Jesus asked, “Were not all ten cleansed? Where are the other nine? Has no one returned to give praise to God except this foreigner?” Then he said to him, “Rise and go; your faith has made you well.”
Sermon for the 18th
Sunday after Pentecost
Proper 23
| Text:
Luke 17:18-19 Jesus asked, “Were not all ten cleansed? Where are the other nine? Has no one returned to give praise to God except this foreigner?” Then he said to him, “Rise and go; your faith has made you well.” |
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Faith leads to gratitude.
Do you wish, like I do
sometimes, that when you wake up tomorrow morning you had the body of a
25-year-old or whatever age you prefer – fully refreshed, full of energy, able
to do the things you once were able to do?
We like to feel good.
We don’t like sickness. It
attacks our bodies and minds. It
makes us feel tired, miserable, cranky.
It isolates us from other people and our normal daily activities.
Sickness is not a happy place for us.
It disrupts our work, our family life, our friendships.
To be sure the 10 people with
leprosy in the Gospel reading today were in this unhappy place.
They wanted to be pain free; they didn’t want to be miserable and cranky.
They no longer wanted to be isolated from the people they loved and the
rest of the world.
As you probably know, leprosy or
Hansens disease, was a horrible disfiguring disease with no cure in Jesus’ time.
It was thought to be contagious.
Anyone with this disease was sent away from their families and friends.
They formed their own communities or colonies completely separate from
everyone else. In fact, a person
with any kind of skin disease, perhaps sores or boils that were ugly and oozed
pus, was sent off with the lepers.
More than anything in the whole
world these 10 men wanted to be normal: they wanted to be healthy; they wanted
to return to their families; they no longer wanted to be the outsiders, those
who caused people to tremble as they passed by because they were considered
dangerous, unclean, less than human.
And it was all so unfair.
Where had this disease come from?
What had they done to deserve this kind of life.
They believed in the God of Abrahan, Isaac and Jacob and yet look what
has happened. People said they must
be terrible sinners, but really – what had they done?
There was no sympathy.
No-one understood their terrible situation.
They simply wanted this horrible disease to go away.
It’s no wonder they call out to
Jesus, “Jesus, Master, have mercy on us!”
“Jesus, look on us in your compassion, and make us well again!”
There isn’t any further
conversation between Jesus and the lepers.
Jesus, full of compassion and love for these desperate people, calls out
from a distance, “‘Go, and show yourself to the priests’ who are able to
declare that you have been healed”.
There is no immediate healing.
Jesus doesn’t go over and touch the lepers as he does in Luke 5 where
“Jesus reached out his hand and touched the man … and immediately the leprosy
left him” (Luke 5:13). The
lepers still have all the ugly signs of this sickness.
These men had experienced the grace of Jesus, his amazing love for them
as ugly and disfigured as they were.
Now they trusted Jesus, were obedient and followed Jesus’ instructions,
and believed that somehow, they will be healed.
All ten made this leap of faith believing that Jesus could make a
difference in their lives.
It was possible that when these
10 lepers weren’t instantly healed as the leper who was touched by Jesus, and
when they saw no change in their scarred and mangled bodies, they could have
lost their trust in Jesus, believing he had tricked them, or that their bodies
were so badly disfigured that Jesus couldn’t heal them.
They could have given into their disbelief and stopped travelling to see
the priest.
But we are told that all the men
were healed of the disease. They
had all trusted Jesus’ words, all were obedient, and all were healed.
The compassion and mercy and grace of Jesus had been generous.
They received so much without begging, bartering, paying, pleading,
promising, or grovelling. His generosity
and love were abundant. To use the
words of the Old Testament reading “their skin was like that a young child”.
Prayers are answered in
different ways. In this case the
men called out, but unlike other situations the obvious answer to their plea for
mercy wasn’t immediate. They had to
trust the word of Jesus. They had
to trust his compassion, his love and care for them.
The miracle happened over time, gradually, not instantly.
Have you found yourself in the
situation of the lepers and called out to God “Help me,
have mercy on me,
change me, change what is happening,
heal me,
help me understand why I feel like I do,
I believe but help me understand your timing, your fairness, your ways”.
We hear God speak to us through
the Scriptures and he reminds us again and again that we are his, he loves us,
he has shown how much he loves by sending his Son to die for us and has
conquered every evil and every trouble that can possible hurt us,
and yet,
in the thick of the battle when the pain is the worst,
when our hurting bodies ache for relief,
when our minds are looking for calm and peace,
when our souls are restless because we can’t grasp how a loving God can allow
evil to cause so much disruption in our lives, our families and our community,
when we lie awake at night restless and agitated by all that overwhelms our
minds,
and we feel alone and isolated in our own world of misery, we cry out like the
lepers, “Jesus, Master, have mercy on me!”.
Jesus is faithful to his
promise. He is compassionate and
kind. All ten lepers are healed.
No doubt they were overwhelmed with excitement with their newfound
health. Their isolation was at an
end and rushed to be reunited with their family and friends.
In their excitement, their
connection with Jesus evaporated because they believed he didn’t have anything
else to offer them. They had all
they needed. They even felt
entitled to what they received.
They might have said something like, “Well, after all we’ve been through, we
deserve a break”.
That is, all except one of those
healed. One who was doubly isolated
because he was not only a leper but also a Samaritan – Samaritans were
considered by the Jews as ritually and racially impure and unclean.
This despised man comes back to bow down at Jesus’ feet, to worship and
give thanks.
This double outcast has been
embraced by grace; he has been healed as Jesus promised and now responds
praising God loudly and thanking Jesus over and over.
This outsider sees something more in Jesus than all the other lepers.
“Rise up and go,” Jesus says,
“your faith has made you well”.
These words can also be translated, “Your faith has saved you”.
Jesus offers the grateful leper
a wellness that runs beyond the healing of the sores on his body.
The Samaritan saw Jesus with the new eyes of faith, trusting him and
believing in him as the giver of his healing and the giver of everything good.
His faith led him to gratitude, to thankfulness that his life had been
changed and will continue to be changed by Jesus.
He may have been doubly isolated as a leper and a Samaritan, but he has
now been doubly blessed by Jesus with healing and salvation.
Jesus wants to do far more than
cure our physical illnesses and worldly problems.
He wants to have a relationship with us that will not only help us in our
life now but a life that will last forever.
It’s clear that 9 of the people with leprosy were interested only in this
life and what the miraculous, physical cure meant for them in the here and now.
They had only trusted Jesus for what they could get.
Faith and gratitude are very
closely connected. In fact, we
might go so far as to say that faith is not faith at all unless it results in
gratitude. It’s easy to take what
we are given for granted, as something we deserve, as something we are entitled
to. We can easily do that in our
relationship with God.
Martin Luther said, “The
highest worship of God is to trust Him and to give Him thanks.”
(Luther’s Works, Vol. 44).
The lepers experienced Jesus’
grace: we experience God’s grace.
Grace fires up our faith,
faith fires up our gratitude,
and in gratitude we fire up worshipping God with singing and prayers and
service.
Sara worked in the city. She took
the train into the city and walked the last 15 minutes to the office block where
she worked.
Near the entrance to her workplace there was always a middle-aged woman in a
well-worn clothes holding a sign asking for spare change for food.
She had a pleasant smile and always said, “Good morning”.
Sara most often gave her something.
After several months, the woman in the well-worn clothes disappeared.
Sara wondered what had happened to her.
Then, one sunny morning, once again she was in standing on the street in her
usual spot but somehow looking different.
Sara walked by and reached into her purse to give the usual donation, but
this time the woman stopped her.
She said, “Thank you for helping me all those days.
When you helped each day, I knew someone cared and revived my faith in
myself. And now I have a new job.”
With that, she reached into a bag and handed Sara a wrapped package.
She had been standing at her old spot waiting, not for a handout, but
waiting for people she recognized so that she could give them a doughnut.
She was thankful.
The woman in the well-worn clothes, like the lepers, experienced grace, generous
love, and like the Samaritan leper she responded to the grace with gratitude.
Grace gave a new faith and faith led to gratitude.
The action of the Samaritan
returning to Jesus, falling before him, worshipping him and giving thanks is
exactly the definition of what we do here when we come to worship.
We are all Samaritans – none of
us really belong, we are outsiders, sinners who have been made welcome by the
grace and compassion of Jesus. We
are here because we experience the grace of Jesus – like lepers we are helpless
to heal ourselves, helpless to change ourselves, beggars who can only hold out
our empty hands and plead, “Jesus, Master, have mercy on us!”
And we have experienced his
grace. We trust his love for us.
We know that his love will always hold us in the fiercest storm and stand
beside us in the wildest destructive winds and calm and soothe us when we are at
the weakest and most vulnerable.
We come here Sunday after Sunday
after Sunday, because we believe Jesus’ grace and mercy are unending even when
we think we don’t deserve it. We
are here to praise God for making us clean – even though we are disfigured with
sin.
Martin Luther was asked, “What is
worship?” He simply replied,
“Gratitude”.
Every day we are blessed by God.
As we go on our way, we rejoice and give thanks; for in giving thanks in
all things, we find that God, indeed, is in all things.
© Pastor Vince
Gerhardy
12th Octotber 2025
E-mail: sermonsonthenet@outlook.com
