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INJ
O Give Thanks Unto the Lord, For He Is Good
St Luke 17:11-19
Divine Service
14th Sunday after the Feast of Trinity | September 16, 2006
Dear Saints,
The Gospel text set before us this Sunday is about faith, and the fruit of faith: thankfulness to God. Last week we heard the parable of the Good Samaritan; this Sunday is the history of the thankful Samaritan. The Scriptures often put before us surprising examples of faith and good works, and that is true today as the Lord Jesus commends the Samaritan leper as an example for all of us to follow.
This leper was one of ten lepers who lived in the border region of Galilee and Samaria. Jesus is plunging toward Jerusalem, careening toward His cross to win for us salvation, He passes by these lepers. They are standing far off. This is want Moses had commanded of them; they must remain outside the camp, and if anyone approaches them they are to yell, "Unclean! Unclean!" But not today. They see Jesus, and they are yelling something different, "Jesus, Master, have mercy on us!" Literally: "Jesus, Master, mercy us!" And this is something to note.
They are not crying out to the Lord for justice or fairness. This is how the unbelieving world speaks to the Lord, "It isn't fair that we're lepers, that we are sick and others are not. Give us justice; give us equity." Faith will have none of that, for they know, as we ought to know, that we deserve nothing good, that there is no merit or worthiness in us. Everything good and pleasant that the Lord gives comes as a gift, from His grace, from His mercy. "Jesus, have mercy on us!"
This is our prayer as well. "Lord, have mercy. Christ, have mercy. Lord, have mercy." Every time we are gathered here before the Lord's altar we cry out to Him for mercy, that He would not give us what we deserve, but rather He would give us His goodness, the gifts that drip from His cross.
Jesus answers their prayer. He sends them to the priest, and in this command is a promise, for the priest is the one whom the Lord has authorized to speak the word of cleanness. It is the priest who will tell these lepers that they may enter the city, enter their homes, and greatest of all, that they may enter into the temple. When Jesus sends them to the priests they are to trust that by the time they get there, they will be clean. And they do trust this Word of the Lord, and they go, and as they are going they are healed.
The text doesn't tell us of their surprise or their exuberance or their joy; only that they were made clean. So far all ten of these lepers have been the same. They have stood in the same far off place, the have prayed the same prayer to Jesus, they have been answered and received the same healing, but now one of these lepers begins to stand out. Again the text doesn't tell us how the conversation went with the ten ex-lepers. If, upon finding themselves healed, they discussed what to do next, "Should we go back to Jesus or keep going to the temple?" Did the Samaritan said, "I'm going back, who is coming with me?" We don't know. What we do know is that he is the only one who returns to give thanks to Jesus. This leper was not just coming to Jesus to get something from Him. The nine were happy with the gifts that Jesus gave, but this one wants more, he wants Jesus Himself, to stand before His face and worship Him; He does not separate Jesus for the gifts that He gives, and this is a good lesson for us to consider.
In the 17th century there was a French philosopher named Balise Pascal. Arguing for the existence of God, he puts forth the following proposition, often called "Pascal's Wager", in which he separates God from His gifts.
"God is, or He is not." But to which side shall we incline? Reason can decide nothing here. There is an infinite chaos which separated us. A game is being played at the extremity of this infinite distance where heads or tails will turn up... Which will you choose then? Let us see. [[Since you must choose, let us see which interests you least. You have
two things to lose, the true and the good; and two things to stake, your reason and your will, your knowledge and your happiness; and your nature has two things to shun, error and misery. Your reason is no more shocked in choosing one rather than the other, since you must of necessity choose... But your happiness?]] Let us weigh the gain and the loss in
wagering that God is... If you gain, you gain all; if you lose, you lose nothing. Wager, then, without hesitation that He is.
Do you see how Pascal has it worked out? If God exists, then believing in Him will get you eternal life, and if God doesn't exist, then death will end it all, and you will have lost nothing. Believing in God, at least in this argument, is just for the purpose of getting God's benefits, His gifts, but for the Lord's Christians this is not the case; Jesus is our benefit, our reward, our everything; He is what we are after.
Consider the stunning line from the hymn, Lord, Thee I Love With All My Heart:
Earth has no pleasures I would share,
Yea heaven itself were void and bare,
If Thou Lord were not near me.
Heaven itself were void and bare, like a barren desert, if Jesus isn't there. Christianity, the things that go on in the Lord's Church, are not just about getting to heaven, they are about getting to Jesus, for wherever He is, there is heaven and life and salvation. There is no separating the gifts Jesus gives from Jesus Himself, and the Samaritan leper teaches us this.
In his giving thanks that we see the potency of his faith. The text says that he "with a loud glorified God... and gave Him [Jesus] thanks." [17:15,16]
This Samaritan knows that Jesus is God; giving glory to God is the same exact thing as saying thank you to Jesus. He is not impressed by the thankless majority, but he goes against the crowd, against his friends, he turns around and goes back to Jesus, back to his God and Lord, and gives Him the glory and thanksgiving. This shows us how thanksgiving is
one of the very first fruits of faith.
Thankfulness is all over the Scriptures, but perhaps more than any other place in the Scriptures, Psalm 136 is full of thankfulness. The first verse reads, "O give thanks unto the Lord, for He is good, and His mercy endures forever." Why do we thank the Lord? Because He is good, and He is merciful with a mercy that endures forever.
This is important, because we are often thankful because we are polite, out of duty and good manners. We always remind our children, saying, "What do you say?" And they dutifully answer, "Thank You." I remember one time on vicarage when a wonderful family gave me the gift of a jar of pickled green beans. Do you know what I said? "Thank you." It's the polite thing to do. (It turned out that the beans were actually very tasty.) But this is not the kind of thankfulness that the Lord is after.
True thankfulness to God arises out of the heart which knows the Lord's goodness and mercy, that knows the depth of His love and the height of His gifts.
When we know our own wretchedness, and when we taste, day after day, the guilt of our sin and the rottenness of our death, and then along comes the Lord Jesus with His cross and His death and the wonderful promises of life and salvation and the forgiveness of all of our sins, when He climbs down to rescue and deliver us from the devil and our flesh, and when we see that He has givens us absolutely everything that we have not deserved out of His great love and free grace, then our hearts are filled and our mouths are lifted up in thanksgiving to Him.
Our thankfulness is not a reflection of the goodness of our own hearts, but rather the result of the goodness of the Lord, of His gifts, the goodness of His life and death for us, and of the gift of His Word and His body and blood.
We, the Lord's people, thank Him. Not because we have been told to, to be polite, because we have good manners, no, we thank the Lord because He has mercied us, given us heaven and eternal life and forgiveness and His name and His kingdom and His love.
These gifts, dear saints, the Lord has given to you, to us, to all who believe His promises. May we all, together with the Samaritan leper and all the saints and angels in heaven, today and forever, give thanks unto the Lord, for His is good, and His mercy endures forever. Amen.
Pastor Bryan Wolfmueller
Hope Lutheran Church, Aurora, CO