Where Jesus' Mouth Is--October 14, 2025

Where Jesus' Mouth Is--October 14, 2025

Then one of [the people with the skin disease], when he saw that he was healed, turned back, praising God with a loud voice. He prostrated himself at Jesus’s feet and thanked him. And he was a Samaritan. Then Jesus asked, “Were not ten made clean? So where are the other nine? Did none of them return to give glory to God except this foreigner?” Then he said to him, “Get up and go on your way; your faith has made you well.” (Luke 17:15-19)

One thing you can say about Jesus for certain is that he actually puts his money where his mouth is.

This moment in Luke's Gospel, which many of us heard in worship this past Sunday, is the pudding that contains the proof.  As we saw in yesterday's devotion, in the first half of this scene, Jesus has set himself up to invite an encounter with outsiders by traveling in this marginal place--the borderlands between Galilee and Samaria--in the places where one might meet a community of those exiled from their towns and lives because of their contagious skin disease.  But if we reach back even further to the beginnings of Jesus' ministry, there are some important moments to hold in the background of the second half of this scene.

For starters, you might recall what Luke gave us as Jesus' first public words--his sermon in his hometown, back in Luke 4.  In that story, Jesus not only read from the prophet Isaiah and declared "Today, this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing," but he also went on to tell his former friends and neighbors in Nazareth that God had a habit of healing not just "their group" or "their kind" but outsiders and foreigners as well.  In fact, he quoted to them a story from the Old Testament (one that many of us also heard back on Sunday) in which God healed a foreigner of the skin disease they called leprosy, even though he was not just an outsider, but actually a commander in an enemy nation's army!  Jesus gave that precedent in his first sermon, as Luke tells it, and it riles up his audience to the point that they want to kill him--they try to throw him off a cliff, as a matter of fact!  So Jesus began his ministry insisting that his mission would lead him to show God's love and use God's power to heal and restore not just his own group or his own nationality, but people deemed "other"... people on the margins.  Yes, even those deemed "enemies."

Then just a little later in Luke's Gospel, we get the central block of Jesus' teaching we sometimes call the "Sermon on the Plain," (which parallels Matthew's "Sermon on the Mount"), in which Jesus teaches his followers to show love and give help not only to people who are kind or can pay them back, but to their enemies and those who hate them. And then Jesus says an even stranger, more provocative, thing: he tells his listeners that this is the way God's own love works, since God "is kind to the ungrateful and the wicked" (Luke 6:36).  In other words, from early on in the story of his ministry, Jesus has gone on record saying that God's kind of love deliberately seeks out those deemed "foreigners" and "enemies" as well as those labeled "ungrateful" and "wicked" and does good to them. And he has called his own followers to practice the same kind of love: "Be merciful, therefore, as your Father is merciful..."

Now the question becomes, will Jesus live up to those words?  Will Jesus do good to those who are deemed foreigners, enemies, and ungrateful people?  That is to say, will Jesus put his money where his mouth is?  

By the time you get to this scene in the seventeenth chapter of Luke, we've already been given some hints.  There had been an episode in which a village of Samaritans wouldn't accept Jesus, since he was headed toward Jerusalem, and his disciples had suggested calling down fire to destroy these people who had made themselves Jesus' enemies--and Jesus flatly refused.  There was a famous story Jesus told in the tenth chapter, too, in which Jesus made a Samaritan the hero figure who truly understands what loving a neighbor looks like.  But now, in this scene, Jesus is met by ten people and heals the whole group, one of whom is a Samaritan "foreigner" from that same ethnic group that had been Jesus' "enemy," and the other nine of whom do not even stop to come back and say "thank you."  In other words, Jesus literally has come across a group made up of "the ungrateful" and those who could be charitably called "foreigners" (and uncharitably could be lumped in as "more of the enemy"). And he chooses--as you know from reading--to give out a blanket healing all around for all of them, refusing to rescind the miracle for the 90% who don't act adequately "thankful."  There it is: Jesus really does put his money where his mouth is, and he really does practice the same kind of love for "the ungrateful" along with "foreigners" and even "enemies."

This is what grace really looks like.  Goodness or mercy that stops at the boundary marking out "Me and My Group" isn't really love--not in Jesus' view.  Empathy or compassion that can be revoked if the recipient doesn't say "thank you" deferentially enough isn't really kindness. They are counterfeits dressed up in the garb of virtue. Jesus insists that God's kind of love--and therefore ours--reaches out to those who have been labeled "foreigner," "enemy," or "insufficiently grateful." 

The question in front of us, then, is whether we dare to take up Jesus' kind of love and to put our money where our mouths are, too.  We who say we are followers of Jesus, will we dare to show kindness to people without demanding some sort of performance of gratitude to make us feel important?  Will we dare to seek the good of those with whom we most strongly disagree--precisely while we still disagree with them?  Will we let Jesus' kind of love move from being an abstract ideal we can read about in Bible stories or hear about in sermons to being something we practice--in action--with the real people we would see as "foreigner"," enemy", "ungrateful", or even "wicked"? For all of our talk on Sundays... and on our social media... and in our churchy circles of acquaintances, will we dare to actually practice the kind of love that Jesus has shown first, by healing unconditionally not only the outsider, but also the nine ungrateful members of his own group?

What could it look like for you and me today?

Lord Jesus, stretch and strengthen our love to reflect your own mercy's expansive reach.