Ten men share the same affliction and the same distance from everyone else. Leprosy kept its sufferers apart from town and from touch (Leviticus 13:45-46), and the ten stand 12"at a distance" and lift their voices together: 13"Jesus, Master, have mercy on us." One of them is a Samaritan, and Samaritans and Jews ordinarily kept apart, yet the disease has overridden an older division. Suffering has taught them who counts as a companion. They also know what they cannot do for themselves. They cannot cleanse their own skin, and they cannot walk into the village and ask for help, so their only move is to cry out from where they stand.
Jesus' instruction requires trust before any evidence: 14"Go and show yourselves to the priests." Only a priest could certify a leper clean and readmit him to ordinary life (Leviticus 14:2-3), so Jesus sends all ten toward the examination while they still look sick. 14"as they went they were cleansed." The healing happens on the road, in the act of obeying an instruction that made no sense yet.
What happens next splits the group in two. Nine keep walking toward the priests, as instructed. One, when he sees that he is healed, 15"turned back, praising God with a loud voice," and 16"fell on his face at Jesus' feet, giving him thanks." Luke tells us plainly who he is: 16"he was a Samaritan." The outsider with the least claim on Israel's promises is the only one who returns.
Jesus' question is spoken aloud for everyone, past the man at his feet, and it carries sorrow: were not ten cleansed, and where are the nine? Nine men received the same mercy as this Samaritan, and nine are somewhere else, presumably relieved and grateful in their private way, and absent from the one place where thanks was owed. 18"Was no one found to return and give praise to God except this foreigner?" The nine, heirs of every promise made to Abraham, forgot to return. The foreigner, with the least reason to feel entitled to mercy, recognized what had happened to him.
Jesus' last word reaches past the physical healing all ten received: 19"your faith has made you well." All ten were cleansed. Only this one is told that his faith has made him well, a wholeness the other nine walked away without, available to any of them and received by the man who turned around long enough to say thank you.
Jesus' phrase about faith is spoken after the cleansing and not before it. The healing came as they obeyed, and the wholeness came as the one returned. Gratitude in this story is the point at which gift becomes relationship. The nine kept the gift and went on with their lives, and the one kept the gift and found the giver.
Think of a mercy you received and kept walking. Turn around this week, find the person or the moment, and say thank you aloud, to God first.
Prayer
Father, thank you for mercy given freely, whether or not it is ever returned with thanks. Forgive us the many times we have kept walking toward our own relief without turning back to praise the one who gave it. Make us like the one and not the nine, quick to fall on our faces in gratitude, so that the healing you have given becomes the wholeness that faith, offered back to you, finishes. In Jesus' name, amen.