Outsiders and Insiders

Outsiders and Insiders Comparative commentary by Roger Ferlo Bible Passage Luke’s Gospel is preoccupied with outsiders. These include the physically sick, who, in Jesus’s context, were widely seen as both physically polluting and ritually untouchable. In fact, ritual impurity in stories like the one featured here tends to overshadow the physical ailment. Jesus’s healing miracles in Luke are as much about the cured victims’ social healing, their rejoining of normal society, as they are about the sufferer’s physical restoration. Perhaps this is why Luke gives so much attention to the outsider who is politically and ideologically unacceptable, embodied time and again in the figure of the ‘foreigner’—the despised Samaritan. What is remarkable about the story of the ten lepers in Luke 17:11–19 is the way these two themes join up. Jesus heals the ten lepers and sends them to the Temple to show themselves to the priests, that is, to be accepted back into the community. They will then be both physically healed and ritually clean. For the lone Samaritan among the ten, however, this cannot be a full restoration. Even when healed, and even if ritually clean, he remains an outcast, a despised political and religious enemy. It is therefore all the more remarkable that only he returns to give thanks. This was likely as scandalous to those first encountering this story as it was for those hearing Luke’s earlier account of Jesus’s Good Samaritan parable (Luke 10:25–37). The religious insiders hearing the parable are forced to admit to Jesus that the despised Samaritan was in fact the only true neighbour among them. The same irony holds true in Luke 17:11–19. But now we, the readers of the episode, rather than the characters within it, are compelled to absorb the scandalous truth that only the Samaritan, the consummate outsider, had the grace to offer thanks and praise. The unknown artist who illuminated the story of the ten lepers in the Codex Aurea Epternacensis had read Luke carefully. Other stories which the same artist depicts on this folio page, as well as on the page opposite, offer a similar linking of miraculous healing with scandalous restoration. In an adjoining panel, there is the healing of the woman with the haemorrhage (Luke 8:44–48), another example of a ritually impure victim of disease—a woman doubly untouchable—who is both physically healed and spiritually embraced. On the facing page, depictions of such miracles multiply: the healing of the man born blind (John:9:1–7); the healing of the paralytic lowered from an opening in the rooftop (Luke 5:17–26); the rescue from stoning of the woman taken in adultery (John 8:1–11); Jesus’s saving encounter with the Samaritan woman at the well (John 4:1–42); and—perhaps the ultimate reversal of untouchable status—the raising of Lazarus from the dead (John 11:1–44). The illustrations in the codex would have been seen by just a few privileged viewers. Tintoretto’s enormous painting, in contrast, was monumentally public. To this day it is positioned in the apse of the church, close to the numinous centre of healing power that is the sepulchre of San Rocco (Saint Roch) himself. Sixteenth-century Venetian viewers, many of them likely to have been relatives of those who perished in the plague, or survivors themselves, could witness their own sufferings mirrored and even dignified in this painting. They could then give thanks for their deliverance, venerating the Christ-like image of San Rocco, so carefully positioned at the centre of the painting. No wonder that fifteen years later, Tintoretto would be commissioned to cover almost every inch of wall space in the nearby Scuola di San Marco with monumental New Testament scenes, creating in effect a Gospel book in three dimensions. Assembled in the 1980s on the National Mall in Washington, DC, within sight of both the Capitol building and the Washington Monument, the acres-wide AIDS Quilt attracted half a million people on the first weekend it was displayed. When it was last displayed in its entirety, in 1996, it covered the entire space of the Mall. Featuring over 12,000 panels, that last full display of the AIDS Quilt attracted an estimated 1.2 million visitors. Like the sixteenth-century survivors and mourners viewing Tintoretto’s outsize painting in Venice, visitors came to mourn and remember. But they also came to reassert the dignity of those who had died of a disease that had generated so much public ostracism, neglect, and condemnation. Times have changed, somewhat for the better. But as an ‘outsider’ artform, deeply rooted in memories of both struggle and dignity, the AIDS Quilt functions as this story in Luke—as a balm for those who suffer social and religious exclusion, and a challenge to Christian believers to practice what Jesus preached. There are now 50,000 panels. References ‘The History of the Quilt’, available at https://www.aidsmemorial.org/quilt-history [accessed 29 April 2026] Cite & Share