It would be enough if all we take from our gospel text today is a recognition of the goodness of gratitude. It would be enough if the only moment that lingers with us from this story – is glimpsing a healed man falling at Jesus’ feet, crying out, “Thank you!”
“i thank You God for most this amazing day:” wrote the poet E. E. Cummings,
“for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue true dream of sky; and for everything
which is natural which is infinite which is yes”
Such grateful praise is shared by the poet of Psalm 66 that we heard earlier in the service, inviting us to join our own joy to the joyful noise of all creation in praise of our creator. There is wisdom in letting our lives be, to use poet Ross Gay’s phrase, a “Catalogue of Unabashed Gratitude.”
It would be enough if all we glean from our gospel story on this Sunday is that returning to gratitude is a pathway to praising the God who gives life. “Thank you” leads us into recognition and worship of the living God. But the gratitude and praise our story invites us into is not straightforward. It’s not a “Quick 5-Step Plan for How Gratitude Can Transform Your Daily Life.”
We meet Jesus at this point in the Gospel of Luke amid his complicated journey to Jerusalem. We can’t trace a precise line on the map where Jesus is walking. But we’re told that he is in the borderlands – between Samaria and Galilee. Questions of history and belonging and exclusion and identity surface and resurface in such places.
And as Jesus enters the edge of a particular village – a community forged in solidarity greets him. Ten people call out to him, they yell at him, “Jesus, Master, have mercy on us!” These men are identified as having a skin disease – they are men with lepra. You may have first heard this story referred to as being about “The Ten Lepers.” But the text does not call them that, fusing their identity to their condition – it instead names them as men with lepra.
Studying the Bible takes you down some strange and winding rabbit holes – and this week for me it was reading about ancient skin diseases and ritual purity. Lepra in Greek is a broad term referring to a number of white scaly skin diseases akin to Psoriasis or eczema or ringworm. What we call “leprosy” today – or Hansen’s disease – is something entirely different.
And so when Jesus hears the attention-getting yell for mercy and compassion from these men with lepra, with skin diseases…Jesus responds by telling them to show themselves to the priests, following the prescription of Jewish law described in Leviticus. Priestly understanding saw these skin conditions not as sinful or a moral failure, but as conditions which caused ritual impurity for which quarantine and ritual cleansing and offering sacrifices offered a pathway to reintegration back into the community.
Sometimes texts like this one – have been interpreted by Christians to try to show Jesus condemning or dismantling the systems of Jewish ritual purity and Jesus is portrayed as removing cumbersome barriers to accessing God’s healing power.
But scholars like former CHMFer Matthew Thiessen have argued that Jesus believes in the reality of ritual impurity that these skin conditions create. What Jesus is opposed to is not Jewish rituals but the “very existence of lepra itself” and the forces of death it represents. Jesus has the power to remove and heal the scaly white skin conditions reminiscent of the skin of a dead body. Jesus has the power to heal the very conditions that result in ritual impurity in the first place.1 Jesus has the power to overcome death and bring life.
And what I find mysterious and intriguing in the story is that we aren’t able to glimpse when and how that moment of healing happens for these ten men that Jesus tells to present themselves to the priests. We’re told that “as they left, they were cleansed.” Their healing happens on a journey that they are participating in.
But one man’ s journey takes an abrupt turn when he decides to disobey Jesus’ command to go see the priests. This man is Samaritan, who likely would not have had access to Jewish priests.2
His lone voice cries out loudly to God in praise for his healing… and he falls down putting his face at Jesus’ feet as “thank you, thank you, thank you” tumbles out of his mouth.
Now the polite thing for Jesus to say at this point would’ve been, “You’re welcome!” Or “Wow!” or something affirming of this man’s gratitude and praise to God. But Jesus instead asks a series of questions directed less at this man than at his disciples, who might’ve been standing around as onlookers: “Weren’t ten cleansed? Where are the other nine? Why did no one return to praise God except this foreigner?”
I don’t know why Jesus is frustrated that these nine simply followed his own instructions. But what I can’t shake off is that it is the Samaritan, the person who Jesus calls a foreigner – who is the one who recognizes the true impact of the healing. All ten men were cleansed of their skin disease, a disease that had isolated them. All ten men’s lives would be transformed by Jesus’ healing of this affliction.
But it was this man, this foreign man, an outcast because of his disease, an outsider by his status, it was this man who recognized that he was healed by the power of God at work in Jesus. And that recognition shifted everything for him. It turned him around in his tracks to glorify God and show gratitude to Jesus. His healing returned him to praise.
The gospel of Luke is filled with a cast of unexpected characters who reveal or recognize the power of God at work in Jesus. It is a teenage girl that will give birth to him who first sings of Jesus’ prophetic, world-upending salvation Jesus. It is the migrant shepherds who first greet baby Jesus and return home with praise songs on their lips. It is the unjust tax-collector who invites Jesus into their home. It is often the unexpected, the outcast, the stranger, the foreigner, the undocumented, the too young or the too old or the too sick – who becomes the one who recognizes and proclaims the life-giving, life-saving power of God.
Our story ends with Jesus finally speaking directly to the Samaritan man who was cleansed, “Get up and go,” Jesus says, “your faith has healed you.”
The word for healed here is the same word for saved. Get up and go – your faith has saved you. The salvation we experience in Christ is a restorative and holistic, it is personal and communal, a surprising healing on the road, a life that gives us strength for today and bright hope for tomorrow.
All ten people experienced the saving/healing power of the God of life that day. But one man glimpsed that experience through the trusting confidence of faith. He returned to praise God as the giver of life and thanked Jesus for his healing.
The E.E. Cummings poem that begins “i thank You God for most this amazing day” concludes with such a return to praise, with a stop you in the tracks recognition of the Divine:
“how should tasting touching hearing seeing
breathing any-lifted from the no
of all nothing-human merely being
doubt unimaginable You?
(now the ears of my ears awake and
now the eyes of my eyes are opened)”
So too, whether we consider ourselves an outcast or an insider, sick or strong, young or old, a foreigner or part of the family…may our ears awake and our eyes be opened so that might by faith, we return to praise whenever and wherever we encounter the goodness and healing and salvation of God. May our words and our lives, our whole beings be one prayer at the feet of the Giver of life, saying,
“Thank You, Thank You, Thank You.”
- Matthew Thiessen, “Chapter 3: Jesus and the Walking Dead” in Jesus and the Forces of Death: the Gospels’ Portrayal of Ritual Impurity within First-Century Judaism, (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2020), 43-68. ↩︎
- Mary Schertz, Luke, Believer’s Church Bible Commentary, (Harrisonburg, VA: Herald Press, 2023), 299.
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