A sermon on Luke 17:11-19 for Thanksgiving. Delivered by Pastor Caleb Strutz. 

Christmas is one of the most exciting days in a child’s life because you can ask for just about anything, and you’ll get it. I remember one year I had my heart set on a Darth Vader voice changer. If you don’t know what that is, it’s a black plastic helmet, modeled after the villain in Star Wars, and it has a microphone that takes your voice and pitches it a lot deeper. I thought it was the coolest thing. I remember that that year, I was so excited for Thanksgiving—not even Christmas— because that’s when I saw my grandma and wrote it down on my Christmas list. I didn’t even have the gift yet, but I was excited just to ask, because I was looking forward so much to getting it.

In our text for today, we see ten men who shared that same eagerness to ask. All ten of them cried out to Christ for help, yet only one returned with a cry of thanksgiving.

I. For Help

Now, in order to understand the situation these men are in, we have to know something about leprosy. Leprosy is a miserable disease. It eats your flesh away right in front of your eyes, but you don’t even feel it because it kills all your nerve endings too. And at the time, it was thought to be highly contagious—the Law of Moses prescribed that if you were diagnosed with leprosy, you had to live in exile—not just for ten days after first showing symptoms, but for the rest of your life.

So when these ten men heard about Jesus, heard about the miracles He had done, maybe they even heard that He had healed a man from leprosy, they were overjoyed. Here’s someone who can help them! Here’s how they can get back to their families and communities and lives!

So when Jesus passes by them, they cry out to Him, not directly asking Him to heal them, but indirectly, for mercy. But it’s pretty obvious what their biggest problem is, right?. Jesus answers them, also indirectly. He tells them, “Go, show yourselves to the priests.” Now, if you have leprosy, there are only two occasions when you would see a priest. The first was to be diagnosed. But the Law of Moses also included a way back. 

If somehow you were cured of your leprosy (there wasn’t a known cure at the time, but it was sometimes used as an umbrella term for various different skin diseases), but you could show yourself to a priest, he would verify that you had been healed, then, after you offer several sacrifices, you would be declared clean and welcomed back into the community. 

Jesus sees eagerness to ask and trust in His power and providence and  responds by testing their trust. He didn’t wave his hands over them to heal them. He didn’t even explicitly say, “If you go, then you will be healed.” But He asked that they go to the priests while they could still see the leprosy on their skin. All ten men passed that test with flying colors and all ten were healed.

When Christmas finally came along that year, I was excited. I saw the box under the tree, it was like I had x-ray vision, I just knew exactly what it was. And when it was finally my turn, I tore off the wrapping paper and became absorbed in my present. The Darth Vader voice changer. Exactly what I wanted. But I was so focused on my gift that I lost sight of the bigger picture. All my attention was on my present that I failed to see what really mattered: that my grandmother loved me and wanted me to be happy. But that didn’t factor in at all in the moment.

Most of the lepers seem like children on Christmas morning. They were so focused on the blessing they had received that they lost sight of the true significance of what just happened. Jesus miraculously healed them and they just went on with their lives. They failed to recognize who Jesus really was and what He primarily came to do. He was not just some wonder worker who came to help people out, but the Son of God who came to save them from sin. They continued to the temple in Jerusalem to offer sacrifices because that’s where God was, failing to see God in the flesh right in front of them. How oblivious. How ignorant.

We can relate to the lepers, I feel. And in good ways. We too trust in Jesus and His providence and power, and we cry out to him when we face difficulties and trials and illnesses. And that’s a good thing! And He hears us and answers us. But I also have a creeping suspicion that nine times out of ten, we’re like nine lepers out of ten.

When God answers our cries to Him and pours out His blessing on us, how often do we take it and go on with our lives, like it wasn’t the very act of God. We are so eager to ask and so eager to get that we lose sight of the bigger picture. This is a far greater problem than just forgetting to say thank you, God isn’t that petty. But when we do this, we fail to acknowledge God as the source of every blessing in our lives. We get so caught up in the blessing that we subtract God from the equation. And then what happens? “Wow, I had a really rough time back then, but things really worked out for me, I did a good job with this.” We fall into a sinful individualism and deny God.

II. From Thanksgiving

As the nine headed down to Jerusalem, Jesus was too. Our text opens by saying “as He went to Jerusalem.” This was his final ascent to the holy city, and he knew full well what awaited him. Triumphal entry on Sunday, betrayal on Thursday, and death on Friday. He went without us even asking him, because we never would have come up with this plan. He went following the will of his Father, having the bigger picture in mind. He went with salvation on his mind. And on the cross, He won for us the forgiveness of sins, free and full, a blessing which we never even asked for, a blessing which covers over and cleanses all of our sin. This forgiveness removes every time we were unthankful, every time we failed to acknowledge God, all of it, gone, permanently. The nine went to offer sacrifices to make themselves clean. Christ went to offer himself as the ultimate sacrifice to cleanse the whole world. And by His resurrection, He showed forth the stamp of God’s approval. The Father accepted the sacrifice of the Son. You are a child of God. You have a right relationship with him. You are an heir of eternal life. We have received blessing upon blessing.

Luke gives us an example of how to respond to all these blessings in the healed Samaritan. Now, a Samaritan isn’t who you’d expect to be a positive example. Samaritans were half Jew, half Gentile, and openly denied their Jewish half. They followed a corrupted version of the Jewish religion with a lot of pagan influence. They didn’t worship at the temple and made their own fake temple in Samaria. One time some Samaritans tried to sabotage the temple right before the Passover, just so the Jews couldn’t celebrate it. So the Jews looked down on the Samaritans, perhaps rightfully so, but even refused to associate with them altogether. In fact, the word Jesus uses for “foreigner” is found nowhere else in the entire New Testament but was found quite famously on the signs in front of the temple: NO FOREIGNERS ALLOWED.  Here’s a man who wouldn’t even have been able to enter the temple in Jerusalem to offer the sacrifices the Law required of him.

But maybe exactly because of that, here’s a man who  knew his standing before God: a sinner awaiting condemnation. And because of that, he knew his need for a Savior. He was looking for the Messiah, who was promised to all people of all nations to take away their sin and make them the people of God. So when Jesus shows himself to be God through a display of his divine power, the Samaritan gets it. This Jesus is the one he’s been waiting for. This Jesus offers to him a healing far greater than any disease, the healing of the curse of sin. So he runs back, praising God and thanking Jesus: in Greek these actions are going on at the same time because they are one and the same. The Samaritan recognizes who Jesus is: God in the flesh who came to save him from sin. And that changes everything.

Now, the in-your-face application is that we should thank God when He gives us the blessings that we ask for. But that’s pretty obvious and I think we can take away something far more profound. Let’s put it this way: the Samaritan was better off having leprosy than not, because through that he got to meet Jesus. Now the hardships we face are difficult, and I’m not going to pretend like this is an all-encompassing explanation, but we can still see how God uses hardships to drive us ever closer to Him, so we rely on Him and realize just how dependent we are on Him, so we cry out to Him in prayer, so we seek Him where He has promised to be found in His holy Word and in the blessed Sacrament. We can give praise and thanks to God in every situation because He uses all things to strengthen our faith in Him and our relationship with Him, to lead us to Jesus.

So cry out to Christ. Trust in his power and in his goodness—He has promised to hear us and to answer us—cry out for help. But cry out also from thanksgiving. Certainly when He answers you how you want to be answered, but even when things don’t seem to be going your way.  Praise God in all things, in every trial and trouble and difficulty, knowing that through them He is guiding you into His loving arms. Amen.