Sermon preached 6 September 2026
Reading: Luke 17:11–19
Tr. Pastor Lawrence McCatty
“God has had mercy on us”
Context
“On the way to Jerusalem”. We almost miss those 5 words, but Jesus is on His final journey to Jerusalem. In just a few months He will triumphantly enter the city to the cries of “Hosanna!” which a few days after will turn to “Crucify!”.
He does not take a direct route to Jerusalem. When the time is right, when His ministry is over, He will set His face to Jerusalem. In the meantime, there are many who need to hear His Word, who need healing both physically and spiritually.
So, Luke reports that:
“He was passing along between Samaria and Galilee”
The Ten Lepers
As He enters a village, 10 lepers approach Him, but remain at a distance.
Remaining at a distance had become second nature to them, for everyone avoided and shunned them. They could not worship in the temple, they could not have a job, they could not shop in the market, they could not experience the touch of another human being. All things we take so readily for granted.
The lepers had to live separated from God’s people, outside of towns and cities in temporary shelters that they had to make for themselves.
The law concerning lepers covers two whole chapters, chapters 13 and 14, in Leviticus, and as we hear in chapter 13:
44 he is a leprous man, he is unclean. The priest must pronounce him unclean; his disease is on his head. 45 “The leprous person who has the disease shall wear torn clothes and let the hair of his head hang loose, and he shall cover his upper lip and cry out, ‘Unclean, unclean.’ 46 He shall remain unclean as long as he has the disease. He is unclean. He shall live alone. His dwelling shall be outside the camp.Leviticus 13:44–46
If people felt that these disheveled, diseased outcasts were getting too close to them, that they may ‘catch’ their uncleanness then they were encouraged to throw stones to keep them at a distance.
In faith they ask for mercy and obey Jesus
So, from a distance they cry out in hope “Jesus, Master, have mercy on us.”
And Jesus does something unusual, unique in fact. He doesn’t administer His healing in an instant by a command as He has many times before. He doesn’t lay hands on them as He did when healing a leper early in His ministry.
Instead, He tells them to present themselves to the priests in the temple in Jerusalem.
In faith, they obey. Jesus hasn’t healed them, but trusting in Him they follow His command but must have wondered why they should do this.
The process detailed in Leviticus for diagnosing leprosy went something like this:
A person with a serious skin infection would go to a temple priest to be examined. The priest would look to see if the infection had penetrated the skin, or if the hair in the affected area had turned white. If so, he would declare the person “unclean” with leprosy. If not, a seven-day quarantine was instituted, with a new examination for leprosy scheduled soon after. (Read more in Leviticus 13:2–8).
Perhaps they thought that Jesus was sending them to get a second opinion, that their leprosy might be downgraded to a skin infection, or eczema.
And it is while they are on their way that they are healed. Jesus is nowhere in sight, not even within shouting distance, but His power is such that they are completely healed.
Their shame gone, they were new people. As newly restored people they could wash themselves, put on clean clothing and walk confidently into the temple of God in Jerusalem. There they could come to the priests and receive the official certificate that says they are now restored and clean, they could then sacrifice two birds as the law proscribed in what was called the “Offering of Cleansing” and come back into society without fear.
God had indeed had mercy on them.
Only one returns to Jesus
But one of them turns back. Instead of proceeding to the temple, he returns to Jesus:
“praising God with a loud voice; 16 and he fell on his face at Jesus’ feet, giving him thanks.”Luke 17:15–16
Wonderful!
And even more remarkable Luke notes that “He was a Samaritan.”
In last Sunday’s Gospel text Jesus told a parable about how a Samaritan had mercy on a Jew who had been robbed and beaten and left for dead. Jesus contrasted that Samaritan’s behaviour with two other men, a priest and a Levite, who had crossed to the other side of the road when they saw the poor man’s desperate plight. The use of a Samaritan, The Good Samaritan, in the parable would have shocked His Jewish listeners.
And now we hear of an actual Samaritan doing what the Jews so often failed to do. He recognises that Jesus is the Son of God, that He is worthy of praise and worship.
No wonder Jesus spoke of the response to His miracle with deep sadness in verse 17:
“Were not ten cleansed? Where are the nine?”
They were somewhere else, perhaps celebrating with family, but they were not at the feet of Jesus where they belonged.
They had forgotten who had healed them, the wondrous Lord, the Saviour, the Promised Messiah. In our Old Testament lesson, Moses warned against exactly this when he wrote:
11 “Take care lest you forget the Lord your God by not keeping his commandments and his rules and his statutes, which I command you today, 12 lest, when you have eaten and are full and have built good houses and live in them, 13 and when your herds and flocks multiply and your silver and gold is multiplied and all that you have is multiplied, 14 then your heart be lifted up, and you forget the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery, 15 who led you through the great and terrifying wilderness,Deuteronomy 8:11–15
Jesus had freed them from the slavery of leprosy, He had led them out of their terrifying wilderness.
Despite showing outward obedience to Jesus by continuing on to the temple to present themselves: “We’re healed,” they would have said to themselves, “so we must go to Jerusalem to show ourselves to the priests as the Master told us to.”
But there was one vital thing missing. It is the one who returned who shows us what that is.
The overflowing of his grateful heart for what the Son of God has done for him brings him back to Jesus in praise and thanks.
The fruit of the one, the fruit of the nine
See the fruit of the one, and compare it with the fruit of the nine.
For the nine are like so many people today. God blesses so many:
For he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust.Matthew 5:45b
… but they look to themselves, to their own works, to their own righteousness, as the source of all good things, rather than God. Those who receive much, often treat it with contempt.
We don’t know what happened to the other nine.
We do know that they didn’t later come to thank or praise Him, as Luke would have certainly reported that.
They may well have been convinced by the temple priests, who detested Jesus, that their “Offering of Cleansing” and obedience to the law was what really healed them. And thus, the priests would have destroyed the faith Jesus’ Word had sown in the lepers. Their faith did not even last the journey to the temple.
They remind us of those in the Parable of the Sower, in whom the seed of faith fell on the path and:
19 the evil one comes and snatches away what has been sown in his heartMatthew 13:19
The small seed of faith that had been sown in the hearts of all ten, had only taken firm root in the heart of one.
And so, it is “this foreigner”, this despised Samaritan, who was the only one whose saving faith bore the fruit of thanks and praise to God.
God has had mercy on us
Like the lepers, God has had mercy on us.
We were distant from Him, but by the hearing of His Word, He came to us and showed us our desperate condition.
He came to us as we could never come to Him. For we are riddled with sin, unclean, diseased, and separated from Him. His Word shone a light on our peril, on our infected and seemingly incurable state.
There was no cure for leprosy in Jesus’ time, and the world has no cure for those who now reject God’s Word.
So we made flimsy shelters with our fellow lepers outside of God’s Kingdom. But when we looked in the mirror of the law and saw what we truly are, diseased, without hope, all we could do was cry out “Jesus, have mercy on us.”
And then what? We see that Jesus was never far away, for He had already come to us. As Paul wrote in his letter to the churches in Rome:
8 but God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.Romans 5:8
He healed us, cleansed us, took off our torn rags and clothed us in His righteousness.
He has sown the seed of faith in our hearts, that has grown into beautiful fruit bearing vines. Sometimes scorched by the sun, sometimes attacked by disease, nibbled round the edges by worms, but nurtured and tended by the Holy Spirit through the means of grace.
Rise and go your way
Such is His love for us, such is His patience with us, that He continues to pour out His mercy on us day after day. Through His Word, through Baptism and the Lord’s Supper, we receive His mercy, His forgiveness, His healing of our souls.
Jesus tells the Samaritan:
“Rise and go your way; your faith has made you well.”
Jesus does not mean that the Samaritan’s faith had brought about his healing from leprosy. Like the Samaritan, our faith played no part in healing and restoring us, in making us well.
It is Jesus who has done it all.
Our faith is merely the beggar’s hand that receives His marvellous blessings that we have done nothing to earn.
The first fruit of that faith that has taken root is being truly thankful to Jesus for the blessings received.
It was in receiving a saving faith that we, and the Samaritan, have been made well.
True thankfulness comes from realising that God doesn’t owe us anything.
True thankfulness comes from seeing that everything we have is a gift.
True thankfulness comes from knowing Christ gave us everything – even himself.
Every time we are brought to the feet of Jesus, to the foot of His cross, we see the magnitude of what He has done for us and we are truly thankful.
So “Rise and go your way”
God has had mercy on you, He has saved you and has given you the faith in Him that has made you well”
Amen