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Were not ten cleansed? Where are the nine? Was no one found to return and give praise to God except this foreigner? Then he said to him, “Rise and go your way. Your faith has made you well.” Amen. In the name of Jesus. Amen.
Dear Saints of God, Jesus is still headed toward Jerusalem in the text, and along the way, somewhere between Galilee and Samaria, He encounters these ten lepers. Not leopards, as the bulletin says, although that might be exciting—ten lepers. Leprosy, remember, was a terrible disease, and it was most especially an isolating disease. Moses had given instructions about how to handle leprosy even in the Old Testament. There were some very specific instructions. If a person had leprosy, they were not allowed to live with the people. They had to live outside of the camp or outside of the city. They had to stay by themselves, and if anybody would get close to them, they were to announce their own leprosy by shouting out, “unclean, unclean,” which indicates that they’re lepers and that they’re not supposed to have any human society.
But these ten lepers on this day have a different yell, have a different cry when they see the Lord Jesus; they pray the Curia. They cry out, “Jesus, Master, have mercy on us,” and He does. Now wonderfully, Jesus sends these ten lepers to go to the priest, and this also was according to the law of Moses. It was Moses who said that if you have leprosy and it heals, you go and show yourself to the priest, and the priest can declare you clean. He can say, “No, you can come back into society. You can come back and live with your family,” and so forth and so on. Jesus sends these ten lepers to show themselves to the priest, but notice that they are not cleansed yet. They still have leprosy when they leave the presence of Jesus.
Now this indicates maybe they had faith, or maybe they were just that desperate, or they didn’t have any other choice, but as they are going to be healed, all of a sudden their leprosy is healed; it’s gone; they are cleansed. And as this happens, one of them comes back, falls at the feet of Jesus, and gives him thanks. Now there’s so much wisdom and so much comfort in this text that we need a couple of hours to… Now don’t worry, I’m going to hint at some things and let you guys have homework to trace it out a little bit further because we want to focus especially on the idea of thanksgiving.
But there’s a couple of things to notice. One is that trouble brings people together. I mean, just, we know the history of the Scriptures well enough to know that the Samaritans and the Jews would never mix with one another. They would never be found together. They lived in different cities. A Jewish person would never go into the house of a Samaritan, and vice versa. These people hated each other. But here we find these ten lepers, and some of them are Jewish, and some of them are Samaritan. Now, it’s curious, but it’s an important point to note that that kind of intense trouble, that having leprosy or something like that, actually brings down the barriers of society as other barriers are lifted.
Now, there’s a practical point to this for us, and it is because there’s this great temptation—I mean, it’s like this in every society. Ours is no different. But there’s this great temptation that we divide ourselves up into little groups based on our wealth or poverty, based on our family heritage or our ethnicity or our language or whatever, that we divide up into these little groups and that we don’t separate with each other, but affliction and trouble tear down the walls that divide us. And that’s how it should be for us, and very practically like this: When we realize that we are sinners, let me say it like this, when I know that I’m a sinner, then there’s no way that I can look at myself as better than anybody else. When we realize that we are fallen and completely corrupt and that we deserve God’s wrath and eternal punishment, when we know that about ourselves, then there is a way that we find fellowship with every other person that we meet.
There’s no way that I can drive by someone that’s living on the street and despise them because they’re a sinner and I’m a sinner. There’s no way that I can see someone who disagrees with me politically or whatever and despise them for that because they’re a sinner and I’m a sinner; that trouble creates a fellowship. And we have this fellowship of being created by God and being sinners in need of the Lord’s mercy. So this is really quite something that we find the Jew and the Gentile, the Jew and the Samaritan leper together in this. And we should realize that our own sinfulness collapses those sort of barriers. It’s just something to think about from the text, a point to pick up on.
A second point is this, that we don’t want to miss in the text, and that is that this text presents to us Jesus as God. This Samaritan comes back after he’s cleansed of this leprosy and he falls on his feet and he worships Jesus. And if we need evidence from the Scriptures that Jesus is God, this is where we find it, that Jesus is worshiped. Jesus, in fact, says it, “Does no one found to come and return and give thanks to God except for this guy?” And who was he giving thanks to? Jesus, because Jesus is, in fact, God. And so Luke is helping along this argument that we have that Jesus, the Son of God, is true God, God of God, light of light, very God of very God, begotten, not made. It’s a fine point in the text, and we don’t want to miss it.
There’s a third thing that we don’t want to miss, and that is that Jesus is teaching us something about the difference between the Old Testament and the New Testament. It’s something that we wonder when we see the ten, nine don’t come back, and the one does. We wonder if maybe that’s because he was a Samaritan and he wouldn’t have been even allowed into the temple complex to show himself to the priests. So maybe nine were Jewish and one was a Samaritan, and they find themselves healed, and those guys say, “We’re going to the priest, good luck buddy,” and so he has to turn around and go back to Jesus. But here’s the point that Jesus and the gospel are making: that Jesus is going to be the place where all people, from every tribe and every tongue and every nation, Jesus is the place where all people will worship.
In the Old Testament, the worship of God was limited to a particular place. The Lord said, “Where I cause my name to be remembered, there I will come to you and there I will bless you.” And so, it was at the tabernacle and then at Jerusalem where the true worship of God took place. But remember what Jesus says: “Tear the temple down, and in three days I’ll build it back up.” And he was speaking of the temple of his body. So the true worship of God now is not in Jerusalem, not in the New Testament. The true worship of God occurs wherever the Lord Jesus is with his word and with his body. That’s why we come to this place to worship the Lord, because this is the place where the Lord puts his body.
So we don’t want to miss that. But here—and this is getting to the main point—it has never seemed, and I don’t know if it’s the same for you all, but it’s never seemed quite fair to me that Jesus is so hard on the nine lepers who were cleansed, because these nine who were cleansed, after all, were doing what Jesus said. Jesus said, “Go show yourselves to the priest,” and as far as we can tell, they did that. They went to the temple; they showed themselves to the priest; and yet when the one comes back and falls down at the feet of Jesus, he gets upset at the other ones. “Were there none others found who could return and give thanks?” And this is what we want to turn our attention to because Jesus wants to press the point that the true worship of God is found in thanksgiving.
The true worship of God is found in giving thanks to God for all of his benefits. So let’s meditate on thankfulness, and I want to make three… I don’t know, you have to ask the people here this morning if these are small points or medium-sized points. I don’t think they’re big points. Three medium-sized points on thankfulness.
Number one, thankfulness is the mirror opposite of worry. If you want to—in other words, maybe we can tell what thankfulness is by the contrast of what it’s not, and thankfulness is not worry. Now I don’t know how you guys are, but I think one of the ways you can tell the difference between one person and another is by what they think about when they’re going to bed at night. Are you thinking about when you lay down to go to bed, are you thinking about all of the things that happened already that day? Or are you thinking about all the things that need to happen tomorrow? Or some sort of mix of the two?
I think in my… It’s like 20% are thinking back, about 30% are thinking forward, and half of the people are kind of somewhere in the middle. I think it’s particularly interesting. Now, just to speak for myself, I am a guy that just only thinks about the next day. In fact, I can’t even hardly remember what I had for dinner. I can’t even remember what I preached in the first service. I mean, it’s always thinking next—what’s coming next? But here’s what happens when you’re thinking about what’s coming next. You’re thinking about what? You’re thinking about the things that are not done, the things that need to be done, the things that you have to do, and that leaves room for worry, or at least for fretting.
Now, that happens to be the exact opposite of thankfulness. To be thankful, you can’t think about the future. There’s nothing yet to be thankful for. To be thankful, you have to think only of the past and of the present. Also, to be thankful is not thinking about the things that you must do, but in fact, to think about the things that someone else has done, so that thankfulness involves a fundamental reorientation of the direction of our mind.
It’s no accident that the leper had to turn around to give thanks to Jesus, that he had to go back and look what was behind him and recognize what was done in order to give thanks. This is the kind of anatomy of thankfulness. It lives in the past—it lives passively on what someone else has done. I think there’s a reason, for example, that St. Paul begins almost every one of the letters that he writes to the church with thankfulness: “I thank the Lord always in every remembrance of you; first, I give thanks,” and so forth and so on, because as Paul thinks about the church, as Paul thinks about the people that he’s writing to, he realizes something—in fact, a handful of very fundamental things.
Number one, that nobody can believe without God’s help. Number two, that nobody would be interested in God’s Word without the Holy Spirit working. Paul knows that every church should be empty. Paul knows, in fact, that heaven itself should be empty except for the Lord working the miracle of faith. And so Paul looks at the church with this profound thankfulness on the things that God has already done. I realized this a couple of years ago. I realized that I would think of the church and my work in the church and I wasn’t looking backwards; I was always looking forward. I wasn’t recognizing what was done; I was always thinking about what has to be done. I was always thinking about the things that needed to be accomplished. I was always thinking about the things that were there waiting for me and all of this sort of stuff, and I realized that the way Paul looks at his work and the way that Paul looks at the church is better here, to recognize the things that God has already done and to give thanks for them.
So there are two fundamentally different ways to look at our lives, to look at our families, to look at our work, to look at our time and our days and our calendar. There is the way that looks at all the things that need to be done, and that leads to worry, but then there is the opposite—that is to look at all of the things that the Lord has done already and to give thanks, so that thanksgiving becomes the mirror opposite of worry.
I want to show you this in the text. Paul writes to the Philippians, he says, “Don’t be anxious about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving, with thanksgiving, let your requests be made known to God, and then the peace of God that surpasses all understanding will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.” So worry is replaced and pushed out by thanksgiving—giving thanks to God and recognizing the things that He’s done. That’s the first point: that thankfulness is the mirror opposite of worry.
And here’s the second point. Christian thankfulness is different than non-Christian thankfulness because it looks not only to the gift but to the giver of the gifts. Here’s another contrast. I imagine that all of the ten lepers, as they were going along and they were healed, that all of them were grateful for the healing. All of them looked at their healed body and were very, very happy about it. But the one thing that makes this one guy who returns different is that he looked past the gift to the one who gave the gift. He looks past his healing to the healer. He looks past the cleansing to the one who cleansed him, and this is the essential difference to Christian thankfulness.
There’s a lot of talk—I don’t know if you guys have heard it, but I hear this all the time—a lot of talk about gratitude. In fact, there are books on gratitude; you listen to the radio, they’re talking about gratitude. There are all these corporate coaches that are talking about cultivating a culture of gratitude and all of this sort of stuff, and that’s fine for what it is, but I think that there’s a difference between gratitude and thankfulness. Gratitude recognizes the goodness of the gift, but thankfulness recognizes the goodness of the giver.
And here’s the difference: can you imagine the child who receives two plates? One is full of Twinkies and things like that, and the other is full of Brussels sprouts. Now what did gratitude do? Gratitude looks at the thing that you like, it looks at the plate full of Twinkies or whatever and it’s very grateful for this, but gratitude looks at the plate full of Brussels sprouts or the things that you don’t like and there’s nothing to be thankful for. You’re looking at that and you think, “Ah, that’s disgusting.” But the Christian knows better. The Christian knows that both plates come from my parents who love me. The Christian knows that if the Lord is dishing out Twinkies or dishing out Brussels sprouts, that both come from the One who loves us.
That means that you can be thankful for both. Now, think about this: you can be thankful for the good things and the bad things because you know where the bad stuff comes from. If the Lord hands you health, or He hands you sickness; if He hands you poverty, or if He hands you wealth; if He hands you good times, or He hands you bad times; if He hands you joy, or He hands you sorrow—it doesn’t matter. All of it comes from the Lord, and while we might not be able to be grateful for everything, we can be thankful for everything that the Lord gives to us. This is a fundamental difference in the way that the Christian looks at this life. It’s a fundamental difference in the way the Christian lives, that even the troubles that come to us, we give thanks to God for.
Listen to how Paul says it: “Rejoice always, pray without ceasing, give thanks in all circumstances, for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you,” so that we know that the one who did not spare his own Son but gave him for us all, shall he not also together with him give us good things? Or we can say it like this: that the hands that hand you your life have holes in them so that everything comes from the one who loves you, which means you can always, always give thanks.
The second point, and that is that Christian thankfulness is not merely gratitude but looks to the giver. And here’s the third point: thanksgiving is a theological reality connected to faith. I think we normally think of thankfulness as a matter of manners, like you know we teach the kids to say please and thank you, and that’s good; we should teach the kids to say please and thank you. But I think we have this kind of idea that thankfulness is just something that we do to be nice. But thanksgiving—I mean, this is what Jesus is teaching us this morning—thanksgiving is something much, much more profound than that.
Now here’s the text that really drove this point home for me. This is Romans chapter 1, where Paul is talking about what everybody can know from creation. And Paul is especially making the point that even the unbeliever, the non-Christian, will be judged by God to be guilty because they could know God from creation but they didn’t. And here’s how Paul says it: “What can be known about God is plain to them because God has shown it to them, for his invisible attributes, his eternal power, his divine nature, have been clearly perceived ever since the creation of the world and the things that have been made, so that they are without excuse. For although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him.”
Did you get it? They became futile in their thinking and their foolish hearts were darkened. Claiming to be wise, they became fools; they exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and creeping things. So that Paul says that one of the marks of the unbelieving world, one of the marks of idolatry, is a lack of thanksgiving. That’s an amazing sort of thing, that faithlessness is a thanklessness and a faithfulness is a thankfulness. So Jesus commends the leper who comes back full of thankfulness, and he says to him, “Your faith has saved you. Your faith, which is manifest in thanksgiving.”
Now this is one of the reasons why it is so hard to be thankful, why it is so easy to forget to give thanks, is because the devil can attack our thankfulness, and when he does that, he is attacking our faith. But the Lord fights back against the devil by giving us not only faith but thanks by reminding us of all of the things that the Lord has done. Faith, in other words, faith in Christ is full of thanksgiving. And why? Because we know we’re sinners, because we know we deserve the Lord’s judgment. We know what we’ve done. We know we’re guilty, and yet instead of judgment, we have the Lord’s kindness. We know we deserve—how do we say it in the confession? We deserve the Lord’s temporal and eternal punishment, but instead of having His temporal and eternal punishment, we have Jesus crucified for us, dead, buried, and raised. We have life instead of death. We have peace instead of turmoil. We have God’s life instead of God’s wrath, His kindness instead of His anger, and this is incredibly good to us, and it causes us to give thanks.
In fact, we see quite wonderfully the reason why Luke has given us this text and the Holy Spirit has brought us this text of the thankful man before us, and that is so that this man, this leper, cleansed from his leprosy, would not be the only one to come and bow down before Jesus, but that we would also join him, that we would also come to the body of Jesus, that we would also fall down on our knees, that we would also give Him thanks for all of His benefits to us.
So may God grant it. May God grant us a faith that trusts in the Lord Jesus Christ and that is thankful to God first for the death and resurrection of Jesus and then for everything else that He has to give. May our lives be set apart by the Lord’s gift of thankfulness, and may we all have the comfort of knowing that that thankfulness will never come to an end. God be praised. Amen.
Please stand. Paul writes these words to the Colossians, “Therefore, as you have received Christ Jesus the Lord, so walk in him, rooted and built up in Him and established in the faith, just as you were taught, abounding in thanksgiving.” Amen.
