Luke 17:11-19
October 12, 2025
Rev. Amy P. McCullough, PhD
Atop the Corcovado Mountain in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, sits the world-famous Christ the Redeemer statue. Standing nearly 100 feet tall, made of concrete and soapstone, the figure depicts Christ looking toward those at his feet, with his arms outstretched, ready to embrace anyone who seeks his refuge. It is a compelling image. One experiences the strength of his presence through the all-seeing eyes, and ready-to-receive arms. Curiously, two other large statues of Jesus in the world — Christ the King in Poland and Jesus Buntu Burake in Indonesia — adopt the same stance. We might claim this as a universal image capturing the essence of Jesus: compassionate, open, and hospitable to us who come to him in need.
From the very beginnings of the faith, followers of Jesus recognized the connection between his presence and an inner wholeness of being. In Jesus lies a hospitality to our needs and a willingness to meet them. The capacity to sing “It is well with my soul” happen in his presence. Jesus himself articulates this unique sense of wellbeing when he says, “Your faith has made you well.” Four different times in Luke’s gospel suffering people come to Jesus seeking restoration. At the end of his interactions with them, he says, “Your faith has made you well.” What might Jesus be conveying? What might it mean to be made whole in Christ’s presence?
Jesus is walking in the region between Galilee and Samaria, which is not a geographical point so much as a spiritual one, that border between illness and health, between isolation and community, between longing for God and accepting God’s embrace. Ten persons with leprosy cry out to him for mercy. The white rash spreading across their bodies, with its swellings and disfigurement, requires they warn any approaching travelers of their existence. Jesus sees them. Jesus sees the redness of their arms, the boils across the neck, the tattered clothes and their knotted arms. Jesus sees through these external distractions to perceive them as persons alive and suffering in his presence.
Knowing their need, he heals them, without fanfare or loud announcement. Go on your way to priest, he tells them, which can only mean that their unclean bodies are about to become clean and ready for the priest’s inspection. The group sets off in a new direction, and “as they went, they were made clean.”
One of the ten does not make it to the priest. Instead, as he sees his skin become restored, he returns to Jesus’s feet, to thank the one who has repaired his body, to praise the God who worked through and is Christ. To this one, this 10th leper, Jesus makes the pronouncement “Your faith has made you well.” Something deeper than a cleansing has happened here, as important as that first healing was. What is it?
Perhaps the deeper transformation is the capacity to be grateful. That is what sets the tenth leper apart from the other nine; his instinctive return to Jesus to thank him for his mercy.
Thankfulness is a key to emotional-wellbeing, and an element of spiritual health as well. Psychologists affirm the benefits of gratitude journals or any daily discipline to count your blessings. Benefits include decreased stress, improved immunity, and deeper self-awareness. Arianna Huffington writes, “gratitude is like white blood cells for the soul, protecting us from cynicism, entitlement, anger and resignation.”
Gratitude is an element of faithful life. Whether it is the full moon rising in the darkening sky, or the wonder of a newborn with their smooth skin and tiny features, whether it is the strength to endure what you thought you could not or the unexpected kindness that softened the hardness of your heart, acknowledging the gifts, freely given, cultivates a particular spiritual awareness. It stirs an alertness to all the ways we are immersed in wondrousness by virtue of living in God’s good creation. In the end, we are creatures cared for by a loving creator. Practicing gratitude does just this.
But I think there is more going on in this story that just gratitude. Because as good as it is to be thankful and express our thanks, our relationship with Jesus includes more than mercy. Discipleship is also about obedience, trust, community, service, and ultimately cross-shaped lives. Mercy is in there, absolutely, but there is more. Haven’t you faced days — or seasons — when gratitude was hard to generate? When you’ve wanted to be thankful, but your heart is constricted by the suffering it has weathered? Even the apostle Paul, whose life was built on amazing grace, had a thorn in the flesh he begged to have removed, not just once but three times. Furthermore, scripture says the tenth leper fell on his feet and praised God before thanking Jesus. Something more than gratitude is going on.
Maybe that something is about how life, when touched by Jesus’s healing, returns us to community, enables us to enter back into circles of connectedness, learning anew that life is meant to be lived together. Persons with leprosy were required to live outside the bounds of a village. They could not enter homes, businesses, or village main streets. They could not work and so were reduced to begging for scraps of food or catching coins tossed their way. They had to vocalize their outcast status, calling “unclean” whenever someone came to close. Anyone who has experienced the way the world shrinks when the doctor says, “stage 4,” or when the house is suddenly empty, or when the door of the business says “we will not serve your kind” knows the sting of rejection faced by those who live on the margins of life.
The tenth leper demonstrated his awareness that much more than clean skin had been restored to him. Relationships were going to be restarted, the dignity of work would be available again, and the temple would no longer be out of bounds.
And yet that formal return did not erase the memories of exclusion. Sometimes when you come back from the far country you realize you are permanently altered, that the days of having to identify yourself by your disfigurement have left their scars. Sometime when you attempt to sit at the family table again, you notice how nights of huddling around a fire outside the village walls carved a hole of cynicism inside you. Healing one’s skin may make you more acceptable to polite society, but entering the village again does not always make one’s soul fully whole.
So, if gratitude is an important element of faith, but not the whole journey, and if a return to community is a part of Jesus’s work, but not necessarily easy to navigate, then what is the wholeness to which Jesus points, and the tenth one so gladly embraces?
Leprosy also carried a spiritual judgement. The condition excluded one from worship. And often the hurts and exclusions of our lives bring with them a sense of being exiled from God’s presence. And this spiritual banishment causes the most pain. “Did I do something wrong?” we wonder. Have I fallen outside your love?
Just as Jesus saw beyond the withered skin to the layers of suffering beneath the surface, the tenth leper sees the deeper reality at work beneath his healed skin and change of social location. Leper sees that in Jesus, love is being extended, a love whose source is God, who is love itself. It is this capacity for seeing God in Christ that brings him back to Jesus’s feet. It stirs his heart with praise. It makes him love in return. It is this seeing of God’s reality — what is really real — that makes him whole.
I have never met a person who does not carry some kind of wounding, who has not been standing, at some point, helpless on the roadside, crying out for mercy. Jesus sees into every situation. He hears us even if our voices do not shout; and like the Christs upon the mountaintop, extends his arms, opens his embrace, and draws us close to the saving power of his presence. Faith, says one scholar, is less a matter of believing as it is of seeing, seeing our lives held by God’s grace, seeing amid the struggling of our world in all its brokenness, that God is here, pulling us toward mercy, healing, wholeness, and love.
Your faith has made your whole. With that the tenth one was sent back into the world on his way to praise God, to share his story, and to love others. We who see the suffering all around us, the exclusion and cries for mercy coming from our country and our world have the wholeness of Christ to offer others. The healing we receive is ours to share. And never has that been more urgent than it is right now. Amen.