10-15-95	Nine Ungrateful Lepers!	Jeremiah 29:1, 4-7

2 Timothy 2:8-15

Luke 17:11-19

Although Thanksgiving is over a month away, our gospel lesson for this morning is certainly on a thanksgiving theme. For what we have here is the story of ten lepers who meet Jesus on the road as he was travelling on a road that went along the border between Samaria and Galilee. And Jesus is just about to turn into a small village when these ten lepers cry out to him, "Jesus, Master, have pity on us!" Jesus tells them to go show themselves to the priests. And as they go they are healed of their leprosy. And only one of them, the Samaritan, seeing that he was healed, comes back to thank our Lord. And Jesus asks, "What? Weren't ten lepers cleansed? Where are the other nine? How come the only one to come back and praise God was this foreigner, this Samaritan? And then he said to the Samaritan, "Rise and go; your faith has made you well."

Now, we really shouldn't be too hard on those nine other lepers. And I don't think Jesus would have been, either. For, certainly, those nine other lepers probably had good reasons for not coming back to thank Jesus. In fact, they might have had some very good reasons.

For instance, when Jesus healed these lepers, he told them to go show themselves to the priests in the Temple. The Law of Moses was pretty clear in this regard. If a person was healed of leprosy he was supposed to go to the Temple to allow a priest to examine him. Upon examination, if the priest found that the person was indeed healed then he would be pronouced "clean." And, so, we can understand the urgency with which these healed lepers went. They saw that they were healed and they knew that they had to obey the law, or risk being censured for failing to do so.

But, evidently, this one healed Samaritan leper didn't worry about strictly adhering to the Law of Moses. Perhaps in meeting Jesus he realized that he had met a higher authority than Moses.