Sermon 12 October 2025 17th Sunday After Trinity
Readings: 2 Kings 5.1-3, 7-15b; 2 Timothy 2.8-15; Luke 17.11-19.
Theme: One in Ten
The focus of our gospel on this seventeenth Sunday after Trinity is on gratitude. A gratitude that is not of the calculating sort, but rather of the kind which recognizes the gift of life, and allows this realization to well up inside a person as that of simple and unadulterated gratitude. When we do this there is a particular kind of joy which is experienced that is a very beautiful one of the gratuitousness of life. That all is gift, and because of this, we should live our lives in gratitude and thanksgiving for all that we have been given, not least, life itself. It is this which is in focus in the gospel for this Sunday about the ten lepers being healed and yet only one returning to thank Jesus.
Such a return of ten percent giving thanks to Jesus for the healing of the blight of leprosy is not a lot, but that is the success rate of Jesus recorded in this gospel passage. Perhaps, this incident of the healing of the ten lepers led to the eyebrows of the apostles being raised at this point about the whole venture of building the kingdom! And, in worldly terms, things are not looking good. The journey of Jesus to Jerusalem will end in tears, and all the hopes and expectations of the disciples will be shattered as the enterprise apparently results in complete failure with the eventual arrest and crucifixion of Jesus.
But, for the moment, there is a ray of hope. One in ten of the lepers, who had approached Jesus as he was on the way to Jerusalem, through the region between Samaria and Galilee, was healed and in gratitude came back to Jesus to thank him. Ironically, this one was not even a Jew! He was a Samaritan, a foreigner, and so someone ritually unclean anyway, from a Jewish perspective, at least.
This percentage return on Jesus’s ministry reveals important matters about the work of faith in Jesus. First, that it is not as we might expect it to be. Nobody deserves it through some kind of birthright or good deed that they may have done. Faith is freely given by the Lord, and often given in the most unexpected of places to those whom we might not imagine to be included in its promises; even, to the Samaritans!
Second, faith heals. This healing may not be from leprosy, for most of us at least (which, as our first reading from Second Kings reveals, during biblical times was indiscriminate in its outreach such that even Naaman, the commander of the king’s army, could catch it). Faith heals us of that most damaging of all diseases: despair, a lack of hope which prevents us from believing that we too may be included in God’s covenantal promise of salvation. With faith, the hope of inclusion in this promise springs eternal. This is why, even though a ten percent success rate is pretty poor, by most ordinary standards, this modest return reveals to us a third aspect of faith that it is good for us to contemplate.
Namely, faith allows us belong to what truly matters. It transcends other transitory forms of belonging that we may be clinging onto, such as our nationalisms, tribalisms, our wealth and our successes; and it incorporates us into God’s kingdom. And, this is why percentages are of little concern to faith, because the logic of ordinary success and failure is turned on its head by the inclusion it brings into the covenantal promise of salvation. That is why, paradoxically, it is the outsider in the story, the Samaritan, the foreign one who is now included, and who reveals to us the true identity markers of the citizens of God’s kingdom: Faith, hope and love. All the rest is just percentages of acquiring the identity markers of the calculus of belonging to the promises of another lesser kingdom.
So, as we contemplate this episode of the healing of the ten lepers it is a good occasion for us to review what it is that marks us out as belonging to the kingdom of God. The clearer we are about this, the easier it is for us to cultivate the attitudes, virtues and interior dispositions required to embrace this belonging to God’s kingdom. When we do this the ground is prepared for our believing in Jesus to transform itself into a belonging to the community of these believers.
Christianity, in this sense, is a team game. It is not one that we play on our own. We are always part of a much bigger community; a community which even transcends time and space in what is called the ‘communion of saints’ that we hope to join when our pilgrimage on this part of our journey into God comes to an end. However, as we journey now in this dimension of our journey, we can already begin to taste something of this belonging through our life as church.
Church is our training ground. It is the community in which we are to become practiced in the knowledge and love of God that brings us such unbridled joy. It should also school us in the characteristics which are given through this knowledge of God that we become aware of through our communal lives. In this sense, Christian knowledge, is a knowledge through doing. We learn who God is through enacting the gospel in our own lives and sharing in this enactment with others as they do the same.
Those ten lepers who came to Jesus for healing were on the same trajectory as us, in this respect, but only one of them came to a more mature understanding of who Jesus really is. It was this understanding that gave that leper the insight of true gratitude which came through realizing what the healing that Jesus had worked in them amounted to. It was nothing less than an encounter with the source of life itself that is mediated to us through faith and effects in us the gift of thanksgiving joy that transforms of lives into an offering of gratitude to God of praise.