Gratitude, Healing and Hope
Gratitude, Healing and Hope
Luke 17:11-19
October 12, 2025
Rev. Cynthia Cochran-Carney, First Presbyterian Church, San Rafael, CA
On the way to Jerusalem Jesus was going through the region between Samaria and Galilee. As he entered a village, ten lepers approached him. Keeping their distance, they called out, saying, "Jesus, Master, have mercy on us!" When he saw them, he said to them, "Go and show yourselves to the priests." And as they went, they were made clean.
Then one of them, when he saw that he was healed, turned back, praising God with a loud voice. He prostrated himself at Jesus' feet and thanked him. And he was a Samaritan. Then Jesus asked, "Were not ten made clean? But the other nine, where are they? Was none of them found to return and give praise to God except this foreigner?" Then he said to him, "Get up and go on your way; your faith has made you well."
The story begins with ten lepers living on the edge of town, separated from their families, their livelihood, and all normal activities and company. Ten lepers who must shout a warning wherever they go that they’re unclean. They may or may not have had what we know today as Hansen’s disease, but they are lepers in that they are the ultimate outcasts.
Rev. Joanne Whitt offers a helpful interpretation and insight into this story from Luke. Jesus is on the road to Jerusalem. When the ten lepers hear that Jesus is in the neighborhood, they come as close as they dare and call out. Jesus tells them to go to the priest, because just as it took a priest to confirm that someone had leprosy, it also took a priest to declare that someone was healed. As the lepers head off to do as Jesus tells them, they are healed of their disease. Imagine the joy, the relief! As soon as the priest gives the okay, they can return to their families, return to worship in the temple, return to being productive members of their community.
Only one of the ex-lepers returns to say thank you. This passage is often interpreted as dealing with the importance of gratitude. It is powerful to notice how practicing gratitude affects our spiritual and physical health.
However, the healing didn’t depend on gratitude. The nine who didn’t return to say “thank you” were healed just the same. And they likely felt profoundly grateful even if they didn’t express it.
The one who turned back to praise God and thank Jesus was a Samaritan. Before Jesus heals the lepers, they’re just ten lepers, no distinctions. But once the ten all have been healed, the Samaritan, alone, remains unclean. There’s no cure for being a Samaritan, outsider. He would not be welcomed by the priest. A reminder about who the Samaritans were. We read in the Hebrew scriptures (Old Testament) that when Jewish exiles returned from Babylon to rebuild Jerusalem, the Samaritans offered to help, claiming to worship the same God. However, the Jews refused, leading to a long-standing conflict and deepening the division between the two groups. By the time of Jesus, Jews considered Samaritans to be a mixed-race people with a "half-pagan" religion. They avoided them, considered them an enemy and labeled them as unclean and unacceptable to Yahweh.
It is only to the Samaritan that Jesus says, “Your faith has made you well.” Four people in the Gospel of Luke hear those powerful words from Jesus: “Your faith has made you well.” Each is, in his or her own way, an outcast. Each healing is followed by a conversation about the Kin-dom of God – what life and the world look like under God’s rule.
Ten were healed. One was “made well.” Maybe Jesus is talking about a different kind of wellness. Maybe he meant that the divisions that separated Samaritans from Judeans and that continue to separate races, ethnicities, genders, nationalities, and religions are a much more serious malady than even leprosy. All the systems that create a “Them” that we can despise or ignore because they are not “Us.”
The others followed directions, but they failed to acknowledge the ultimate source of healing. God is unconcerned with citizenship when it comes to healing and hospitality.
Jesus’ final words to the grateful foreigner describe a healing that joins body, mind, spirit, and relationships, “Get up and go on your way; your faith has made you well.” That is God’s word to us: there is healing right in front of us and when we follow God’s path to healing, we will find wholeness.
One detail we might miss in the story is that at this point in Jesus’ journey to Jerusalem, he’s on the border between Galilee and Samaria - communities that were divided by generations of hatred and suspicion. Jews considered all Samaritans ritually unclean and even would travel miles out of their way to avoid having any contact with them.
What are some of the borderlands in us that feel unclear? Feel in between.
Traveling along borderlands –
Hope and despair? Being well and facing illness?
A chapter of life ending but new one not clear?
Border of life and death?
Struggles around faith and the church and belonging, on the edge.
Psalm 111 from our reading and our gospel story invite us to think about healing, wellness, cure and wholeness.
One of the members of my congregation in New Jersey named Sandy often reflected on what healing, hope and faith meant to her. She gave me permission to share her story with others. Sandy was an athlete and later a PE teacher and coach in middle school and high school. When she was in her 40’s, she had some strange symptoms and was finally diagnosed with MS. Devastating. She told me she was mad at God for a long time. Over time, she said she realized she was no longer praying for a cure but for healing – healing felt like peace, healing felt like gratitude for friends, her church family, her joy in reading and music. She said, “I experience God’s life-giving healing even though MS is robbing me of my physical freedom. I am open to God’s grace daily.” Sandy lived on her own for many years with support and eventually moved in with her sister. Sandy taught me so much about life, healing, hope and facing death with shalom. She welcomed Jesus’ words ‘Your faith has made you well.”
We don’t know exactly what Jesus meant, but it’s safe to say that, to Jesus, “wellness” does not include going back to a life of ego, of living in fear, of thinking too much of ourselves or too little, of living full of anger or regret or bitterness.
“Where are the nine?” asked Jesus. The nine were right back where they came from, safely on the right side of the border, healed of their exterior problems but locked back into their old life and prejudices. Maybe healed, but not well. Maybe fewer patches of skin sluffing off, but with hearts that refused to be transformed, vulnerable, open,
As Maggi Dawn writes, “We are healed not to stay the same, but to live differently.”
Live differently despite pain in our lives – mental, physical, spiritual. Pain in our lives. Pain in the world.
Richard Rohr has written extensively about Jesus’ ministry of healing. (excerpts)
Jesus is constantly on the move from place to place, preaching and healing. Jesus is conveying the good news of God’s big picture into people’s small worlds, and he does this much more than he talks about it. Jesus’ actions and physical healings consistently rearrange faulty relationships—with people’s own self-image, with others, with society, and with God who is from now on seen as on their side. The same is true for us today.
There’s not much profit in just thinking, “Wow, Jesus worked another miracle!” But there is much profit in noting the changed status, self-image, courage, and relationship to family or community that the healing invariably entails. This is the real transformative message.
I am not denying that Jesus did perform physical healings. It still happens, and over the years I have seen it many times. At the same time, the healings in the gospels are primarily to make statements about power, abuse, relationships, class, money, exclusion, the state of the poor, and the connections between soul and body—the same issues we face today.
Jesus also doesn’t heal as a reward for good behavior. Usually there is no mention whatsoever of any prerequisites, All of the healing stories are present-tense concerns for human suffering in this world. They tell us that God cares deeply about the tragic human condition now.
We are all initially created in the image of God, and Jesus’ public ministry is always recreating and restoring that image. Transformed people, like Jesus, naturally transform others. There is joy there. In Jesus’ ministry of healing, the transformations were immediately verifiable and visible.
The real message here is not a medical cure or whether Jesus could do such a thing, but that (1) God cares about human pain, (2) God cares about it in this world now, (3) God’s action actually changes people, and (4) the people who have experienced God’s grace are equipped to pass on the real message.
May we be open to many kinds of healing. In a world where people are hurting, may we be God’s instruments of hope. Amen.
Resources
Rev. Joanne Whitt, “Healed vs. Made Well,” blog entry for 10/12/25 https://solve-by-walking.com/2025/10/08/healed-vs-made-well/
Richard Rohr, “The Significance of Healing,” Center for Action and Contemplation, 1/26/25 https://cac.org/daily-meditations/the-significance-of-healing/ Jan 26, 2025
Maggi Dawn, “The untouchables: Luke 17:11-19,” The Christian Century 10/2/07 https://www.christiancentury.org/article/2007-10/untouchables