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+ + + In Nomine Jesu + + +
Please join me in prayer: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be pleasing in your sight, O Lord, our Rock and our Redeemer. Amen.
Dear Brothers and Sisters in Christ,
Grace to you and peace from God our Father and from the Lord Jesus Christ.
Have you ever had laryngitis? Recently one of our members suffered from an acute case of that inflammation of the voice box that makes one sound raspy, hoarse, or deeper‑voiced than normal, and can leave someone unable to talk at all. (Our sinful human natures may be able to think of a few people who we might wish would get a chronic case of that kind of laryngitis!) The lepers in the Gospel Reading appointed for a Day of Thanksgiving likely suffered from some sort of symptoms similar to laryngitis, for leprosy is said to gradually destroy the voice (Lenski, ad loc Lk 17:13, 875).Yet, the ten lepers together lifted up their voices (St. Luke’s original Greek more-literally suggests that they together lifted up a voice), and they called out to Jesus for mercy. Later, the cleansed Samaritan leper, St. Luke says, with a loud voice, praised and thanked God. This evening as we reflect on this Gospel Reading, we do so under the theme “Lifting Up Voices for Mercy and Thanks”.
For the ten lepers, outcasts from their respective areas, Jesus, by Divine providence, was passing through the area between Samaria and Galilee on His way to Jerusalem. As Jesus was entering a certain village, the ten lepers met Him and lifted up their voice, as in prayer to Jesus, for mercy. Having seen them—and having had mercy—Jesus told them to show themselves to the priests. As they were going, they were cleansed. When the Samaritan leper saw that he was cleansed, he returned with a loud voice, praising God, and he fell on his face at Jesus’s feet, thanking Him. And Jesus told him that his faith had “made him well”, or better, “saved Him”. We would do equally well to lift up our voices for mercy and thanks.
We might ask, first of all, whether or not we even lift up our voices to God as in prayer. Some might go anywhere for help but to God. Even believers, who regularly attend the Divine Service, in their personal lives can essentially ignore both God’s command to pray and His promise to hear our prayers. When we do lift up our voices, do we lift them up for mercy and thanks or do we lift them up for something else? Are we more likely to complain to God about our situation than we are to ask Him for help with it? And, when God does help us, do we give Him thanks? Just before the Gospel Reading for tonight in St. Luke’s Divinely-inspired account, in a Gospel Reading we should hear next October, Jesus told His disciples that they should not expect thanks for doing their duty (Luke 17:7-10; confer Just, ad loc Lk 17:11-19, 655), but God is under no obligation to help us, and so we should thank Him.
In a number of ways we are like the ten leprous men, but chiefly we are like them in that we all are by nature sinful and unclean. Since there was no known cure for leprosy, the leprous men were regarded as already dead and so ritually unclean (Lenski, ad loc Lk 17:12, 874-875), and so they had to keep their distance from those who were clean. Apart from faith, on account of our sin, all people are also as good as dead and at a distance from God. But, thanks be to God, there is a known cure for our sin! The God-man Jesus Christ lived the perfect life we fail to live—including praying to His Father, appropriately both seeking His help and thanking Him—and the God-man Jesus Christ paid the price for our failure to live that perfect life. When we turn in sorrow from our sin, trust God to forgive our sin for Jesus’s sake, and want to do better than to keep on sinning, then God truly forgives our sin, all our sin, whatever our sin might be. Sin is the source of all evil and itself the greatest evil; God wants to free us from our sin, as He did at least in the case of the Samaritan leper, who initially was cleansed and healed and ultimately was saved (see Oepke, TDNT, 3:212). The Samaritan leper had lifted up his voice for mercy and then was able to lift up his voice for thanks.
Of course, the Samaritan leper was not the first to “praise”, or better “glorify” God in the person of Jesus Christ. At Jesus’s birth, a multitude of the heavenly host praised God singing “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace among those with whom He is pleased (Luke 2:13-14 ESV). The shepherds who heard that heavenly host’s message and saw the newborn Jesus Christ and themselves returned glorifying and praising God for all they had seen and heard (Luke 2:20). Whatever the other nine lepers might have known and believed about Jesus when they lifted up their voices saying, “Jesus, Master, have mercy on us”, the Samaritan leper, who was cleansed and healed on the way to the priests, returned to Jesus, the Great High Priest, more than that, the Temple of God on earth (John 2:21). At least by then, the cleansed Samaritan leper seems to have realized that Jesus was the promised Messiah, the Christ, the Savior. For, the healing of leprosy was understood as a sign of the Messiah (for example, Matthew 11:5). As the Messiah, Jesus went on from that certain village to complete His journey to Jerusalem, there suffering and dying on the cross, for the lepers’ sins, for your sins, and for my sins. The faith that saved the Samaritan leper likewise can save us, not as the basis of our salvation, but we are saved through faith as we trust in God’s mercy and grace on Jesus Christ’s account. In this Divine Service, as in all Divine Services, we lift up one voice crying out for salvation, appealing to God for mercy (as we did, for example, in the Kyrie), and, in this Divine Service, as in all Divine Services, our merciful God cleanses, heals, and saves us by giving us the forgiveness of sins through His Means of Grace, His Word and His Sacraments.
At the time of the sixteenth-century Reformation in Germany, some Roman Catholic writers claimed that our Gospel Reading, with Jesus’s telling the ten lepers to show themselves to the priests, supported the Roman Catholic requirement that people privately confess to a priest all of their sins. The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther and other Reformers rejected both the claim that the Gospel Reading supported that Roman Catholic requirement, and they also rejected the requirement itself, although, to be sure, Luther and the other Reformers still encouraged people privately to confess to their pastor the sins that troubled them most for the sake of receiving individual Holy Absolution, forgiveness from the pastor as from God Himself. Today’s point of similarity with the Gospel Reading is not the Jewish priests (to whom the cleansed leper never went), but today’s point of similarity is Jesus Himself, His authority, which He later gave to His disciples-turned-apostles (authority both to heal lepers [Matthew 10:8] and to forgive sins [Matthew 16:19; 18:18-20; John 20:21-23]). The apostles in turn passed on that same authority to forgive sins to their successors.
As Jesus then personally cleansed, healed, and saved the Samaritan leper by His Word, so Jesus today personally cleanses, heals, and saves us by His Word and Sacraments, His word purely preached and His Sacraments rightly administered by the apostles’ successors, pastors today. Already in the Old Testament, a healing of a leper by washing in the Jordan River resulted in a man’s giving glory to God and pointed forward to Holy Baptism (2 Kings 5:1-15), where all those who believe have their sins forgiven, are rescued from death and the devil, and are given eternal salvation. I already mentioned private Confession and individual Holy Absolution, and we see that more-clearly in the cleansed Samaritan leper’s falling on his face at Jesus’s feet and Jesus’s sending the cleansed Samaritan leper on his way saved. And, the cleansed Samaritan leper’s giving thanks, especially with its Greek verb, points us to the Eucharist, that is, to Holy Communion, the Sacrament of the Altar. After thanking Him, from this Altar at this Rail, we, with bread and wine, are fed with Jesus’s Body and Blood—better food and drink than any turkey or anything else we will eat in the next few days, better heavenly food and drink than the manna and other items mentioned in the Old Testament Reading (Deuteronomy 8:1-10), better food and drink especially because they give us the forgiveness of sins, life, and salvation. To paraphrase today’s Introit (Psalm 104:24, 27-28, 30; antiphon: Psalm 104:33), when the Lord sends forth His Spirit in all of these ways, we are re‑created and renewed. No longer at a distance, we come near to God, and He draws near to us (James 4:8), purifying us and transcending all ethnic and cultural boundaries (Galatians 3:27-29; confer Just, ad loc Lk 17:11-19, 654). And so, we, who had lifted up our voices for mercy, in turn are able to lift them up for thanks.
Like the cleansed Samaritan leper, who was able to glorify God with a fully-restored loud voice (confer Kretzmann, ad loc Lk 17:15-19, 359), our member who was suffering from laryngitis subsequently was physically healed, in answer to our prayers, according to God’s good and gracious will,. But sometimes, we do not receive the physical healing for which we pray. Even then, we still lift up our voices for mercy and thanks. As we heard tonight in the Epistle Reading (Philippians 4:6-20), we are thankful in every circumstance. Of course, a lack of physical healing here and now can hasten our experience of God’s greater healing, our soul’s departing this world in death; and, ultimately we anticipate our experience of God’s greatest healing, the reunion of our souls with our resurrected and glorified bodies. As God moves us from far to near and through each of these other stages, He turns our voices lifted up for mercy to voices lifted up for thanks. O, give thanks to the Lord, for He is good, for His “steadfast love” (His “mercy”) endures forever (Psalm 136:1).
Amen.
The peace of God, which passes all understanding, keep your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus. Amen.
+ + + Soli Deo Gloria + + +