The Key to Thankfulness, Part 2

Earlier today, I wrote a bit about that incident from Jesus' life on earth that preachers most often use as the basis of their Thanksgiving Eve sermons: Luke 17:11-19.

In it, Jesus gives cleansing and restoration to ten lepers. But only one thanks Him. Like the others, that one had been en route to a priest in Jerusalem, as Jesus had instructed, when he noted that his leprosy was gone. He went back to Jesus, praising God and thanking Jesus as he lay at Jesus' feet. After that, we're told:

Then Jesus asked, "Were not ten made clean? But the other nine, where are they? Was none of them found to return and give praise to God except this foreigner?" Then He said to him, "Get up and go on your way; your faith has made you well."

I always found Jesus' words to this man curious. Jesus tells this one former leper that His faith has made Him well. But Jesus Himself has just said that all ten lepers were cleansed. And as we saw in my post of earlier today, all ten of these lepers had demonstrated sufficient faith in Jesus and His miracle-working powers to cry out for His help. Furthermore, we have no indication that Jesus has rescinded the miracle He's worked in these ten lives. All ten are still free of their leprosy apparently. So, what gives?

A good principle for understanding difficult passages of the Bible is one introduced by Martin Luther: We need to let Scripture interpret Scripture. That means that we don't irresponsibly isolate passages of Scripture without respect to the witness of the entire Bible.

When I was considering what was up in this passage a few years back, I remembered another one: John 5:1-18. There, Jesus performs another healing miracle. He gives a paralyzed man the ability to use his legs.

Because Jesus performs this miracle on a Sabbath Day, He incurs the anger of religious authorities. Apparently, they thought it was okay to perform loving acts on any day but the Sabbath. (Actually, they saw Jesus' feat as work, a no-no for Sabbath days.)

So, they begin to grill the healed man about who exactly this Sabbath-violator was. He wasn't sure.

Later, Jesus approaches the man and tells him:

"See, you have been made well! Do not sin any more, so that nothing worse happens to you." (John 5:14)

Now, to me, that's a telling statement on Jesus' part. According to John, the chronicler of this incident, the once-paralyzed man had been lame for thirty-eight years. It's hard to imagine anything worse than that. But Jesus seems to say that there is something far worse. It's to unrepentantly violate God's will for our lives and thereby destroy our relationship with Him. It's to turn from God and live life according to our own terms and selfish whims and desires and so, to be separated from God, from life, hope, peace.

This, I think, what underlay Jesus' statement to the thankful former leper in Luke 17: "Your faith has made you well." The other nine one-time lepers were physically healed. But only one had the faith to see Jesus as the God and Lord of life and eternity. He was well because, through Jesus, He would be with God forever.

There are lots of things for which human beings can be thankful. But if we've let Christ's Lordship of love into the center of our lives, that's the greatest source of thanksgiving we can have. With Him, we know that we're well...forever!

[I'm not a big hymn guy, but the lyrics of It is Well with My Soul capture Jesus' words well, I think.]