“There are not found that returned to give glory to God, save this stranger”
Ten lepers, standing afar off on the outskirts of a certain unnamed village in the lands of Samaria and Galilee, cry out to Jesus for mercy. All ten were healed. Yet one turned back, Luke tells us, “glorifying God, giving him thanks,” and, indeed, in an extravagant manner, crying “with a loud voice and falling down on his face at his feet.” As Luke simply says, “he was a Samaritan.”
Jesus calls attention to the paradox of the one and the many. Ten were healed. But “where are the nine? There are not found that returned to give glory to God, save this stranger.” The Samaritan here as in last Sunday’s Gospel in the parable of the Good Samaritan is the stranger, the other, yet the one who shows us what it means to be human. In both cases, the Samaritan, the stranger, the other, really symbolizes what belongs to the truth of our common humanity, and in two ways: first, our being healed and restored by divine compassion in the care of one another, (such is “music at midnight” as we considered last week), and, secondly, in turning back, giving glory and thanks to God in whom all our good and the good of one another is found.
Giving thanks for healing and care and giving glory to God go together. The act of receiving and giving reveals the nature of salvation. If the “certain lawyer” learns in spite of himself who is the neighbour in the parable, so here in today’s Gospel, we learn that the love of God and the love of neighbour not only belong together as the fulfilling of the law in love, but as the very meaning of our being made whole and restored; in short, salvation. Jesus says directly to the stranger, “Arise, go thy way, thy faith hath made thee whole.” He is not simply healed of the contagion of leprosy, a bodily condition, which separates him from the human community, he is made whole or saved in terms of his whole person, his essential humanity. The terms are synonymous: Salvation is our wholeness both in body and soul as restored to the community of God in faith, hope, and love.
In returning and giving thanks we are made whole. Yet returning and giving thanks to God in Christ was not actually commanded by Jesus. All he said to the ten was “Go, and show yourselves unto the priests.” This references the customs and practices of Israel in the Jewish religion. Implicit in his directive is that they could only show themselves to the priests of Israel if they were no longer outcasts and defiled by their contagion of leprosy; in short, only if they were healed. In Luke’s wonderful economy of expression, “it came to pass, that as they went, they were healed.” All ten were healed.
What the story highlights is the profound movement of the one who “when he saw that he was healed, turned back.” Turned back to whom? To Jesus. But as with last Sunday’s parable, the turning follows upon what is seen. It makes explicit what seeing and compassion really mean in the parable of the Good Samaritan: the seeing is about an understanding of God’s grace at work in our recognition of one another in need; but also a recognition of ourselves and one another in God. The word of Jesus to all ten opens us to the real healing and restoration of our fallen and broken humanity in God.
As the Collect suggests this means the operation of the three theological virtues of faith, hope, and charity in us. We pray to God for their increase in us. They are not static but dynamic qualities of excellence. They are only in us as active principles, as living and alive to God. They belong essentially to the living form of our life in Christ.
The supernatural virtues of faith, hope, and love or charity belong to our human good and perfection through the programme of sanctification. They are about the good, namely, the wholeness or salvation which God intends and seeks for our humanity through the perfection of human nature and not its destruction.
They are implicit in this Gospel. The ten lepers have an insight of faith in God seen in Jesus whom they all call out to as “master” or teacher, (Luke uses επιστατα with its connotations of care and knowing as distinct from the term διδασκαλος, teacher, in Matthew and Mark). They have a faith that there is a principle of life and healing that can be known and communicated; in short, a truth which in turn gives hope, a hope that assumes and seeks the motion of love towards them. The three theological virtues are not add-ons but the ground of our life in and with God and one another. “The restoration of authentic humanity depends upon and is sustained by the supernatural virtues” as Fr. Robert Crouse notes.
Those virtues active in us belong to the radical freedom and essential dignity of our humanity illustrated in the one who “turned back” “when he saw that he was healed,” “glorifying God” in Jesus and “giving him thanks.” The word is ευχαριστων, the verbal form for the eucharist, which means thanksgiving. This is the profound recognition that God is life and light in whom we live and move and have our being. It is only in returning and giving thanks that we are truly human, truly ourselves as the children and sons of God, made in his image, and thus living towards and with God in prayer and praise, glorifying him and giving him worship. Only so are we free and made whole. It is the freest thing that we can do and yet it is entirely the motion of God in us; grace perfecting nature. A constant work of progress in us but fully realized in Christ.
Jesus sometimes uses the Samaritans to criticise Israel for not being fully faithful to the intent and meaning of the Law, which is the universal moral code or ethical teaching for all and thus cannot be limited by ethnicity, language, race, or religion. He is also reminding Israel of her true vocation to be “a light to lighten the nations” and the covenant for all peoples. In the weekly offices we have been reading through Second Kings and Second Chronicles about the ups and downs of the kings of Judah and Israel, the bad kings who turn away from the Lord and his word towards the Baals, the gods or principles of worldly conceit and power, versus the good kings who attempt to turn their people to God’s truth even in the face of external domination by other kingdoms, even trying, like Hezekiah, to re-establish the observance of the Passover (2 Ch. 30). The Passover recalls God’s act of liberating Israel from slavery in Egypt; it is the Old Testament prototype for the eucharist. The Samaritans, a Jewish sect, recognised only the Pentateuch or Torah, rejecting the rest of the Hebrew Scriptures, namely, the Prophets and the Writings. They regarded Mt. Gerizim as the holy place of Israel not Jerusalem.
But Jesus is not privileging the Samaritans over and above the Jews as we learned this week in the Evening Prayer readings from John 4 in the remarkable story of Jesus’ encounter with the Samaritan woman at the well of Samaria. In that exchange, such differences are brought out into the open and overcome. She says to Jesus, “Sir, I perceive that you are a prophet. Our fathers worshipped on this mountain (meaning Mt. Gerizim); and you say that in Jerusalem is the place where men ought to worship.” Jesus replies, “Woman, believe me, the hour is coming when neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem will you worship the Father. You worship what you do not know; we worship what we know, for salvation is from the Jews” (an essential point for Christians and one reason why the Hebrew Scriptures belong to the Holy Scripture for Christians). He goes on to say that “the true worshippers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for such the Father seeks to worship him. God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth.” She then speaks about the coming of the Messiah, the Christ who “will show us all things” to which Jesus says, “I who speak to you am he.” Wow. The Scriptures are God’s self-revelation which in turn reveal us to the truth of ourselves.
The dialogue is simply amazing and sets her in motion, not unlike Mary Magdalene, to testify to others, “Come, see a man who told me all that I ever did. Can this be the Christ?” This results in many Samaritans “believing in him because of the woman’s testimony” and because of what they also heard for themselves that “this is the Saviour of the world.” Today’s Gospel illustrates wonderfully the Epistle teaching about walking in the Spirit, fulfilling the law of Christ in bearing one another’s burdens and our own.; all through the theological virtues of grace moving in us. But only if we are alive to the radical life of God without which we cannot be whole and fully human; something which Jesus rather gently reminds us in this moving Gospel story.
“There are not found that returned to give glory to God, save this stranger”
Fr. David Curry
Trinity 14, 2026