is not to create a new tribe based on ethnicity, but to call into being a new kind of people altogether, a community not bound by bloodline, border, or badge, but by shared faith, compassion, humility, and gratitude.
This new community is marked by what we might call the deeper values of God as expressed by Luke’s Gospel: mercy over judgement, compassion over exclusion, humility over pride,
gratitude over entitlement, and love that crosses all human-made boundaries.
It is a community that sees every person as a bearer of God’s image, not as a stranger to be feared, but as a neighbour to be embraced.
What does all of this have to say to us in our own time, a time when anger and fear about foreigners, immigration, borders, and “outsiders” often dominate our public conversation and political debates?
From a personal perspective, the nature of the current national debate on immigration has raised some concerns for me.
There is clearly a problem with the issue of uncontrolled small boat crossings over the English Channel. But asylum seekers in the UK only make up about 4-5% of the immigrant population of the UK. But that thorny and difficult issue of asylum seekers and small boat crossings has been projected over the 90-95% of immigrants who are here on legal visa’s casting a deep and dark shadow over them creating the impression that the majority of immigrants in the UK are here illegally or free-loading off the state.
The Oxford based Migration Observatory website shows that up until April of this year a skilled worker with a partner would have been required to pay £23 000 over a seven year period to achieve settled status in the UK. With a family of 2 children that would have gone up to almost £50000. And that is over and above paying normal tax and NI contributions.
And so rather than being a liability on the state, even taking into account refugees and illegal immigrants a recent study suggests that on average immigrants on visa’s contribute more financially to the UK economy than the average UK citizen. And that makes sense because the majority of immigrants are on skilled workers visa’s.
Contrary to the misleading announcement by Boris Johnson when he said he was introducing an Australian style points based visa system into the UK this strict and arduous system was already in place in 2008 and tightened up further by Teresa May in 2012. All Boris Johnsson’s government did after Brexit was to extend this system to EU citizens.
And there have been other worrying and potentially misleading aspects to the current debate…
In June of this year there was a sensationalist headline that created an impression that a large percentage of immigrants in the UK are criminals. But for anyone doing a little bit more research it is evident that the headline was in fact misleading. You will probably remember the headline, that 12-13% of the prison population in England and Wales were made up of foreign-born individuals. It was a headline that stirred up a lot of negative feeling amongst many UK citizens – understandably so when taken at face value. But what those articles didn’t say was that the percentage of foreign born people living in the UK (according to the 2022 census) is actually around 16%, meaning that foreign born people are actually under-represented in the prison population. What it actually suggests is the very opposite of what people thought when they first read the headline, that in fact, UK born people are (percentage wise) more likely to be criminals than foreign born residents from outside the UK.
Lastly, few weeks ago the labour government announced that immigrants were no longer going to be able to claim public benefits. It was a nice sound bite for a government wanting to be seen to be doing something. But my research says that immigrants on visa’s haven’t been able to claim public benefits for around 25 years. (This was obviously not the case for EU citizens before Brexit or asylum seekers). It was certainly very clearly indicated on Wendy’s temporary residents cards that we were not eligible for public benefits.
I am not saying that there is no debate to be had over immigration in the UK including tricky issues around integration and social cohesion. There is also a really important issue to be solved around small boat crossings that is dominating the debate and peoples concerns. But I worry that the nature of the current debate is in fact distorting the facts for the vast majority of immigrants who are here legally on visa’s making a large and positive contribution to the UK’s health system and economy.
Getting back to our passage from Luke. Perhaps Luke’s Gospel speaks a gentle but firm word to us: Be careful whom you call foreigner or too quickly labelling the foreigner as bad and the source of all our problems. Because in God’s story (according to Luke’s Gospel), it is often the foreigner, the outsider, the unexpected one, who shows us what true virtue and true faith looks like, who reminds us what gratitude sounds like, and who helps us rediscover what love really means.
I don’t wish to diminish some of the complexity of issues around a rapidly growing immigrant population. There are real issues that need to be wrestled with.
But in the end, whatever our views are on the debate around immigration, as Christians we can’t simply ignore what the witness of Jesus might have to say on these matters. In the end we might still come to different conclusions. But as people of faith what we can’t do is to ignore Jesus. And so the question for each of us as Christians remains: How does Jesus inform your and my perspective on this debate?
Just some food for thought as always…
Today’s passage in Luke’s Gospel could quite easily be entitled: The Thankful Foreigner.
The story is simple but powerful. Ten men who are suffering from leprosy, a disease that made people outcasts from society, call out to Jesus from a distance, asking for mercy. Jesus tells them to go and show themselves to the priests, and as they go, they are healed. But only one of them, a Samaritan, a foreigner, someone despised and mistrusted by Jews, turns back to thank Jesus. And Jesus says, “Were not all ten cleansed? Where are the other nine? Has no one returned to give praise to God except this foreigner?”
Only the foreigner returns to Jesus to express his gratitude.
This is very typical of Luke’s Gospel. Luke again and again highlights not only Jesus’ concern for the foreigner, but also the way foreigners, outsiders, and the socially despised often display greater virtue, deeper faith, and more gratitude than those who consider themselves morally superior or closer to God by virtue of their heritage or religion.
Luke’s Gospel is full of such examples:
In chapter 4, Jesus reminds the people in Nazareth that Elijah was sent not to an Israelite widow, but to a widow of Zarephath in Sidon — a foreigner. And that Elisha healed not an Israelite leper, but Naaman the Syrian. And the people of Jesus home town caught up on their own ethno-centricism respond with such anger that they attempt to take Jesus life.
In chapter 7, it is a Roman centurion, a soldier of the occupying army, who shows extraordinary faith, and Jesus says, “I have not found such great faith in all Israel.”
In chapter 10, Jesus tells the parable of the Good Samaritan, again, the foreigner, the outsider,as the one who truly loves his neighbour.
In chapter 19, it is Zacchaeus, a tax collector and collaborator with the foreign Roman power, who is called a “son of Abraham” when he turns his life around.
And even at the cross, it is the Roman centurion, the foreigner and outsider who proclaims, “Surely this man was innocent!” while others stand at a distance.
And in our story today, it is only the foreigner who returns to express gratitude to Jesus.
In each of these moments, Luke overturns conventional expectations. Those who appear to be “inside” often fail to see or respond to God’s grace, while those on the margins, the outsiders, the foreigners, the ones despised or feared, turn out to be most open to God’s transforming presence.
By the time of Jesus, the Jewish people had become an increasingly insular and exclusive community with a very strong ethnocentrism that drew sharp distinctions between Jews and foreigners. Faithfulness to God became tightly linked with belonging to the nation, keeping its laws, and preserving its traditions. What had begun as a way of staying true to God’s covenant gradually hardened into a sense of religious and national superiority.
And it is into this world that Jesus steps, not to condemn his people, but to open their vision wider, to remind them that God’s mercy is never limited to one nation, one race, or one religion.
Luke’s Gospel invites the reader to question the very notion of who are, or are not,the chosen people of God. It challenges nationalistic, ethnic, and religious boundaries that define who is “in” and who is “out.”
Jesus’ mission, as Luke presents it, is not to create a new tribe based on ethnicity, but to call into being a new kind of people altogether, a community not bound by bloodline, border, or badge, but by shared faith, compassion, humility, and gratitude.
This new community is marked by what we might call the deeper values of God as expressed by Luke’s Gospel: mercy over judgement, compassion over exclusion, humility over pride,
gratitude over entitlement, and love that crosses all human-made boundaries.
It is a community that sees every person as a bearer of God’s image, not as a stranger to be feared, but as a neighbour to be embraced.
What does all of this have to say to us in our own time, a time when anger and fear about foreigners, immigration, borders, and “outsiders” often dominate our public conversation and political debates?
From a personal perspective, the nature of the current national debate on immigration has raised some concerns for me.
There is clearly a problem with the issue of uncontrolled small boat crossings over the English Channel. But asylum seekers in the UK only make up about 4-5% of the immigrant population of the UK. But that thorny and difficult issue of asylum seekers and small boat crossings has been projected over the 90-95% of immigrants who are here on legal visa’s casting a deep and dark shadow over them creating the impression that the majority of immigrants in the UK are here illegally or free-loading off the state.
The Oxford based Migration Observatory website shows that up until April of this year a skilled worker with a partner would have been required to pay £23 000 over a seven year period to achieve settled status in the UK. With a family of 2 children that would have gone up to almost £50000. And that is over and above paying normal tax and NI contributions.
And so rather than being a liability on the state, even taking into account refugees and illegal immigrants a recent study suggests that on average immigrants on visa’s contribute more financially to the UK economy than the average UK citizen. And that makes sense because the majority of immigrants are on skilled workers visa’s.
Contrary to the misleading announcement by Boris Johnson when he said he was introducing an Australian style points based visa system into the UK this strict and arduous system was already in place in 2008 and tightened up further by Teresa May in 2012. All Boris Johnsson’s government did after Brexit was to extend this system to EU citizens.
And there have been other worrying and potentially misleading aspects to the current debate…
In June of this year there was a sensationalist headline that created an impression that a large percentage of immigrants in the UK are criminals. But for anyone doing a little bit more research it is evident that the headline was in fact misleading. You will probably remember the headline, that 12-13% of the prison population in England and Wales were made up of foreign-born individuals. It was a headline that stirred up a lot of negative feeling amongst many UK citizens – understandably so when taken at face value. But what those articles didn’t say was that the percentage of foreign born people living in the UK (according to the 2022 census) is actually around 16%, meaning that foreign born people are actually under-represented in the prison population. What it actually suggests is the very opposite of what people thought when they first read the headline, that in fact, UK born people are (percentage wise) more likely to be criminals than foreign born residents from outside the UK.
Lastly, few weeks ago the labour government announced that immigrants were no longer going to be able to claim public benefits. It was a nice sound bite for a government wanting to be seen to be doing something. But my research says that immigrants on visa’s haven’t been able to claim public benefits for around 25 years. (This was obviously not the case for EU citizens before Brexit or asylum seekers). It was certainly very clearly indicated on Wendy’s temporary residents cards that we were not eligible for public benefits.
I am not saying that there is no debate to be had over immigration in the UK including tricky issues around integration and social cohesion. There is also a really important issue to be solved around small boat crossings that is dominating the debate and peoples concerns. But I worry that the nature of the current debate is in fact distorting the facts for the vast majority of immigrants who are here legally on visa’s making a large and positive contribution to the UK’s health system and economy.
Getting back to our passage from Luke. Perhaps Luke’s Gospel speaks a gentle but firm word to us: Be careful whom you call foreigner or too quickly labelling the foreigner as bad and the source of all our problems. Because in God’s story (according to Luke’s Gospel), it is often the foreigner, the outsider, the unexpected one, who shows us what true virtue and true faith looks like, who reminds us what gratitude sounds like, and who helps us rediscover what love really means.
I don’t wish to diminish some of the complexity of issues around a rapidly growing immigrant population. There are real issues that need to be wrestled with.
But in the end, whatever our views are on the debate around immigration, as Christians we can’t simply ignore what the witness of Jesus might have to say on these matters. In the end we might still come to different conclusions. But as people of faith what we can’t do is to ignore Jesus. And so the question for each of us as Christians remains: How does Jesus inform your and my perspective on this debate?
Just some food for thought as always…
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