Rise And Go; Your Faith Has Made You Well

This little scene sits in a long stretch of Luke that is often called the travel narrative. From Luke 9:51, Jesus has set his face towards Jerusalem, and everything after that is shaped by the journey to the cross. Our story opens by reminding us of it: “As he was on his way to Jerusalem, he was passing along the borders of Samaria and Galilee.”

That detail matters more than it looks. This is border country, the unsettled ground between Jewish Galilee to the north and Samaritan territory to the south, and Jews and Samaritans shared a long, bitter mutual contempt. It is the kind of in-between place where a mixed group of outcasts might end up, which fits the story, because one of these ten turns out to be a Samaritan. Disease had blurred a line that nothing else could. I find it telling that on the road to lay down his life, Jesus keeps stopping for the very people most others had stopped seeing.

Read it slowly and you notice Luke is careful with his verbs. As the ten go, “they were cleansed.” When the Samaritan turns back, “he saw that he was healed.” And the last line lands somewhere else again: “Your faith has healed you.”

The Greek behind that final sentence uses a word, sōzō, that can mean to heal but also to rescue and to save. It is the same family of words the Gospels use for salvation. All ten were cleansed of leprosy, and that is no small thing. But Jesus says something larger over the one who came back. Nine got their bodies back. One got his body back and met the One who gave it, and in the text it is only that meeting Jesus calls being made well. The same cure, in the end, was not the same gift.

“Go and show yourselves to the priests” can read like an odd instruction until you know the law behind it. Under Leviticus, a priest was the one who inspected a person with a skin disease and pronounced them clean, the official ruling that let them back into family, worship and ordinary life (Leviticus 13 and 14). Jesus is sending them to get their old lives signed back to them.

The striking thing is the order of events. He does not heal them on the spot and then send them. He sends them while they are still covered in sores, and “as they went, they were cleansed.” The healing happened in the walking. They had to act on his word before there was a scrap of evidence it would work. I have noticed how often trust actually goes like that. We rarely get the proof first and obey afterwards. More often we take the next ordinary step, still aching, still unsure, and the change meets us somewhere along the road. Faith here is not a feeling they worked up. It is feet, moving.

Luke does a cruel and kind thing with his timing. He lets you watch the one man fall on his face at Jesus’ feet, glorifying God, and only then drops the line: “and he was a Samaritan.” The person a devout Jew of the day would have written off twice over, once for the leprosy and once for being a Samaritan, is the single one who comes back. Jesus names it plainly: “Were there none found who returned to give glory to God, except this foreigner?”

This is one of Luke’s recurring notes. It is Luke who gives us a Samaritan as the hero of the parable in chapter 10, and Luke who keeps showing grace land on the people religion had ruled out. The shape of it points to Christ himself. The Saviour walking to Jerusalem to be despised and cut off is, on the way, received best by the despised and cut off. Gratitude, it turns out, is not produced by good standing. It comes from knowing you had nothing and were given everything anyway.

What unsettles me about the nine is that they were obeying. They were hurrying to the priests, doing exactly what Jesus told them to do. You can be busy with the right religious thing and still leave the thank you unsaid, and I know that from the inside. I have prayed hard through a frightening week, and the moment the test came back clear or the job came through, I was off into the relief of it, full of the gift and somehow finished with the Giver.

What helps me is small and physical, like the Samaritan turning his body round on the road. A muttered word of thanks at the kitchen sink. A pause before sleep to actually name two mercies from the day instead of only the worry. Paul tells the Thessalonians to give thanks in everything (1 Thessalonians 5:18), and the Psalmist tells his own soul not to forget the Lord’s benefits (Psalm 103:2), which rather suggests our souls forget unless we tell them not to. Gratitude is a practice before it is a feeling. You turn back, and then you mean it.

• Where in the last month did I take the gift and forget the Giver, hurrying on like the nine?
• Is there a word of thanks I have been meaning to say, to God or to a person, that I keep walking past?
• The healing came as they walked, before any proof. What next ordinary step is Jesus asking me to take while I still feel uncertain?
• The Samaritan was the outsider who knew where to kneel. Is there someone I have quietly written off, the way that crowd wrote him off?

If you want to keep going from here, sit with more of this Gospel and its road to Jerusalem at /bible/luke/, or find a verse for wherever your heart actually is today at /bible-verses-for-how-you-feel/.