Who Remembers To Give Thanks?

Luke 17:11-19

One early lesson that good and conscientious parents try to teach their children is to be grateful to others, and to say “thank you” when someone does something kind for them or gives them a gift.  Often one might hear a parent prompt their young child with “What do you say?” when they are given a gift. No one likes to see an ungrateful and selfish adult. In today’s Gospel reading from Luke we see ten people who were given a most special gift, and what their response was.

In the course of His ministry, Jesus traveled from village to village throughout Galilee, with many excursions south into Judea and Jerusalem.  In each location Jesus would teach and heal people. As our passage opens we see Him approaching another village when a group of ten people, standing a distance away, call out to Him.  Generally when people desired something from Jesus, such as healing, they came right up to Him, often crowding Him so much that He and the disciples could scarcely move around. However this time the group called to Jesus from a distance.  That was because they dared not approach Him or anyone. They were a group of lepers and were unclean, outcast.

The disease of leprosy in the Bible was a horrible skin disease, often terribly disfiguring the one afflicted, and greatly feared.  Some scholars today do not think that what we call leprosy today (Hansen’s Disease) is the same disease as in Biblical times. People with leprosy would have to live outside of the town, away from family, friends, and the community.   Family members would have to leave food, water, and clothing at the edge of town for the leprous loved one because the leper could not come in to town, nor the family member come directly to them. They were outcasts, unclean. This would naturally lead to depression in addition to the disease itself.  Yet Jesus broke this societal prohibition, and had touched lepers before, healing them (Matthew 8:1-3). He did not hesitate to come up to them, speak to them, and actually touch them.

These ten lepers lived in a camp together, some ways outside of the village.  When they heard that Jesus was coming to town they came as close as the Levitical Law allowed and called out to Him to have mercy on them, desiring to be healed (vs. 11-13).  Jesus then told the lepers to go and show themselves to the priest. He said this before any healing took place. It was as they were leaving, that the healing took place. These ten showed faith in that they started to head off to the priest, which one must do in order to be declared clean from the disease and be allowed back into society.  They showed faith and were healed (vs. 14). Do we trust and believe God enough that we act on what Jesus says, even before we see evidence that it is so?

As our passage continues we see that only one of the ten was grateful enough for his healing that he came back to thank Jesus (vs. 15-19).  Not only were they all healed from this painful and disfiguring disease, they could now rejoin their families and loved ones. Yet only one was grateful and thoughtful enough to return to Jesus first, and thank Him.  This man was not a Jew, either. He was a Samaritan, a foreigner. Although the nine were not wrong in running off to see the priests, as that pronouncement would mean they could finally go home, they weren’t entirely right, either.  They were following the letter of the Law, but they didn’t take the chance to thank and praise God. There are many who receive God’s gifts with an ungrateful spirit. The only one who returned to thank God was a Samaritan, one who was despised by the Jews. The others were ungrateful.

Sometimes it is someone we least expect who will turn to God and give Him praise and glory.  The Lord will always accept them. Do we fail to thank God for all of His blessings, especially for salvation that brought us to Him?  We were stained and unclean with sin, yet God came to us, touched us, and made us whole. To be unthankful, to be unappreciative to the Lord God is to be diseased in spirit.  Let’s be sure to be like that one man who returned to Jesus, and give Him thanks!