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Have You Done Anything for Me Lately?
Luke 17: 11 – 19 |
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Summary
Have You Done Anything for Me Lately? It’s an old kind of joke. Yesterday Joe saved Bill’s life by pulling him from a car wreck just before the gas tank exploded. The day after his heroic deed, he gets a letter telling him that the mortgage payment is overdue and that if he didn’t come up with $2,000 in the next week he’d lose the house. What can he do? He just doesn’t have the money and he can’t think of anybody he can get it from. “Wait a minute — Bill is pretty well-to-do. Maybe he’d lend me the money.” So Joe calls Bill and asks if he can borrow $2,000 to save his house. Bill is hesitant, saying, “I don’t really feel comfortable lending that kind of money to friends.” Joe is desperate and says, “Come on, Bill! Remember, I just saved your life yesterday.” “Sure,” Bill says, “Have you done anything for me lately?” Not many of us would be ungracious or as calculating as Bill, but most of us do have problems with giving thanks. Oh, we may say “Thank you” for birthday gifts or send notes of appreciation after a visit with a friend. But especially when it comes to the ultimate source of all our gifts, we tend to have very short memories. In times of need or danger, even many people who “aren’t very religious” will pray for help and hope that God will do something for them. We pray for healing, for safety for ourselves or those we love, for success in various enterprises. But it’s all too easy to forget about God once we have the gift. If we don’t come right out and say, “What have you done for me lately?” it may only be that we aren’t thinking about God at all at that point. The 10 lepers In today’s gospel lesson we’re in the section of Luke’s gospel in which Jesus is on his way after having “set his face to go to Jerusalem,” and on his journey, he meets a group of 10 lepers. The term “leprosy” is used in the Bible for many skin diseases, and these 10 may not have had Hansen’s disease, the ailment that today is called leprosy. But if you’ve ever had a bad case of eczema, acne or some other condition that required a visit to a dermatologist, you know how uncomfortable skin problems can be. And for those who were considered lepers in Israel, what was often worse than physical suffering was the fact that this condition made them ritually “unclean,” so that they had to stay away from people who weren’t lepers. These 10 were probably living together outside town, surviving by begging and trying to give one another some support. Since Jesus’ reputation as a healer has preceded him, they naturally ask him for help when they hear that he’s coming through their town. But Jesus doesn’t heal them as soon as they ask for His help. Instead, he tells them to go and be certified as “clean” by a priest, which is what the law required before a leper could become part of the healthy community again. Apparently, they all trusted Jesus enough to start off to find a priest, “And as they went, they were made clean.” One of them immediately turned around and went back to thank Jesus. At this point, we have to be careful. It’s very common for preachers to focus on the unthankfulness of the nine who didn’t return. Jesus does make that point when he asks, “where are they?” But in many Thanksgiving services for which this text is one of the readings, I’m afraid that the impression that many people get is, “We’re certainly better than those ingrates!” In reality, we’re more often than not among those who don’t return to give thanks after we get the gifts we’ve prayed for. Only one man does return to thank Jesus. But here’s an odd thing about that — he’s also the only one who doesn’t do what Jesus told him to do in the first place! Jesus said, “Go and show yourselves to the priests,” and he hasn’t done that. Yet Jesus doesn’t criticize him for that and is clearly pleased with him for coming back. What’s going on here? The key here is what Jesus does say to him, “Your faith has made you well.” The Greek verb that’s used there, sozo, occurs over a hundred times in the New Testament and is the word that’s used for “save” in a spiritual sense as well as for physical healing. In its broadest sense, it refers to complete healing — of our relationship with God as well as our bodies. The man who returns to Jesus to give thanks has been “saved” from his disease and brought back from his estrangement from God, and the fact that he gives thanks is a sign of that healing. Levels of thanks You see, giving thanks can occur at different levels and with different meanings. If some distant relative or business associate gives you a toaster as a wedding gift, you’re expected to send a thank-you note. It’s considered rude to ignore that courtesy, and the giver of the gift may be a bit annoyed if there is no acknowledgement. But that gift probably isn’t something that you needed badly, and you don’t look to its giver to supply all your needs. Giving thanks for it is expected, for the courtesy it represents as much as for the gift itself, but the thank-you note we send isn’t an expression of a deeper relationship. Things are different when Joe saves Bill’s life or when a surgeon performs a difficult operation to repair a damaged heart. Then thanks becomes more than a formality. Thanksgiving rises to a higher level when the giver of the gift is in fact the one we depend on for life itself and for all the necessities of life. What we receive from God is not just a one-time rescue but also the ongoing gift of life. And as Christians, we understand that God goes beyond the gift of physical existence to give us, in Christ, a spiritual relationship at a higher level. When we truly give thanks to God, it is an expression of faith that God will continue to provide for us. God does not want our thanks simply to get proper credit for generosity. What God really wants is our trust, which is the crucial part of faith. God wants us to believe that we really will receive what he promises us — the necessities of life now and the promise of an ongoing relationship with him even in spite of death. Having that faith is for our own good, because with it, our anxieties about life now and hereafter are relieved. So important is this faith that having it takes precedence over following ceremonial rules like getting a clean bill of health from a priest. It doesn’t matter whether you’re a Jew, a Samaritan or a member of any other race or nation as long as you put your trust in the God who saves and heals and provides. God’s gifts come to us before we give thanks, and come even to people who never express any appreciation for them. God “makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous,” Jesus said in the Sermon on the Mount. Some of the people Jesus helped during his ministry received bodily healing but didn’t see him as their Savior from sin or come to any deeper relationship with God. When the man whom Jesus healed beside the pool at Bethesda after his 38 years of disability heard that some people were upset because this happened on the Sabbath and were looking for the lawbreaker who had done it, he went to the authorities and turned Jesus in! It’s almost another “What have you done for me lately” joke. Healing, even of a sort that may seem miraculous, doesn’t necessarily mean salvation in the full sense. Heartfelt So what about the nine former lepers who didn’t return to Jesus? They had enough faith in Jesus’ words to go, before they were healed, to find a priest. Perhaps they were thankful to God for their cures — we really don’t know and can leave that to God. But the Samaritan who returned is certainly the one that Luke wants us to see as our model in this regard. He is a pattern given to us not just of polite expressions of gratitude, but of faith that expresses itself in heartfelt thanks. |
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