SEEING JESUS’ MERCY PRODUCES THANKSGIVING
Prayer: Dear heavenly Father, You daily care for us and are an ever-present Help in every need: We pray that You awaken our hearts to be truly thankful for all Your benefits. Let us not grow apathetic about Your temporal and eternal blessings, but remember that Your mercy is new every morning, so that in perfect trust we may call upon You in every trouble and thank and praise You with a joyous heart. Amen. (Theodore Hoyer, Meditations on the Gospels: Luke, p. 577, edited)
Sermon Text, St. Luke 17:11-19 (v. 15-16). And one of them, when he saw that he was healed, returned, and with a loud voice glorified God, and fell down on his face at [Jesus’] feet, giving Him thanks. And he was a Samaritan.
Lord, this is Your Word and these are Your words. Sanctify us completely by the truth. Your Word is truth. Amen!
Dear fellow redeemed in Christ: Grace, mercy, and peace from God the Father and Christ Jesus our Lord. Amen.
So what sticks in your mind from this miracle is probably that only one of them gave thanks. The line we remember best is: “But where are the nine?”
This story is a great illustration of the 2nd commandment, which is about using the name of God rightly. In our catechism’s what-does-this-mean, we learn what God wants us to do: “Call upon Him in every trouble, pray, praise, and give thanks.” All ten lepers did the first part of that, when they call out, “Jesus, Master, have mercy on us!” They called upon Him in their trouble.
After the miracle the nine didn’t do the “praise-and-give-thanks” part. It says the one who was a Samaritan “returned, and with a loud voice glorified God, and fell down on his face at [Jesus’] feet giving Him thanks.” This is the gospel for the Thanksgiving service, because he did the giving of thanks.
But we have a basic problem with this Bible story. We can think of it as a Law Story – what we do, summarizing it as “Be thankful!” or “Be more thankful!” Not a Gospel Story – not seeing the main thing here as what Jesus does for us and with us. Our over-active conscience is hard at work gauging our thankfulness. We often summarize this miracle as “nine unthankful lepers,” or “one thankful leper.”
But actually, the main thing in this miracle is not a focus on what we do or don’t do or don’t do well enough. The main thing is to see Jesus’ mercy. He did all things well. That’s what producesgiving of thanks.
To give thanks and to praise and glorify God is part of our prayer life. Our prayers are a fruit or direct result of faith. So our prayers and thanks do not come first, on our own, as if we’re just naturally thankful people. First has to come faith: what we know of Jesus, believing in Him. Then comes prayer; and when we pray, God does indeed desire the first thing in our prayers to be thanks. As Paul says in Romans 1: “first, I thank my God.”
The ten lepers as a group asked Jesus for His mercy. They could see His mercy as a thing they needed: He had healed others, maybe He could heal them. They were living with such pain and sickness all the time, and living in such isolation and loneliness, apart from their families. From a human standpoint, everything in their life was bad, nothing was good.
But Christ came down from heaven, where there is no sickness, where there is perfect health and wholeness, and only being loved and comforted all the time. Far from isolation and loneliness it’s a “blest communion, fellowship divine” (ELH 554:4). He brought this with Him. Jesus came where all is lacking and imperfect, and as He came near these lepers, what He represents for people living with these consequences of sin being in the world, what He is, is: God’s mercy. He is the embodiment of God’s mercy. Mercy in the flesh.
What is mercy? It’s God’s kindness, His goodness. It’s something that as sinners we don’t deserve and can’t repay. God didn’t owe the lepers any-thing. Healing them was a sign of His mercy and kindness. They receive what they didn’t deserve. When His word healed them, they did see Jesus’ mercy. But soon after that moment the nine forgot it. They didn’t keep seeing it before them, didn’t keep it in front of them. They began right away to live as if they weren’t in need of His mercy. Their unthankful hearts came from this.
We see in this text how the one leper was different. It says that “when he saw that he was healed, he returned,” he turned about and ran back to Jesus, so that with every step he’s seeing his healing, Jesus’ mercy, in front of him, not stopping until he is face to face with Jesus, face to face with Mercy-In-The-Flesh. When Jesus is in front of him, it says the man “fell down on his face at Jesus’ feet, giving Him thanks.”
See how what he knows and sees of Jesus is connected to his giving thanks? They’re in the same place, the same location: his faith in Jesus, and his prayer of thanks, are joined together. One can’t live without the other. His thanks doesn’t happen apart from Jesus. What he knows of Jesus as his Lord and Savior – his faith in Jesus – doesn’t exist apart from giving thanks.
This is how it is for you. If you feel that you aren’t thankful enough, if you think your prayer life is lacking something here, if your grumbling or your worrying or a pessimistic feeling is outweighing your thanks, burying it even, then the problem isn’t that you’re not a thankful person. Nobody is a thankful person on their own. The Old Adam in us, our sinful self, is never thankful. Our sinful self often overcomes our new nature, our forgiven self – our thankful self. In fact the Old Adam is always pushing down our thanks.
The issue is not that you’re an unthankful person, it’s that you are not seeing Jesus. You aren’t seeing His goodness and His kindness to you. If your life doesn’t look good to you, the Old Adam in you might get you to say you’re just being realistic and seeing how things really are; but that’s actually a lie of the devil. You aren’t seeing how things really are. How things really are, is something you have to see with eyes of faith.
Jesus says, “Your faith has made you well” – literally, “Your faith has saved you.” By faith in Him, all is well and all shall be well. In Jesus you have God’s blessing. He blesses and keeps you, He makes His face shine upon you in grace, He looks upon you with favor, He’s at peace with you. All of this is true because of Jesus. As Romans 8:32 says, if the Father did not keep His own Son from us, but sent Him to the cross, then with Christ He will freely give you “all things” that you need.
Who could not give thanks? In Christ you know God cares for you, He is caring for you: not only in the Gospel, but in all the First Article gifts too.
He gives you your body and soul, cares for your body and all your needs, gives us H-E-B’s and Costco, more restaurants and clothing stores than we honestly need, house and home, roofers and plumbers and electricians, gives you a job so you have money, doctors and nurses and an ER to tend to your health, a Christian spouse and children, a Christian mother and father, Christian brothers and sisters and friends, gives you our government, roads and highways, police, firefighters and a free press, a military to defend us, a nation, our community, and the freedom to come here and not only pray, but praise and give thanks to Him whose mercy does endure forever. Amen!