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Sermon for Trinity 14
Galatians 5:16-24 + Luke 17:11-19
In last week’s Gospel, we heard, again, the summary of God’s Law, what God’s will is for mankind: To love God with our whole selves, and to love our neighbor as we love ourselves. In that parable, the focus was on the neighbor. The Good Samaritan taught us how Christians are to love our neighbor, by always being willing to show mercy to the one in our path. But that, obviously, isn’t our posture toward God. We don’t love Him by showing Him mercy. How do we love God, then? The account of the Ten Lepers gives us an example of that. Love toward God, which always flows from faith in God, expresses itself in one of two ways. Either with a cry for mercy to the God whom we love, or with a cry of thanksgiving for mercy received from the God whom we love.
Our Gospel begins with ten lepers, ten men (most of whom were Jews, although at least one was a Samaritan, like the Good Samaritan from last week’s parable) who were afflicted with that terrible skin disease called leprosy. It forced them to live alone, separated from the rest of society. It forced them into poverty, because they couldn’t work. And it forced them away from God’s temple and from all the religious ceremonies that were part of Jewish life. To suffer from leprosy was a miserable existence.
But these ten men had found a ray of hope! They had heard of this Jesus of Nazareth—of His kindness and goodness to people in their misery, of His claim to have been sent by God, and of His ability to perform miracles of healing that only God could perform. They had heard. And they believed!
That believing, that beginning of faith, gave birth to their first work of love. They cried out from a distance, Jesus, Master, have mercy on us! Now, you may not think immediately of a cry for mercy as an act of love, and it isn’t always. A defendant in court may beg the judge for mercy, or a person who is being robbed and threatened at gunpoint may beg the robber for mercy, not as an act of love, but as an act of desperation, an act of fear. But where there is faith in God, and in the mercy He has promised for Christ’s sake, that cry for mercy isn’t an act of fear. It’s the response of a believer who knows that God is good, that God is merciful, that God has promised to help in times of trouble. It’s an act of worship, actually, to call upon God’s name in every trouble, seeking His mercy, and trusting in His goodness. It’s the first act that flows from faith. It’s an act of love.
Now, the cry for mercy, the “Kyrie, eleison” that the lepers cried (Kyrie is the Greek word for “Lord” and eleison is the Greek word for “have mercy!”) was very specific. They were asking for the mercy of healing from their leprosy. But the plea, “Have mercy! Eleison!” is all-inclusive. Kyrie eleison covers every need of body and soul, all in one word. Do you have guilt that needs God’s forgiveness? “Have mercy!” Are you in some kind of trouble? “Have mercy!” Are you praying for someone else who needs help, or is in trouble, or is sick or dying? “Have mercy!” Do you look at the evil world and have no idea how to cope with it any longer? “Have mercy!” It covers everything. We cry to God for mercy, because we believe in Him. We trust in Him. The very act of crying out to God for mercy, crying out to Him as your highest good and as your faithful Rock of refuge, is a form of love for God. That’s how He sees it. And He is pleased with it, whenever it flows from believing hearts.
Then the other part of love for God comes after God has shown His mercy, yet again.
Jesus, the Master, had mercy on the ten lepers. Go, He said. Show yourselves to the priests. The priests were the ones charged in Israel with diagnosing leprosy, registering a person as an unclean leper, and with diagnosing that a leper was no longer leprous, and then performing the cleansing rituals prescribed in God’s Law, so that the one who was clean of leprosy could become ceremonially clean again and reenter Jewish society. Jesus didn’t even need to say the words, “Be healed!” The healing was to be assumed, or else there would be no reason for them to show themselves to the priests.
And all ten got it. They went, as Jesus commanded. And it happened that, as they went, they were cleansed. The Lord had mercy on them, just as they had requested.
Then we see the other form of love for God, although we only see it in the one leper, not in the other nine. The one leper, a Samaritan at that, when he saw that he was healed, turned back, glorifying God with a loud voice. And he fell down on his face at Jesus’ feet, thanking him.
God shows all kinds of mercy to the unbelieving world, and it either goes unnoticed or unappreciated. But when God shows mercy to those who believe in Him, there will be a response of love in the form of thanksgiving. A cry of thanksgiving will proceed from the mouth of the believing recipient of mercy. But, notice, the leper didn’t just stop on the road, say a word of thanks up into the heavens, and then keep going. His feet took him back to where Jesus was located on earth. His knees took him to the ground at Jesus’ feet. His mouth spoke words of thanks and praise to Jesus, His God. And, of course, behind it all, was a heart that overflowed with thankfulness for the mercy he had asked for and received. The act of saying “Thank you” to God is love for God.
In fact, every genuine act of service to God, every act of obedience to His commandments, is, for the believer, an act, or a sacrifice, of thanksgiving. The entire life of the believer, who has received the mercy of God in so many forms, the greatest of all being the suffering and death of the Son of God for our sins, is obedience to God as a way of saying “Thank you” to God, which is a form of love. This is love for God, John writes: to keep His commandments.
St. Paul outlined the same thing for us in today’s Epistle. The life of the believer is to be characterized by love for God, walking by the Spirit, being led by the Spirit of God in every form of goodness and godliness, while struggling against every form of uncleanness and sin. To walk by the Spirit, to renounce the practices of wickedness—this is love for God. This is our daily practice of giving thanks.
And so we have the two basic forms of love for God highlighted in today’s Gospel: Crying out to Him for mercy, and saying “Thank you” to Him, both with our lips and with our lives, for His mercy.
If you think about it, practically all our hymns can be categorized either as prayers for mercy, or songs of thanksgiving. The same is true of all our prayers. The same is true of our liturgical responses. The same is true of the reverence we show while we are gathered here in the special presence of God. “Where two or three are gathered together in My name, there I am in the midst of them,” Jesus said. The same is true of your attentiveness to the sermon. The same is true of our celebration of the Sacrament of the Altar, which is appropriately called, “The Eucharist,” the Thanksgiving. Cries to God for mercy, and forms of saying “Thank you” to God for His mercy summarize the whole pattern of our worship, and the whole pattern of “loving the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength.”
But, we note in our Gospel a breakdown in the pattern. Now, where the “have-mercy” cry is missing, faith itself is clearly absent. We saw that in the parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector a few weeks ago, didn’t we? The Pharisee had no cry for mercy on his lips, revealing the absence of faith in his heart, whereas the only plea of the tax collector was, “have mercy!,” revealing the faith in his heart by which he was justified. Well, in today’s Gospel, we have the “have mercy” cry of faith from all ten lepers. But then, what happened? Jesus said, “Were not all ten cleansed? But where are the nine? Was no one found to return and give glory to God except for this foreigner?” Love only reached its fulfillment in one of the nine. The initial love of crying out to Jesus for mercy was not completed with the love of thanksgiving.
Where the “thank-you” cry is missing, faith is faltering, possibly dying, possibly already dead. A word of thanks is the first act of a believer who treasures the mercy he has received from God, and a life lived in obedience to God’s commandments is how that life continues. When no heartfelt giving of thanks takes place for mercy received, when no obedience to God’s commandments follows, when no walking by the Spirit happens, then something is very wrong. The nine in the Gospel are not excused by Jesus. His words highlight a problem in their failure to return, an expectation that was not met in those nine recipients of His mercy.
You can probably identify the same problem in yourself at times. Even though you’re a Christian, there are surely times when you’ve cried out for God’s mercy, for His help, and have received a fresh dose of mercy from God, in any number of ways, and then took it for granted, or failed to acknowledge it with a word of thanks. Worse yet, some Christians receive the mercy of God’s forgiveness on Sunday, only to go out and live unthankful lives during the week, ignoring or openly rebelling against God’s commandments. That is not love for God. Not in the least.
And so, even as today’s Gospel account is a lesson in what love for God looks like in the believer’s life, it also serves as a call to repentance, and as an encouragement to acknowledge just how great Christ’s mercy truly is, in that He promises to forgive even our thanklessness, when we acknowledge it before Him. And so, inspired by His promise, we cry out again for His mercy. And He gives it! He gave it earlier in the absolution. He gives it now in the sermon. He will give it again in the Holy Communion of His body and blood, which were given and shed for these and for all sins. And then, renewed again by His mercies, which are new every morning, you are urged to give thanks again. Which you’ve been doing in the service until now, and which you will do again when you celebrate the Eucharist, the Thanksgiving, where we both cry out to the Lamb of God to have mercy on us, and give thanks to God for giving us the very body and blood of Jesus as a token of the forgiveness won for us by the giving and shedding of that very body and blood.
As you live out this life of faith, this pattern of crying out for mercy and giving thanks for God’s mercy, be assured that the words of Jesus to the one leper who returned are also constantly being spoken to you: Rise and go. Your faith has saved you. Rise and go, and let Eleison—Have mercy!, and “Thank You for Your mercy!” never depart from your lips, or from your lives. Amen.
