Giving Thanks

In our Gospel lesson this morning we hear about one of Jesus’s miraculous healings. He enters this village where there are 10 lepers who cry out to him for mercy. Jesus doesn’t actually act right away. He simply tells them to go and show themselves to the priests. And they respond with the very first steps of faith: they follow what he says without having received any sign of his mercy; they’re only healed ‘on the way’ to see the priests. 

Nine of the lepers keep going when they discover they’re healed. Just one, and a Samaritan i.e. outsider at that, turns around and praises God with a loud voice and prostrates himself at Jesus’s feet thanking him for having received the mercy of being healed. Jesus says to him: “where are the nine others whom I healed, were none of them willing to give praise to God except this foreigner? Get up and go on your way, your faith has made you well.”

The other nine lepers were like seeds that fall on the rocky soil: those who hear the message and immediately receive it with joy.  But since they don’t have deep roots, they don’t last long. They fall away as soon as things start to go well, or they start to have problems again. But this one leper who turns back, he is like a seed that falls on good soil: one who hears and understands God’s word, allowing him to bear good fruit for drawing others or pointing them to God. 

What’s the difference between the nine lepers who don’t turn back to thank God and the one who does? I can’t say for sure: was it a quirk of personality, his upbringing, perhaps the fact that he was always considered an outsider and so was raised with less sense of entitlement. What I can say is that the Samaritan's return to praise Jesus shows us that receiving God’s mercy involves a much deeper healing than merely physical healing. The Samaritan recognizes the source of that healing (rather than simply the gift of being healed for that moment) and this is what will carry him, in faith and realized hope, through future trials, illnesses, and eventually, death. The Samaritan therefore becomes an image of those who recognize Christ while many who affirm God’s promises with words, would fail to recognize Him when things don’t go their way.

“Were not ten cleansed? Where are the nine?” This question is intended to expose our tendency to seek God's gifts, to demand proof and evidence, to demand that we receive, that we have, that we are assured, before we are willing to commit to following him. This is to neglect God himself. It’s a warning not just to the Jewish lepers over and against the Samaritan leper, or the Jews who refuse to recognize Jesus, or those in the Church who begin with great zeal. 

No, it is a question for all of us to examine: do I love God only because of what he gives me here and now, or do I return to him because he is God. Because if we love God only on the basis of our immediate healing, on the basis of getting what we ask for right now, on the basis of getting what we think we want and need: healing of a disease, a fixed relationship, a particular job or promotion, the recognition we desire, what will happen to that love when we don’t get what we want when we want it? It is not for you to know the day or the hour. Will we wait on God, or pursue our own apples?

Jesus holds up the Samaritan as one who recognizes the source of healing. Because this source is God himself, God incarnate in Jesus Christ, the healing the Samaritan sees isn’t simply that of his leprosy; it is that of his whole life; from slavery to sin to life in the spirit, from death due to sin, to life in Christ, from eternal separation from God to eternal life with God. This is why he returns to Jesus and cries out with loud praises and then prostrates himself on the ground in an act of pure awe, shock, fear, amazement, and most profound thanksgiving. 

The nine lepers’ failure to thank God are warnings to us - you and I who show up in the church and do our duties - not to behave as though we are owed or entitled to the things we receive. We could receive good health, family, good jobs, that promotion, that nice house, that forgiveness, the gospel, the sacraments, and yet we could simply keep walking on with the nine healed lepers, asking what we want next. 

In contrast, the Samaritan’s thanksgiving is evidence to us, and a sign to us, that we recognize not simply the blessings that we have, the gifts we’ve been entrusted with, but the source of these things. To recognize and attend to the source, God. To turn to him and give thanks, and ask what it is that desires from us, as his image bearers. Called with the Samaritan to take those first steps of following God without seeing the immediate fruit; the thing we desire. Called with him to lay ourselves humbly down before God again and again, where like me, we can take hold of God’s true healing: of our hearts, our minds, our souls and one day, as we are raised with Christ, our bodies. AMEN