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Sermon for the Eighteenth Sunday after Pentecost – October 12, 2025
Luke 17:11-19
Dear friends, grace to you and peace from God our Father and our Lord Jesus Christ.
As a pastor I am with people who are very sick on a regular basis. It is part of my job to bring the Word of God to people when they need it most, and so I find myself in hospitals on a fairly regular basis, meeting with people who are enduring various medical crises. And something I’ve observed over the years is that when people recover from a serious medical condition, oftentimes they are healed in ways that go beyond the physical. They are not only restored in body; something has changed in their soul too. They have a renewed perspective on things. Gratitude pours out of them in ways it didn’t before. Their faith comes into sharper focus, and so they are quicker to give praise and thanks to God. There is greater appreciation for all the gifts God gives. They aren’t just healed, they are well. They are well in a way they weren’t before, in body, mind, and spirit.
I notice this most profoundly in those who have been the most sick. I’m not going to name names, but if I were I could name at least three people in our congregation of a variety of ages who have been through serious health challenges in the past couple of years, all of whom have told me that their physical healing has changed them spiritually. And it isn’t just the patients themselves who experience this. Those who are closest to them do too. Their spouses, their parents, their loved ones often say the same thing. The healing of bodies often leads to greater spiritual and relational wellness, a wellness that is steeped in deep gratitude to God.
In our gospel reading for today we encounter ten people suffering from the disease of leprosy. This horrible disease causes your skin to tighten and shrivel up around your extremities, causing fingers and toes and even noses to fall off. Leprosy is still around today, and not fun to have in our own time, but it was an especially devastating diagnosis in the ancient world. Once you were diagnosed with it, you were immediately sent away. You were banished from your town, banished from your home, banished from your family, made to beg and roam about with other lepers. To be diagnosed with leprosy meant you would never again kiss your spouse. It meant you would never again hold your son or daughters’ hand. It meant you would never again be embraced by a friend. For Jews, to be diagnosed with leprosy also made you ritually unclean. As long as you had those lesions, you couldn’t attend worship, which meant you couldn’t make sacrifices of atonement for your sin. This meant that, for all practical purposes, you were cut off from God. And so it was a disease that went more than skin deep. There were relational and spiritual implications too.
These ten lepers called out to Jesus as he was traveling between Samaria and Galilee. They approached him, but they followed the rules. They didn’t come too close. They kept their distance. They called out to him saying, “Jesus, Master, have mercy on us!”
And Jesus did have mercy on them. Jesus had mercy on all ten of them. He told them to go and show themselves to the priests. They knew what this meant. The priests also functioned as de facto public health officials. It was their job to verify that their disease had been cured and then administer the rites of purification which would allow them back into the company of others and back into the worship life of God’s people. To be told to go and show themselves to the priests was a way of telling them that their healing was at hand, and sure enough, as they went, they were made clean. Their lesions vanished. They were healed.
One of the ten turned back. This one who turned back praised God with a loud voice. He knelt before Jesus and thanked him. And this one who turned back was a Samaritan. St. Luke, being a master storyteller, holds this important detail back from us until now. One of the ten – a Samaritan of all people – loudly praised God and knelt at Jesus’ feet, expressing his gratitude.
You can hardly blame the other nine. Jesus asked where they were. He asked why this Samaritan was the only one who returned to give glory to God. But the nine were only doing what Jesus told them to do! He told them to go show themselves to the priests, and that’s exactly what they did!
So what was it about the Samaritan that made him turn back? Perhaps it was because the Samaritan knew he had received the most mercy from Jesus. After all, Samaritans had no reason to expect anything from a Jewish healer. Jews weren’t supposed to interact with Samaritans at all. The Samaritans were the descendants of those who had been Jews from the northern kingdom but had intermarried with the Assyrians and had adopted many of their religious beliefs along the way. The Samaritans had cobbled together a hodge-podge spirituality of their own making and drifted away from the true God their people once knew. And so Samaritans were widely regarded as traitors and heretics. Perhaps the Samaritan knew he was in far worse shape than the other nine, and had received far more mercy from Jesus.
Jesus granted him physical healing, curing his leprosy. But there was more to it than that. Through this physical healing he had been given a whole new perspective. The Samaritan now praised God – the true God whom Jesus was making known. The Samaritan fell as Jesus’s feet in humble adoration for this gift he did not deserve, this gift of complete and utter grace. The Samaritan overflowed with gratitude.
And in response, Jesus said to him, “Get up and go on your way. Your faith has made you well.” The Samaritan wasn’t just healed; he was made well. His healing wasn’t just skin deep; it went down to the depths of his soul.
Martin Luther was once asked to describe the nature of true worship, to which he replied: “The tenth leper.” That was his response! He just said, “The tenth leper!” That’s what true worship is!
This answer makes a lot of sense, actually. After all, we follow the ancient traditional pattern of Christian worship by singing the Kyrie on most Sundays, which is the very same plea as the ten lepers. Together with them we cry out: “Lord, have mercy. Christ, have mercy. Lord, have mercy.” We sing this plea because we all have a spiritual sickness which makes us unclean, a spiritual sickness which separates us from God and often gets in the way of our relationships with one another too. We are all afflicted with the spiritual disease of sin. And it is here in worship that Jesus extends to us his great mercy. It is here that Jesus, our Master, hears our plea and responds with his grace, healing our sin-sick souls. He forgives our sin, he restores us to God, and he goes to work rebuilding our relationships with one another too. And so we offer him our thanks and our praise. We kneel before him in humble adoration. And then we rise to live a life marked not only by the obedience of the nine, but the deep gratitude of the tenth.
He is doing all of this right here for you today. His mercy and grace are for you too, no matter who you are.
It is wonderful when God grants physical healing. We are right to pray for it. We are right to seek it through medical professionals. But as we all know all too well, sometimes physical healing doesn’t come. Sometimes it comes only in part. Sometimes it comes imperfectly. Sometimes it doesn’t come at all.
But when it doesn’t come, it does not mean the Lord Jesus has ignored us. It doesn’t mean he has forsaken us. Jesus never fails to notice those who cry out to him, and he comes to us all with a healing that is more than skin deep. Jesus ultimately came for the healing of our souls.
No matter how far you may have drifted from God, no matter how unclean your life has been, Jesus has come to give you mercy. Jesus Christ took your disease upon himself on the cross, and he rose again to cure us from sin and death so that we could be with God forever. If that isn’t a healing that gets you to turn around and give thanks and praise God, I don’t know what is!
Trust in his mercy. Trust in his grace. This is the faith that makes us truly well.
And then watch as your entire perspective changes. Watch as you come to a greater appreciation for all the gifts of God. Watch as your life begins to overflow with gratitude. Watch as you find yourself more and more saying, “Thanks be to God.”
Amen
Rev. Jeffrey R. Spencer
Oak Harbor Lutheran Church