Last week we heard Jesus instruct his disciples not to expect thanks or praise for doing what was required of them. In the scene that follows immediately Jesus is confronted by 10 lepers who ask Jesus that they might be cured from their illness. Sending them on their way to the priests to attest to their healing, one of them, a Samaritan recognizing that he had been healed, comes to give thanks to Jesus for the gift of healing. Jesus is amazed that only this one, certainly of all of them, returns. Again, Jesus highlights the problem of expectations and gratitude among the disciples. 

We enter into this tension throughout our lives. There is a fine distinction between gratitude and taking for granted. The lepers, who were required by legal prescription to shout and announce their presence because they were ritually unclean, and therefore, outcasts, instead shout for mercy.

“Have mercy on us” they cry, the same outcry Jesus used for the rich man in the parable we heard last week, and which immediately precedes this event in the Gospel. So now we are seeing some connections that Luke is using to highlight the point of thanksgiving and mercy; gratitude and being taken for granted.

The lepers get it right -- at first -- they cry out to Jesus and call him “master,” a title used by his disciples alone. They seek his mercy. They recognize their status as total outcasts in society. Likely, they thought of themselves as suffering punishment from sin, either their own or that of an ancestor. One of them was a Samaritan. This made him a double outcast within the Jewish world of the time. He has found a welcome with the other nine lepers where they were able to at least form a sense of a community among themselves. Now that they are healed and restored to their former ways of life, it is unlikely that he will continue to associate with them, or them with him.

The Samaritan recognizes the gift of mercy that he receives as a healing from Jesus, Even though he was part of this company of lepers, he may have wondered if he would receive the same healing mercy from Jesus. Jesus was, after all, a Jewish prophet. Without saying so, Jesus could have withheld his mercy from him. He recognizes that he is healed, and he comes to give praise to God and to give genuine thanksgiving to Jesus. 

This sense of thanksgiving stands as a reminder to us in multiple ways. It is easy to take the many gifts that God bestows upon us for granted. First, we experience God’s mercy in small and consistent ways each and every day. We all sin each day. While those who sin much and most in need of God’s mercy, it is easy, indeed all too easy, for those who walk a righteous and faithful path to begin to believe themselves to be free from sin, or at least to not be conscious of grave sin. 

We do not know what was in the mind of the other nine lepers as they were pronounced “clean” and did not return to thank Jesus. But when we take a careful look at the many other miracles Jesu performs, it is uncommon that anyone ever comes to give thanks, though a few do go off praising God and acclaiming the miracle to others. 

The other lepers returned to their former ways of life, reconnecting with their loved ones, and no doubt celebrated with them. It is a time of great joy. They are healed and restored, and they seem to think nothing more of it.

Were they ungrateful? This we cannot know. They most certainly would have made the proper offering at the Temple for healing from leprosy. The Samaritan would have been barred from the Temple precincts and not permitted to offer the sacrifice. The most he could do was to offer thanks to Jesus. 

Our lives must be filled with gratitude on every level. We offer thanksgiving -- Eucharist -- every day, and it is proper to have Masses of Thanksgiving celebrated, though this is rarely the case. Lives filled with gratitude become lives filled with mercy and compassion. This, too, is our call as disciples of Jesus Christ. 

Let us all, like this Samaritan, give thanks to God for his great mercy.

Father Garry Koch is pastor of St. Benedict Parish, Holmdel.