Luke 17:11-19 – Now Thank We All Our God

1. The Setting (Luke 17:11)
2. The Lepers (Luke 17:12-13)
3. The Command (Luke 17:14a)
4. The Result (Luke 17:14b)
5. The Thankful (Luke 17:15-16)
6. The Lesson (Luke 17:17-19)

I came across an article in the Chicago Tribune on Thanksgiving Day which shows us how rich and blessed we really are. It’s titled, “Sure, Kings had castles—but did they have DSL?”

We live better than kings.

…Grab a crown. Most of us are far healthier, far more comfortable and have far more opportunities and diversions available to us than 99 percent of all the monarchs, emperors, maharajas and other potentates who’ve ever lived. We live longer, eat better and travel farther than the richest and most blessed people in virtually every other generation in every land in history.

We tend to forget this, just as we forget to savor the blessings of family, friendship, freedom and faith. So, as a reminder, I offer my amended list of stuff to be thankful for today:

Automobiles. Electricity. Flush toilets. Electronic-ignition gas stoves. Refrigerators. Microwave ovens. Hot-water heaters, central heating systems controlled by programmable thermostats. Alarm clocks that begin beeping softly and get gradually louder. Energy-saving bulb-shaped fluorescent lights that don’t burn out for years.

Cruise control. Digital photography. Answering machines. Velcro. Gore-Tex. CoolMax. No-iron dress shirts and no-stain khakis. Shoes that are broken in when you buy them. Clothes dryers that shut off using moisture sensors.

The availability of good coffee and warm, fast-food sub sandwiches. Post-it Notes. Spybot and Ad-Aware. Soap pumps. Carbon monoxide detectors.

Cordless drills, phones and weed whips. No-lick stamps. Bifocals without lines (and the snazzy term “progressive lenses” to describe them).

Affordable jet travel and cheap long-distance calling. Calculators so inexpensive you throw them away rather than replace the batteries. Lipitor. Faxes. Overnight mail.

PDAs, .pdf and PVRs. DVDs, CDs, MRIs and ATMs. DSL, GPS, Wi-Fi, MP3, USB-2 and, most astonishing of all, really, clean H {-2} 0 at the turn of a tap.

Cell phones. Blogs. E-mail. Google. And Firefox—the cool, new free Internet browser that makes Microsoft’s Internet Explorer look like that bird on your holiday table.

Double-pane windows. Titanium golf clubs. Coaster Frisbees. Surgical lasers. Anesthesia. Penicillin. Strings of holiday lights that don’t go dark when one of the bulbs burns out.

Nickel-metal hydride rechargeable batteries. Electronic guitar tuners. Laminators. Label makers. Big-box bookstores. Cordless phones with “locator” buttons to find the lost handsets.

Modern playground equipment. Run-flat tires. Air conditioning. Keyless entry. Pay at the pump. Comb binding. Walkman stereos with ear-bud headphones and speed-control playback. Nyquil. Taquitos. TV.

Flat-panel monitors. In-line skates. Tevas. Direct deposit. Automatic bill pay. Audio books. Public libraries. Air bags. Super SloMo. Instant replay. Mulching mowers. And, especially, finally, suitcases on wheels.

When you give the totality of your circumstance its annual second thought Thursday, think of the royals in hardscrabble antiquity raging with jealousy, and reflect:

At worst, you live in miraculous times.[1]

In America today, we have so much—arguably more than any other nation in the world, and yet we are so selfish and unthankful. I’m sure that we throw out more food and more possessions in one year than many people in the world will see in a lifetime. And yet, it is the greatest of gifts that we take for granted the most.

Martin Luther once said that “The greater God’s gifts and works, the less they are regarded.” A hungry man is more thankful for his morsel than a rich man for his overflowing table. A lonely woman in a nursing home will appreciate a visit more than a popular woman with a party thrown in her honor.

A Russian who finally gets his own copy of Scripture after seventy-five years of state-imposed atheism is more thankful for his little book than we are for all the Christian books and magazines and Bible translations that overflow our shelves.

Ralph Waldo Emerson observed that if the constellations appeared only once in thousand years, imagine what an exciting event it would be. But because they’re out every night, we barely give them a look.[2]

The greatest gift of God we often overlook is none other than Jesus Christ.

One of the evidences of the Holy Spirit’s work in our lives is a gradual reversal of this twisted pattern. God wants to make us people who exhibit a thankfulness in proper proportion to the gifts and blessings we’ve received.

We want to look at a passage where Christ attempts to teach his disciples this very thing. This passage is Luke 17:11-19—beginning with Luke 17:11.

The Setting (Luke 17:11)

Luke 17:11. Now it happened as He went to Jerusalem that He passed through the midst of Samaria and Galilee.

The time of Christ’s death was near, and the three years of Christ’s public ministry were almost complete, so Jesus was heading to Jerusalem with His disciples. He was coming down from the north, and verse 11 says he chose to travel along the border between Samaria and Galilee.

It is not really as important to know where these are on the map as it is to understand the significance of this statement. The significant thing to remember is that Jews considered Samaritans to be “half breeds.” Samaritans were Jews who had intermarried with other people groups, and so were no longer full-blooded Jews. This had caused a lot of tension over the years.

But then Jesus came along—and we see him telling stories about the Good Samaritan, we see him having conversations at wells with adulterous Samaritan women, and here in Luke 17, we see him walking the border between Samaria and Galilee—one of the dividing lines between two groups of people who hated each other.

And so with all of this in mind, we pick up in Luke 17:12.

The Lepers (Luke 17:12-13)

Luke 17:12. Then as He entered a certain village, there met Him ten men who were lepers, who stood afar off.

We are not told if this village was in Samaria or in Galilee, but whichever it was, we see that ten men who had leprosy met him there. Leprosy is one of the premier pictures of sin in Scripture. When you read the book of Leviticus, you can see how much God hates sin by how much attention he gives to rooting out and destroying leprosy from within the camp.

I’m sure you all know what leprosy is. It is a dreadful disease. Most people think that leprosy causes your skin to rot and fall off your body, but this is not really the case. The only thing that leprosy does is to destroy the body’s nervous system. It simply causes you not to be able to feel anything.

Leprosy causes your whole body to go numb. When someone is blind, they cannot see; when someone is deaf, they cannot hear; when someone has leprosy, they cannot feel.

Being blind and deaf never killed anyone, and by definition, having leprosy never killed anyone either. But imagine what your life would be like if you had leprosy. Sometimes a leper would be cutting vegetables for supper, and would accidentally cut off a finger and not even know it because they had no feeling. Sometimes, a leper would be sleeping by a fire, and would roll too close to the fire and burn off their foot without ever waking up. In the extreme cold, a leper would freeze his fingers and toes without ever knowing it.

So a leper does not die from leprosy, but from the damage that is done to their body because they have no feeling in their limbs. This is why leprosy is a perfect picture of sin. Sin causes us to lose all spiritual feeling just as leprosy causes it’s victims to lose all physical feeling. Sin causes our hearts to become hard and our conscience to become seared so that we perform and witness the most evil and depraved acts of man, and feel nothing but a detached disinterest.

Ten lepers met Jesus, but verse 12 says that they stood at a distance. Because leprosy was such a dreaded disease, those who had leprosy were cast off from the rest of society. They were expected to live outside the town—often in the garbage heaps, and to have no contact with former friends or family. This was for the safety of those who did not have leprosy, and also for their emotional well being. Seeing a leper who has an advanced case is a very distressing thing.

When I was in India several years ago for a mission trip, many lepers would walk the streets and beg. They did not stand off at a distance however. They would go up to tourists, and touch them and keep touching until they were given some money just to go away. Some of them were missing ears and legs. I saw some missing fingers and toes. They were cast off from society. Rejects. Refuse. Garbage.

At first, remembering what the Bible says about leprosy, we were scared to be touched by the lepers, but our mission trip leader told us not to worry about it. We were immune to leprosy. Yet even though we knew we could not become leprous, it was one of the saddest things I’ve ever seen. One old lady in a church service I spoke at, came up afterward, and with the aid of a translator, asked me to pray that she would die. That’s not a prayer request you get every day.

The lepers in the time of Jesus were made to stand at a distance, and if they were approached by anyone, they were required to shout out “Unclean! Unclean!” They knew they were lepers. They knew they were unclean. It was obvious to them as their flesh rotted away from their bones. They knew there was a chasm that separated them from everyone else, and it could not be crossed.

Again, it’s a lot like sin, isn’t it? Sin separates us from God, so that the only thing we can do is stand a distance and shout “Unclean! Unclean!” Once we get a hold of how holy God is and how much of a sinner we are, our only response can be like that of Isaiah in Isaiah 6: “Woe is me, for I am a man of unclean lips!”

So these lepers were standing at a distance, and maybe were shouting “Unclean! Unclean! as Jesus approached. But when they saw who He was, look what else they shouted in Luke 17:13.

Luke 17:13. And they lifted up their voices and said, “Jesus, Master, have mercy on us!”

Apparently, they had heard of the healing power of Jesus, and they called out to him for mercy. They called out to him for healing. Isn’t this how we call out to God when we are aware of how sinful we are? Spiritually, we are a rotting, decaying, putrefying corpse. And if we know it, we also know that all we can do is call out to God for mercy.

Luke shows us this. If you’re in Luke 17, turn over to Luke 18. The lepers were standing at a distance calling out for mercy. Look what Luke says in 18:13. This is very interesting. Here we have a tax collector. If the Jews despised lepers, they hated the tax collectors even more. They viewed tax collectors as traitors because they cheated their own people and worked for the Roman empire. But here, we see a tax collector, aware of his own sin, and what does Luke 18:13 say? “The tax collector stood at a distance…and said, “God, have mercy on me, a sinner.”

I am convinced this is an intentional parallel by Luke. The despised lepers standing at a distance and calling out to God for pity is just like the despised tax collector standing at a distance and calling out to God for mercy. That’s the way it is for us too. As sinners, all our good works are not thing but filthy rags in God’s sight, and so all we can do is stand at a distance, and cry out for God’s mercy.

But back in Luke 17, we see Christ’s response to their call for pity in Luke 17:14.

The Command (Luke 17:14a)

Luke 17:14a. So when He saw them, He said to them, “Go, show yourselves to the priests.”

Notice he doesn’t say “You are healed.” Notice also, that he doesn’t say, “If you show yourself to the priest, you will be healed.” He doesn’t promise them anything, he just tells them to show themselves to the priests.

But the promise was inherent in what he said. In Leviticus 13-14, someone who had been healed or who had recovered from a skin disease was required to present him or herself to the priest in order to be pronounced clean.

So Christ was saying, “You are not clean. But go anyway, and show yourself to the priest.” And they could have argued with him, and said, “But were not clean. He won’t pronounce us clean. If we do what you ask, we’ll just be humiliated more than we already are!” But they did not argue, whether they understood or not, they had faith in Jesus to do what he asked, and look what the rest of Luke 17:14 says.

The Result (Luke 17:14b)

Luke 17:14b. And so it was that as they went, they were cleansed.

In other words, while they were going, they were healed. Can you imagine the joy that all of them felt at that moment? They, who were outcast, who had no hope, who had no future to look forward to, now had received their lives back! They could now go home to friends and family. They could kiss their wives again. They could play with their children. They were cleansed!

And now we get to the heart of the passage. Look at Luke 17:15.

The Thankful (Luke 17:15-16)

Luke 17:15. And one of them, when he saw that he was healed, returned, and with a loud voice glorified God,

One of the ten came back, all the while giving thanks and praise to God.

Statistically, this account is true. When you serve others, only about 10% will thank you. Realize this when you serve others, or else you are in for a big disappointment. Serving others is a thankless task. This is why we must serve God rather than men, because we know that God always sees, and He will thank us when we stand before Him, even if humans do not.

Now, the other side of this coin is true too. Though only 10% will thank you, make sure that you are the 10% that thanks others. When someone does something good for you, or nice to you, or something for you, thank them! Give them a card. Send them a plate of cookies. Just call them on the phone and tell them how much you appreciate them.

When was the last time you thanked the person that cleans your church? Did you thank your children’s Sunday school teacher today for preparing lessons every week, and being here early, week in and week out?

When someone invites you over for dinner, do you send them a card afterwards thanking them for the meal and the fellowship? When you get gifts for Christmas, or your birthday, or a bridal shower, do you send thank you cards?

When was the last time you thanked the person who bagged your groceries, or your mail carrier, or your wife for doing the dishes, or your husband for mowing the lawn, or your kids for bringing their dirty clothes to the laundry room?

Though only 10% of people thank you when you serve them, be the 10% that thanks others for serving you.

But don’t just thank others, thank God also. Look what this leper did. The text says he returned with a loud voice, glorifying God. This was no meek and quiet praise to God out of fear that someone might be offended by his boisterous proclamation. He wanted the whole world to know what God had done for him! Luke 17:16 explains more.

Luke 17:16. he fell down on his face at His feet, giving Him thanks. And he was a Samaritan.

He thanked Jesus. I’m sure this was not just a nonchalant “Hey, thanks man.” It was profuse thanksgiving. It was a promise of undying loyalty. It was adoration and love.

And the text says he was a Samaritan. We don’t know for sure the nationality of the other nine. We just know that this one was a Samaritan. He had been despised because he was a Samaritan, and he had been despised because he was a leper, and he alone came back to thank God.

This again reminds me of the account of Luke 7. A woman who was aware of her many sins was forgiven by Christ and so she showed her love to him by washing his feet with her tears, drying them with her hair, and anointing them with very expensive perfume. Jesus says in Luke 7:47 that she loves much because she had been forgiven much. Those who are forgiven only a little, love only a little.

Christ is saying in Luke 7 that if we are really honest with ourselves, all of us have been forgiven much—so much that we cannot even comprehend how much. And if given a glimpse of how much we have been forgiven, we will show it by our love for Christ—like the woman in chapter 7—like the leper here in Luke 17.

The Lesson (Luke 17:17-19)

But in Luke 17:17, Jesus asks the same question we have been asking.

Luke 17:17-18. So Jesus answered and said, “Were there not ten cleansed? But where are the nine? Were there not any found who returned to give glory to God except this foreigner?”

Jesus asks, “Why did only this one come back to thank me? Where are the other nine? Why is this foreigner, this Samaritan, the only one who returned?” Jesus knew where the other nine were, so why was he asking the question, and who was He asking it to?

I believe he was asking it to those who were traveling with him to Jerusalem—he was asking these questions for the benefit of his disciples. His focus during this time was on teaching and training them, so this event was just as much for their benefit as it was for the 10 lepers.

First, let’s deal with where the other nine lepers were. Do you want to know where they were and what they were doing? Some have suggested the following reasons why the nine did not return. These are all excuses.

One waited to see if the cure was real.
One waited to see if it would last.
One said he would see Jesus later.
One decided that he had never had leprosy.
One said he would have gotten well anyway.
One gave the glory to the priests.
One said, “O, well, Jesus didn’t really do anything.”
One said, “Any rabbi could have done it.”
One said, “I was already getting better anyway.”

These are possible excuses, but I don’t think any of these are right. We often get down on them for not coming back to thank Jesus, but I think we do so unjustly. Do you want to know why none of the other nine returned?

I believe it is because THEY WERE OBEYING CHRIST! Christ had told them to go and show themselves to the priest, and that is exactly what they were doing. In fact, you can even imagine the conversation among themselves along the way: “That stupid Samaritan! Doesn’t he know God’s law? Doesn’t he know that we are supposed to show ourselves to the priest to be pronounced clean?”

In fact, I can just hear them saying, “We were healed on our way to the priest. If we turn back now to thank Jesus, he will condemn us for disobedience. We will become lepers again. We’ll go to the priest now, and then go and thank Christ later. There will be time later.”

And so they went, so intent on obedience that they forgot to thank the very One who made it possible for them to obey.

But the Samaritan, overwhelmed with gratitude, could not keep himself from doing what his new life demanded that he do—thank the One who had made him whole.

He knew that Christ had told him to go and show himself to the priest. But he also recognized that the One who had made him whole was more important that the one who would simply recognize that he had been made whole. Jesus had healed him; the priest would simply say “Yes, you have been healed.”

The Samaritan knew that one does not obey simply for obedience sake, but that obedience springs from a grateful heart. And so he returned to Jesus and thanked him…and look what Jesus says in verse 19.

Luke 17:19. And He said to him, “Arise, go your way. Your faith has made you well.”

Jesus made him well physically and then he also declared him well. This statement is nearly identical to what the priest would say to a healed leper. The priest would simply declare the person well.

So in returning to thank Jesus, the Samaritan had been obedient to Jesus as well! Jesus, according to the book of Hebrews, is our High Priest. The Samaritan leper, in returning to Jesus to thank him, went also to the High Priest of our salvation, and was declared well by Him.

You and I—we are lepers. And Jesus has redeemed us. He has healed us. He has made us whole. When we believe in Jesus for everlasting life, He gives it to us and promises that we will never become lepers again. We will never lose our eternal life.

And then He tells us to serve Him, and what do we do? We go serve Him. We go do things for the homeless people. And we do things for the homeless children in Africa. And we do things for the children in our own church. And we hold Bible studies and prayer meetings. After all, that’s what He told us to do, right?

No, it is not. He told us to serve Him. To love Him. To worship Him. To sit at His feet and listen to Him. But we get so busy trying to do all these things, that we forget completely about Him. Just like these lepers. We get so intent on doing what He told us to do, we forget completely that just ten minutes ago, we were lepers, and He has healed us, and our first priority is just to love him, and more than that—be loved by Him.

This holiday season can be a very busy time. Here’s my suggestion. Do less. Love more. Just put aside all your business and all the things you have to go do, and the people you have see, and just love Jesus. Sit at his feet and thank him. Sit on your couch, play some Christmas music, and praise Jesus that you are not a leper any more. Thank him for making you whole. That’s all He wants, and that’s all you need to do this holiday season.

As one author says, “Christ is stark-staring bonkers over you. He doesn’t [care] for all the wonderful things you’ve done…, or even for the sins you’ve messed it up with.”[3] He loves you no matter how much you’ve messed up, or how much you’ve fixed yourself up. Jesus is stuck on you, and He just wants to spend time with you.
“So get off the silly, works-righteousness kick of whipping yourself into a frenzy of love, repentance, and good works, and relax” in His love.

Be the tenth leper. Just forget about your to-do list, and come back to Jesus, fall at His feet, and say “thank you.”

Endnotes:

[1] Eric Zorn, “Sure, kings had castles—but did they have DSL?” Chicago Tribune, November 25, 2004.
[2] All of these opening lines come from Nelson’s Book of Illustrations, 736.
[3] Robert Farrar Capon, The Foolishness of Preaching (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998), 152. Warning: Capon is not for the theologically sensitive. He will offend you. He will shock you. He will even confuse you. But he will challenge you as well.