Select here for a pdf version.
Luke 17:11-19
A sermon for the Eighteenth Sunday after Pentecost
We heard the Gospel text about the ten lepers, and you may have thought: The ten lepers today? Isn’t this usually a Thanksgiving text? What’s going on?
To be sure, we are marching through Luke, more or less. But the Lectionary Committee, however, had no trouble leaving out the parable of the Prodigal Son because they wanted to put it elsewhere. Why the ten lepers now?
The reason is: Thanksgiving in Canada is the second Monday in October. That’s tomorrow, October 13th. Happy Thanksgiving to the Canadians.
The Lectionary Committee sets the texts for the whole world, and in the fall, at least in the Northern hemisphere, there are harvest festivals everywhere, Thanksgiving festivals. Therefore, we have the ten lepers today.
Our Old Testament lesson is the story of Naaman, another leper who was healed. Both stories feature an outsider. In both cases the outsider does something the better way.
The story in 2 Kings is about this general in Syria, Naaman. He was the commanding general of the army, a man of mighty valor, but he had leprosy. That was a terrible disease and there was nothing he could do about it.
But Naaman’s wife had a little slave girl from Israel, and she said to her mistress: “Why don’t they go to the prophet in Israel? He could heal him.”
Naaman went to the king of Syria and said: “Give me permission to go.” He took a gift of about $10,000 and went to the king of Israel and said: “Heal me.” And the King of Israel said: “I don’t know how to do that. You’re just trying to make trouble.”
But fortunately, one of the servants of the King of Israel said: “There’s Elisha down the road. He can do that.”
So Naaman took his gift and his entourage and went down to see Elisha, but Elisha sent his servant to meet Naaman and the servant said: “Go to the River Jordan and dip yourself seven times.”
Naaman got mad and said: “What in the world? Shouldn’t Elisha at least have come himself and waved his hand over me or something?” Naaman thought: “Don’t we have good rivers in Syria, just as good as here?”
But fortunately, one of Naaman’s servants said to him: “If he had asked you to do some big thing, you would have done it, so why not go?”
So Naaman went and he did this and he was healed and said: “Behold, there is no God in all the earth but in Israel” (2 Kings 5:15).
Our second leprosy story today is the one about the ten lepers in Luke 17. The Samaritan could go with the nine as Jesus had told them to do, but when he saw he was healed, he turned back and fell at Jesus’ feet in thanks and praise.
The Jewish law required that the nine go and show themselves to the priest to have their healing legally certified. Perhaps that didn’t count for the Samaritan, who was not a Jew. But it was practical to have that certification.
What do we make of these accounts? You may think the message for today in both stories is: “Be like the outsider. Both of them chose the better way. We should, too. Amen.”
But no, that’s not what the texts are really about.
As we look at the Bible there is a danger that we treat the Bible like a law book. What we look for in there is God’s laws about what we should do, when, in fact, it’s really about something else.
Take, for example, this account about the ten lepers. Some years ago, at a Thanksgiving service the pastor read this text about the ten lepers, but he left out the one verse, verse 16, which says of the one who came back: “Now he was a Samaritan.”
How could the pastor do that?! Didn’t he get it? That’s the main point. The one who turned back was a Samaritan!
Who were the Samaritans? They were like first cousins of the Jewish people. They held to the first five books of Moses. But they did not worship in Jerusalem; they worshipped at Mount Gerizim. The Jews hated them because they kept the law in their own way, not the Jewish way.
When we look at the Gospel of Luke, we see the same thing happening in Luke 10 about the Good Samaritan as happens in Luke 17 about the Samaritan leper who was healed along with nine other lepers who were Jewish.
We misunderstand the parable of the Good Samaritan when we think it’s about doing the right thing. The Jewish people knew from Leviticus 19:18 who was the neighbor. The point of the parable is that it was a Samaritan, not that somebody did the right thing.
The whole parable has to do with Jewish law. It says the priest and the Levite went on by the side because the law said you have to keep yourself ritually clean.
The same is true in the parable of the Prodigal Son in Luke 15:11-32. That parable should really be called the parable of “the two brothers.”
The one brother said: “I’ve kept the law and you didn’t do anything for me, and here you are doing all this for the one who went off breaking the law and even working with pigs!”
But the father responded that what’s important is that the lost has been found.
Throughout the Gospel of Luke, the message is: God favors people who are not those we expect him to favor. We are like “the Jews,” who follow the law and are clean.
In Luke 7:32-50 there is the prostitute who washes Jesus’ feet. In Luke 19:1-10 there is Zaccheus the tax collector, a hated collaborator with Rome. Jesus rescues him. The way it works is not that kind of simple purity and doing the right thing that we like to think. It’s all very different from our logic.
In the Book of Acts (which Luke also wrote) we read in Acts 10:11-16 about the sheet full of animals coming down from heaven and how Peter said: “They are unclean.” And the Lord’s answer is: “No, they’re not. I declare that those rules about clean and unclean food don’t count any longer. My mercy and my ways are different from what you think.”
The question is: How is God working? Remember in Genesis 12:1-3 the Lord says to Abraham: “Go forth from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land I will show you. And I will make of you a great nation and . . . by you all the families of the earth shall bless themselves.”
But by the end of Isaiah, the land has disappeared, the people have all gone into exile, and the temple was destroyed.
Then comes Isaiah 66:23: “All flesh shall come to worship before me, says the Lord.”
How can that be when the land is gone, the people in exile, and the temple gone? It’s against the way our logic, our thinking, our calculations.
The same is true in the New Testament in an entirely different way.
It never occurs to the people in the Old Testament that God himself will come. In the Old Testament there are divine appearances, called theophanies.
In Genesis 18 there are three angels who come to Abraham, and then just the one speaking as the Lord (Gen 18:10, 13-14), but the Lord wasn’t truly there; it was another theophany.
It never occurred to the ancient Hebrews that God himself would truly come to be one of us. And then to die on the cross. It’s against our thinking, our logic, our categories.
The story of Naaman, the parable of the ten lepers—these accounts are remarkable ways of describing how God’s ways are different from our calculations, and we can be thankful for that.
And what about you and me? Remember how Naaman he got mad that Elisha didn’t come out, and the servant said to him: “If Elisha had asked you to do some great thing, you would have done it, so when he says to you: ‘Wash and be clean,’ why not just go do it?”
Luther in the Small Catechism writes of Baptism: “How can water do such great things—give the forgiveness of sin, deliverance from death and the devil, and grant eternal salvation?”
How can baptizing with ordinary water do that? It’s such a small thing. And the answer comes: “It’s not the water alone that produces these effects but the Word of God connected with the water.” Wash and be healed, forgiven, redeemed.
God’s ways are different from our calculations, and we can be thankful for that. Amen