If you remember from last week, we talked about the faith that moves mountains or rather “plants mulberry trees in the sea”, because that’s Luke’s version of the saying. To his disciples who ask him to increase their faith, Jesus replies: If you had faith the size of a mustard seed, you could say to this mulberry tree, “Be uprooted and planted in the sea”, and it would obey you.
We assumed it was a way of making fun of them a little bit: You want your faith to increase? But you haven’t even begun to have faith. And yet, rather than trying to make them feel bad about their lack of faith, Jesus follows up on his teaching pointing them in another direction, a starting point in a life of service. If you wish to have faith, start with being faithful and humble like the servants of the parable, doing their Master’s will day in and day out, only doing their duty out of pure obedience. And we noted something interesting is that Jesus himself could have had identified as the slave “putting on his apron” or “taking a towel”, like he did on his last evening washing the disciple’s feet. He will say later: I am among you as the one who serves (Luke 22:27). In this passage we have just read, that picks up where we left off, we know Jesus is on his way to Jerusalem, his life of service will even turn into sacrifice – giving his life for his friends and, by extension, for each one of us. So indeed we have good reasons to believe that when Jesus told the parable of the servants, rather than just enjoining his disciples to submit to authority, he may have in fact invited them to follow his example, doing God’s will in all things. We actually read this passage at Bud’s funeral on Friday. Jesus says: I have come down from heaven, not to do my own will, but the will of him who sent me. (John 6:38) In his parable, Jesus concludes that by following his example obeying God, the disciples will have done “only what [they] should have done” and they shouldn’t expect any kind of acknowledgment or thank you’s. He asks: Do you thank the slave for doing what was commanded? (Luke 17:9-10)
And so I am coming back to that story because I think that if we know how to read between the lines, it tells us a lot about how Jesus felt as he was heading to his death. It seems that he didn’t have a sense that the people he was helping were even a little bit grateful to him, it didn’t feel like he was doing something that people really knew how to appreciate. He had reached a point where he acted out of pure duty towards God because there was nothing rewarding in serving people who showed themselves hard hearted, or indifferent or maybe just distracted. And today with this Gospel, Luke continues to hammer the point. We may at first finds it beautiful, and it is, that one of the ten lepers turns back to say thank to Jesus for his healing, but it becomes kind of bittersweet when you do your research and you realize that this is the only time, in the whole Gospel, all four Gospels included, that someone actually says thank you to Jesus. I had to look it up because I couldn’t believe it, and yet this is the truth. Yes, we have people who praises God after Jesus heals them or visits them, some may manifest their joy or desire to follow Jesus but nobody says thank you for the pure sake of it, and not just to be polite but out of pure gratefulness.
Leprosy, as you may know, was a terrible terrible disease (still is today, when people cannot have access to medication). It is first a terrible for the disease in itself for what it does to one’s body: It attacks the nerves and makes one numb, so people lose their sense of touch and hurt themselves constantly, and then because of necrosis they start shrinking and be disfigured. But leprosy in Jesus’s world was even “twice terrible”. Because as if the disease in itself wasn’t bad enough, healthy people were very afraid of contagion and so lepers had to live away from the rest of the village. They couldn’t participate in the religious life, do their work or even be with their family, they had to live like outcasts. We know today that leprosy isn’t that contagious, but maybe it was more than people couldn’t stand to look at the lepers. It actually was in Moses’s Law itself to keep the lepers away (Leviticus 13-14), so it’s possible that he had prescribed as a safety measure to start with, had become to be seen by the people as God’s punishment. So it was three times terrible! The lepers were ritually unclean, something that could happen in different circumstances to different people, but this time there was almost no hope to be made clean again because leprosy couldn’t be healed – which meant that those affected could never be admitted again in God’s presence in the Temple. That’s the reason why Jesus asks the men to go show themselves to the priests, because only the priests could have declared them clean again, and able to reintegrate their former life of worship, go back to their occupations and their loved ones.
So when Jesus heals them, this is really a big deal – He does not just heal a disease, he sets the men free from isolation and lift the curse they believed to be under. And yet, only one man when he realizes he is healed, goes back to Jesus to thank him because he acknowledges that God is working through Jesus. The story tells us he was a Samaritan. Why him? Well, since he was a foreigner, maybe he had a more accurate sense that he didn’t deserve help from a Jew, that he had been given a special favor – but the truth is they all got one. Not only the nine other lepers, but it looks like Luke wants to tell this story for all Israel, which counted ten tribes and so the men represent all of God’s people. It’s important to realize that this story is the last healing Jesus does before he is arrested, and it’s a foretelling about the work of Christ itself who makes us “clean”, frees us from a leprosy that hurts us on three different levels: Sin destroys our body and brings death, Sin breaks our relationships and put a curse on men’s work (Genesis 3: 16-19). Finally, Sin alienates us from God’s presence (Adam and Eve are exiled from the garden). Jesus on the cross, will undo what was condemning us since the creation or rather the Fall of humankind.
And so, if they obvious lesson of the story we have heard today is that we should be more thankful to Jesus, the story tells us also why we should be thankful. We talked about thankfulness at Bible study and we reflected on the things we were thankful for: The beauty of the world, our life and health, those whom we love, the little joys of everyday. And we should be thankful for that, and yet if we are only thankful for that, we may not grasp the extend of what our thankfulness needs to be about. If we look at our psalm today, we realize that we are not invited to be thankful just for the world as it is, the creation, mainly we are invited to consider the works of God throughout History and in the Redemption that is offered to us, and we believe as Christians that ultimate Redemption is found in Jesus.
And I think it’s important we consider that because sometimes it’s so hard to be thankful when we are only thankful for creation or for the good things in our lives. It’s certainly great on a great day, but if we are only grateful for the good things that are in the world, where does it leave us on a bad day? And I mean, not just when it rains. Where does it leaves us when we suffer or see other sufferings, when the good order of the world is upside down? Most of the time, because we have been taught to be thankful, when things go wrong, we start praying prayers of thanksgiving that are at best resignation or at worst hypocrisy: Thank you because things could be worse (the thing is they can always be). But that’s not what thankfulness is about! Thankfulness, and that’s the topic of our passage, is about being first thankful for Redemption. The Hebrews were thankful for God’s commandments because they prevented them to do evil and to be separated from God’s presence. For us, we are thankful for Christ because in his death and Resurrection he does the ultimate cleansing that restores us to life, to relationships and to being admitted into God’s presence, And this, we can be thankful about even, and maybe especially, or our most terrible days without resignation or hypocrisy. Because in Jesus even the worst is never final, we believe that something better, something wonderful is to come. Whatever the leprosy of our world, Jesus will make it right.
And in the end, that’s what faith is all about. Isn’t it interesting that Jesus only declares to the one man who came back and was thankful that his faith has made him well? He isn’t talking about the healing – they all had been healed. Jesus actually said in the original text: “Your faith has saved you” because the man sees God at work in Jesus, a work that anticipates the work Jesus will do in his death and Resurrection. If we are able to see and acknowledge what God has done and is still doing in Jesus then indeed we are saved because we know that he continues to raise us up from the graves we dig for ourselves in countless ways when we sin or despair, and even when nothing is right we have the hope that the best is yet to come, and that’s what we are thankful for. Jesus, we are thankful for Jesus. Always.