Advent Devotional for Dec. 12
Friday, December 12 Luke 17:11-19
Human gratefulness and divine healing.
Samaritans and Jews were famous for not getting along. Elsewhere in the Bible, John tells his readers that Jews and Samaritans would not even use the same utensils. I heard a local Methodist preacher point out that this region, between Samaria and Galilee, would have been particularly rife with ethnic tension as it was right on the border between the two ethnic groups.
But there was one place that those ethnic barriers did not apply—the leper colony. Lepers were outcasts, no matter what nationality they were, and lepers did not have the luxury of drawing social lines between themselves and other lepers. Lepers needed to stick together because no one else wanted anything to do with them.
What a provocative picture of the church—the leper colony! We live in a fragmented culture but the church strives to be the kind of place where those fragmenting boundary lines do not apply—and not because we are so great, but precisely because we recognize that we are sick. We see clearly that God has saved us, and that this is not of ourselves; and because of this, we know we are in no position to elevate ourselves above anyone else. We cannot afford to pretend we are better than anyone else, because we know how fallen we are.
Jesus himself has contact with the lepers, a shocking action in his culture. He heals ten of them, but only one returns to thank him—one of the Samaritan lepers. I’ve always wondered why the others didn’t return. Was it because they didn’t care who healed them, just so long as they were healed? Was it because they were just so overcome with joy that they didn’t think to do it? Is it possible they somehow deceived themselves into thinking that this healing had come by chance, that it was God’s reward to them for their own behavior?
To be truthful, I don’t know. But the story does illustrate a deep truth about human nature, and more pointedly, the church. When something good happens to us, we are able to be remarkably ungrateful, remarkably unconcerned about the Author of our good fortune. And this is not just true of society at large, but even in the leper colony of the church. Here, where we are acquainted with our soul-sickness, we should know better, we should know that we can’t change things on our own, we should know there is One who has touched us and should be thanked. But even here, in the leper colony, we forget to thank Him.
Human gratefulness and divine healing.
Samaritans and Jews were famous for not getting along. Elsewhere in the Bible, John tells his readers that Jews and Samaritans would not even use the same utensils. I heard a local Methodist preacher point out that this region, between Samaria and Galilee, would have been particularly rife with ethnic tension as it was right on the border between the two ethnic groups.
But there was one place that those ethnic barriers did not apply—the leper colony. Lepers were outcasts, no matter what nationality they were, and lepers did not have the luxury of drawing social lines between themselves and other lepers. Lepers needed to stick together because no one else wanted anything to do with them.
What a provocative picture of the church—the leper colony! We live in a fragmented culture but the church strives to be the kind of place where those fragmenting boundary lines do not apply—and not because we are so great, but precisely because we recognize that we are sick. We see clearly that God has saved us, and that this is not of ourselves; and because of this, we know we are in no position to elevate ourselves above anyone else. We cannot afford to pretend we are better than anyone else, because we know how fallen we are.
Jesus himself has contact with the lepers, a shocking action in his culture. He heals ten of them, but only one returns to thank him—one of the Samaritan lepers. I’ve always wondered why the others didn’t return. Was it because they didn’t care who healed them, just so long as they were healed? Was it because they were just so overcome with joy that they didn’t think to do it? Is it possible they somehow deceived themselves into thinking that this healing had come by chance, that it was God’s reward to them for their own behavior?
To be truthful, I don’t know. But the story does illustrate a deep truth about human nature, and more pointedly, the church. When something good happens to us, we are able to be remarkably ungrateful, remarkably unconcerned about the Author of our good fortune. And this is not just true of society at large, but even in the leper colony of the church. Here, where we are acquainted with our soul-sickness, we should know better, we should know that we can’t change things on our own, we should know there is One who has touched us and should be thanked. But even here, in the leper colony, we forget to thank Him.
posted by Michael Jordan at 6:00 AM
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