The Great Eraser

Borders are, all too often, contentious places. You can probably name a handful of current conflicts just off the top of your head: India-Pakistan, Ukraine-Russia, Eritrea-Ethiopia, and so on. Sometimes the closest neighbors make for the bitterest enemies. This was true back in Jesus’ day too, although the reciprocal acts of violence and destruction between Samaria and Judea had cooled into a simmering hatred between the two.

And yet, as Jesus traveled that way, he encountered a group of ten men, several Galileans but including at least one Samaritan.* All ten were suffering from skin diseases that had made them outcasts. In their suffering, they found each other, the old ethno-religious rivalry insignificant in the context of their hardship, their differences so much smaller than the shared experience of illness and exclusion.

Suffering has a way of erasing our borders. ur shared but precarious human condition, while shrinking everything else in comparison. Grievances once clung to seem like petty concerns; differences of opinion that once seemed life-or-death pale in the face of actual life and death. I think about my best friend’s work with Project Common Bond, which brings together young people who have lost a loved one to terrorism or mass violence — often from opposing sides of the same conflict. Every year, participants start out wary of one another, and every year their shared experiences of loss perform some precious alchemy, transforming their skepticism, resentment, and even hatred into the glue that binds their community of grief and hope together.

Suffering has the power to erase the lines that divide us. But what happens when the suffering ends? Will we hurry to redraw those lines? The ten men start out united, but the healed Samaritan comes back alone. Maybe that’s a coincidence. Or maybe it’s a reminder that once the dust settles, once our wounds are bound up, we will be tempted to separate ourselves once again. May the Spirit help us find a better way.