Luke 17:12-19 2023/12/17 Osaka Church
In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit
Ten lepers, from a distance, asked Jesus to heal them, saying, “Please have mercy on us.” One of these ten was a Samaritan. Leprosy, a disease that was considered an “incurable disease” at the time, bound these ten people together, transcending ethnic differences. And Christ also healed all of them who begged for mercy without distinction.
The ten people who were healed hurried to the priest to be officially considered to be clean, as required by the law. This, understandably, showed their continued attachment to their old way of life. Their joy was their own joy. They only understood their past suffering from their “disease,” now healed by a seemingly exceptional physician named Jesus. They must have run to the priest first, pushing away their companions who had been wallowing in their misfortune together. They wished to return to their former lives as quickly as possible. They were hurrying to lives of comfort and pleasure.
“Christ saved me, a sinner”. It is a cry of joy wrung from the heart of grace that every converted Christian knows. However, if we keep this joy to ourselves and confine ourselves to it, the gospel will not be able to fully express its life-giving power.
However, only one Samaritan returned to Jesus to give thanks. He noticed that the healing that Christ brought to him was actually not just for him, not just for the ten people who had just been healed, but for all people, a complete healing by God”. He put off “pleasing himself ” by not focusing on the priest proving that he had been healed, and in order to praise God and share his joy with God, he ran to the “true High Priest” Christ Jesus. “A completely new and great event had just occurred, and a new “time” had begun through this person. People and the entire world had started to surge with joy toward a new creation. He returned, leaping with joy, to acclaim this.
Jesus healed Jews and Samaritans without distinction. He realized that the God that Christ represented was the God of all people. He knew that this was a communion between God and all humanity, not the communion between God and the Jewish people, nor the communion between God and the Samaritans. He ran back to Christ to rejoice in the joy of God.
Christ told him, “Your faith has saved you,” and shared his joy as God himself. Indeed, salvation is not a cure for a specific illness, but it can only become a reality when a person changes their lifestyle from one that pleases oneself to one that pleases God, and returns to being grateful to God, in other words, “rejoicing in God’s joy.” .
Everything was done by God.
It is God who came down to us as God who became human. We did not go up to God. God did not discriminate among the ten lepers by ethnicity and healed them all. We also know it here now, in the Liturgy with various people who gather from all the world.
However, it is up to each of us whether we accept it, like the Samaritan who ran back to give thanks, as God’s salvation for all people, and as salvation for all life in the world. It is left up to you, free to choose.
It is within this freedom that a saved person prays for Christ’s salvation “offering thine own of thine own”, just as we pray each time in the Divine Liturgy. In this fellowship in which we are convinced of our salvation, we are gathered together as “we who have been saved” rather than “I who have been saved”. We gather for this worship of gratitude called the Eucharist, beginning to live in the communion of God’s love – that is the “Church.”