Luke 17:11-19 (Pentecost 18C)
St. John, Galveston 10/12/25
Rev. Alan Taylor

+ In Nomine Jesu +

Grace and peace to you, from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. Amen.

    Back in the early 2000’s, Tom Hanks starred in a movie called The Terminal. Essentially, the movie was about a man without a country. Hanks played a character who had landed in at New York cities JFK airport at the same time that a coup took place in his home country. Since he no longer had a country of origin, he couldn’t enter the United States. At the same, he couldn’t return home because he had no country to return to.

    His English was very poor, which made it difficult for him to figure out what to do. He took up residence in an abandoned part of the airport and he subsisted on scraps of food and ketchup packets left on tables at the food court. Each day, he would take his papers to the customs office in the airport and each day the clerk would look at him and his papers and then forcefully stamp his papers “unacceptable.” Over the course of the movie, as he wandered around the airport, Hanks mumbled that word to himself as if it had become his new persona. “Unacceptable.”

    I’m sure it’s probably just me, but whenever I read this passage from Luke 17 about the ten lepers, I think about that movie. In the first century, a man or woman with leprosy was considered “unacceptable,” although their situation was much more grave than the one depicted in the movie. Not only were they ostracized by the people of their community, their country, if you will, but they were also considered ritually and spiritually unclean. In the Bible, you see, leprosy was viewed as a powerful symbol of sin, of spiritual corruption, of and ritual impurity. And so, a person with leprosy bore in their flesh the stigma of being “unclean.” The title was, in many ways, their new persona. “Unclean,” “Unacceptable,” “Unwanted.”  

    While on His way to Jerusalem, walking between Samaria and Galilee, Jesus encountered ten men who suffered from leprosy. The men were obedient to the Law, and so, they kept their distance, both from Jesus and from everyone else in their little town. They weren’t silent though. They cried out though to Jesus, mostly likely because He was someone new, a stranger to their town. “Jesus, Master (they said), have mercy on us.” “(Jesus) saw them he said to them, “Go and show yourselves to the priests.””
 
    In their present condition, that was strange thing for Jesus to say to the men. “Go and show yourselves to the priests.” First of all, because of their condition, the men weren’t permitted to leave the confines of their little town. Remember, they were “unclean,” “unacceptable.” Secondly, as lepers, the priests would be the last people they would go and see, since their leprosy was a symbol of sin, and of spiritual corruption and ritual impurity.

    The men though did what Jesus told them to do. And as they made their way to the priests, they were cleansed. It was a miracle! At that moment, the men must have come to understand why Jesus told them to go to the priests. In Rabbinical law, it was the priest who had the power to write a certificate declaring a person to be clean after they had formerly been declared “unclean.” And so, nine of the men went their way to do as the Law prescribed.

    It’s often suggested that the nine men who went to the priests were unthankful to God that they were healed. The fact is, we don’t know for sure whether they were thankful or not, but it seems highly unlikely that they weren’t. I mean they were cleansed of one of the most horrible diseases the people in the ancient world were forced to contend with. There must have been at least a modicum of thankfulness in their hearts. The story, it would seem isn’t so much about the unthankfulness of the ten men verses the thankfulness of the one man. Rather, it’s about Jesus and one man’s faith in Him.

    The Old Testament, with it’s ritual laws, it’s distinctions between things that are clean and things are unclean, with it’s sacrifices and offerings, was to foreshadow the New Covenant that was to come. The New Covenant, of course, would be ushered in by the Messiah, the Anointed One of God. When the Messiah came into the world, He would be the priest of the New Covenant. While the Old Testament priest could declare someone who had formerly been declared “unclean” as clean, the Priest of the New Covenant could make such a declaration in a much more profound sense, since, by His own sacrifice, He could and would declare the sinner, holy and righteous.

    As the men made their way to present themselves to the priests, to get their certificate of “cleanliness,” one of them saw something in Jesus that the other’s did not see. And so, he returned to Him and “praised God with a loud voice; and he fell on his face at Jesus’ feet, giving him thanks. He was a Samaritan.”

    Ultimately, this story of the ten lepers is about the person of Jesus and the one man’s confession of Him. It is about your confession of Jesus too. In all of the various things that happen in your, whether good or bad, it matters what you believe and say about Jesus. Not because God is a stickler for theology and for right answers, but because what was depicted in the Old Testament regarding things that are clean and unclean is an absolute reality in God’s economy.

    I think maybe the Tom Hanks movie stuck with me over all these years because of that one little word, “unacceptable.” It’s a word that applied to all of us at one time, in terms of our relationship to God. Oh, the Bible doesn’t use that word, per se. Instead, it says things like “All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.” “There is none righteous, not even one.” “We were all, by nature, children of wrath.” “You were at that time separated from Christ, alienated from the commonwealth of Israel and strangers to the covenants of promise, having no hope and without God in the world.” “Unacceptable.”

    Thankfully, like He did for the ten lepers, God worked a miracle in your life too. You may have noticed that Jesus told the man who returned to him that “his faith had made him well.” The statement wasn’t in reference to the man’s leprosy. After all, all ten of the men were healed physically that day. The man’s faith didn’t cause or appropriate the gift of physical healing in his life. His faith did, however, receive another blessing of God, another miracle that day. In returning to Jesus, he confessed that Jesus was the Priest of the New Covenant. He was and is the fulfillment of everything promised by God in the Old Testament.  

    Like Simon Peter elsewhere in the Scriptures, the man who returned to Jesus was confessing that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of the Living God. He is the literal embodiment of God’s grace and forgiveness in the world. He is the One who dares to approach and converse with the “unacceptable,” that He might declare them dearly loved, even holy and righteous. And so He has done with you. “Your faith had made you well.”        

In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

The peace of God that passes all understanding keep your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus unto life everlasting. Amen.

+ Soli Deo Gloria +