October 12, 2025
Luke 17:11-19
Five different times in the New Testament Jesus said to someone, “Your faith has made you well”. He said it to the woman who had been bleeding for 12 years after she had touched the fringe of His garment and was instantly healed. He said it to Bartimaeus, the blind beggar whose sight He restored. He said it to the woman who anointed His feet with perfume and wiped it with her hair. He said it to a blind man who he healed on the road to Jericho, you know, the guy who refused to be quiet when they told him to shut up. And then He said it in today’s lesson to the one leper out of the ten who was cured and returned to give Jesus thanks.
The medical name for leprosy is “Hansen’s Disease” and it is a condition characterized by a loss of sensation in body parts, especially the extremities. The inability to feel pain can lead to injuries caused by not responding to things that can hurt you. If you can’t feel a pin prick you won’t pull away from the pin. Hansen’s Disease is contagious and is transmitted through water droplets in the air spread by an infected person sneezing or coughing.
Now, when the Bible speaks of leprosy it is not necessarily speaking of Hansen’s Disease, Biblical leprosy can be any rash or discoloration of the skin that doesn’t go away in the prescribed 14 days. Two entire chapters of Leviticus, the 13th and 14th, are devoted to describing the various skin conditions that qualify as Biblical “leprosy”. The Hebrew word that is used is צָרַ֖עַת (tsahl-ah) and in Leviticus the NIV does of good job of translating this word, not as “leprosy” but as a “defiling skin disease”.
Due to the extremely contagious nature of Hansen’s Disease, isolation of people with the disease was essential. However, non-contagious diseases such as psoriasis or even a simple, persistent rash could still have rendered a person unclean, and banished them from the Jewish community.
I think it’s important for us to understand just how horrific the isolation was for those who had been declared “unclean” due to צָרַ֖עַת. Probably the first thing to know is the fact that these skin diseases were believed to be a direct result of personal sin, so there was a stigma attached to the disease that not only were you sick and probably contagious, but that you were an evil person as well.
So stringent was this isolation that if an unaffected person came within 50 paces, or about 125 feet, of a person with צָרַ֖עַת, the unaffected person would be rendered unclean themselves. And so, the first thing that one would lose if they were declared unclean would be personal contact; personal contact with friends, with families, with spouses, and even with your children. And of course, you would be excluded from worship and barred from the temple, which was the center of Jewish community. Lepers were not permitted to bathe, probably because of fears of contaminating the water supply. Lepers were required to wear clothing that had been torn, a sign of grief. Lepers always had to have their nose and mouth covered, they were not permitted to cover their hair, which would have been shameful for women. They were required to wear or carry noise makers; bells, shakers, or things that they could clang together and whenever other people approached at a distance, they were required to make noise with these noise makers and shout continually, “unclean, unclean, unclean”. And you thought that “social distancing” was a Covid invention!
The isolation must have led these poor people to despair, and so, it is no wonder that lepers tended to live in community with other lepers. That community would have provided them with the only social interactions and support that they could possibly have.
In today’s story Jesus is approached by a group of ten lepers. We are not told how the lepers knew that Jesus was able to heal them, but we do know that word of His healing powers was widespread and given the fact that one of His earlier miracles was the healing of a leper, one would expect that that news would spread quickly through the leper community. And so, this group of lepers stood at a distance and shouted “Jesus, master, have pity on us”. When Jesus saw them, He instructed them to go and show themselves to the priest to be declared clean, as required by Jewish law. But when Jesus commanded this, they had not yet been healed, and so, it required some faith on the part of each of the ten lepers to turn and begin the journey to the nearest synagogue. Our text tells us that they were healed “along the way”.
One of the ten lepers, realizing that he had been healed, returned to Jesus to thank Him. And not only just to thank Him. Our text tells us that the man “Threw himself at Jesus’ feet”. My interlinear Greek Bible translates this passage as “He fell on his face at Jesus’ feet, giving thanks”. This one leper, overwhelmed with gratitude at his healing was the only one who returned to thank Jesus for healing him. And then… our text tells us that he was a Samaritan.
And before I go on, I would like to make a little observation. We have often discussed the Samaritans and the animosity that existed between Samaritans and Jews. We’ve learned a little about the origins of that animosity, how the Jews viewed the Samaritans as half-breeds and blasphemers and how the Samaritans viewed the Jews as hostile, inflexible, and arrogant when it came to their faith. Since the other nine lepers are all quickly making their way to the closest synagogue to have themselves declared clean, it is probably a safe assumption that they are all Jews. And yet this Samaritan was living among these Jews as a part of their community. The difficulties that these lepers faced, the fact that they were ostracized and excluded from the life and worship of the general community resulted in their being banded together for their mutual support and acceptance, and the racial aspect of their relationship, this hatred of the Jews and the Samaritans towards each other had been set aside in the interest of that support and acceptance that they all so desperately needed. Isn’t it a shame that sometimes it takes personal adversity to lead people to become more human.
And so, our nine Jewish lepers hurry to the synagogue, undoubtedly grateful… undoubtedly. But their eagerness to be declared clean, to be restored to all of that which they had lost when they became sick, friends, family, spouses, and children. To be able to worship again, to work again, to live normal lives without the stigma of being both contagious and sinful, all of this compelled them to haste. The sooner they were declared clean, the sooner they could return to normalcy. And so, it’s not at all hard to understand their enthusiasm. And even though, thankfully, WE don’t have to deal with the difficulties that they faced. Even though we are not isolated from community or worship, even though we are not looked down upon as sinners bearing the punishment for our sin, there is still a lot for us to learn here.
Because this human tendency to rush into our responsibilities and into our favorite distractions and into our dreams, can occupy us to the point that we can also forget to show OUR gratitude for what God has so graciously done for us.
Only the Samaritan, the foreigner, that despised “other” returned to give thanks. And what happened next to our Samaritan friend was life changing for him. Our text tells us that Jesus said to him, “Rise and go; your faith has made you well.” But the NIV translation doesn’t quite give this statement the impact that it deserves. I started my remarks today with a list of the five people in the New Testament to whom Jesus said, “Your faith has made you well”. And in each of those five instances, Jesus used the Greek word, “σέσωκέν” (say-so-kyen) and σέσωκέν actually means to save. According to Helps Word Studies it means, “to deliver out of danger and into safety, used principally of God rescuing believers from the penalty and power of sin”. There is actually one other use of σέσωκέν in the New Testament that will help us to understand its impact. When the angel spoke to Joseph, telling him that Mary was pregnant, he told Joseph that this baby that would be born “will save his people from their sins” and the word that we translate here as “save” is σέσωκέν.
The Samaritan leper was not just healed of his infirmity, his gratitude to God for what God had done for Him in Jesus, allowed God to SAVE him. Our Samaritan friend, in God’s act of grace and in his corresponding act of gratitude was restored to right relationship with God and was made whole not only in body but in Spirit as well.
The Presbyterian pastor and theologian R. C. Sproul says,” Beloved, it is one thing to be grateful; it is something else altogether to show it, to manifest it, to DO gratitude. Feeling and doing are not the same thing. If a person is truly grateful, [they] show it, and [they] show it in worship and service to God. That is the part of this passage that is so precious—the response of the man who was healed: “With a loud voice he glorified God, and fell down on his face at His feet, giving Him thanks.”
This morning, as we look at all five of the people in the New Testament to whom Jesus had said “Your faith has made you well”, we find in each instance that same gratitude; that same burning desire to thank and to glorify God for what He has done. This was not a gratitude that was felt while hurrying along to continue living one’s life. This was a gratitude that was life changing. This was a gratitude that caused each of these recipients of God’s extravagant grace to stop in their tracks and to recognize the magnitude of what God had just done for them. And in that moment of gratitude something happened in each of their lives where their relationship with God moved from the theoretical to the personal. It was a point at which God suddenly and emphatically touched their lives in such a way that they would never again be the same, because now they KNOW that God is real, they know that God is personally and intimately involved in their lives, and they know, without question, that God loves them!
My dear friends, have we felt this gratitude? Has God touched us with the power of His Spirit helping us to understand that He cares about us and is deeply and personally invested in our lives? Have we experienced His life changing love? If we have, let us not fail to bring Him our thanks and our praise and our worship. And let us live our lives in ways that are worthy of the grace and love that He has showered upon us.
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