Luke 17:11-19 (18th Sunday after Pentecost) – October 12, 2025

Introduction

We are at a transition point here in the Gospel of Luke. We have had one long teaching section from Luke 15 through Luke 17:10 and now Jesus is on his way to Jerusalem again and we know we are transitioning.

And so, Luke 17:11–19, the healing of the ten lepers, functions as a bridge passage. It sits between Jesus’ long teaching section (Luke 15–17:10) and the coming eschatological teachings of 17:20–18:14. It both concludes the discipleship teachings and prepares readers for the question of what kind of faith perceives God’s reign breaking in.

Narrative Context

Luke begins this text by reminding us that Jesus is “on the way to Jerusalem,” but the geography (“between Samaria and Galilee”) is fuzzy. That’s intentional. It’s liminal space, neither fully one place nor the other. And this healing happens in this space. Neither here nor there, neither inside nor outside, neither Galilee nor Samaria, neither foreign nor home.

And here, Jesus meets ten lepers in that in-between place. They, too, live in the liminal, set apart from community, waiting for restoration, longing for a place to belong again. When Jesus tells them to go show themselves to the priests, they are healed as they went. Not yet home, not yet fully restored, but already changed.

But one of them, a Samaritan, does something different. Instead of completing the journey to the priests, he turns back. He turns back toward the one who healed him. And in turning, he reveals what Luke calls faith. Not just obedience to instruction but the capacity to see grace, to recognize mercy, and to respond in gratitude.

It’s a curious scene, because Jesus has already told the parable of the Good Samaritan back in chapter 10. He has already lifted up a Samaritan as a model of love and mercy. So why is Jesus surprised that the one who turns back is “this foreigner”? Perhaps because this story isn’t about ethnic division or surprise so much as about perception. The Samaritan is “foreign” not in geography but in perspective, a person whose life on the edges has trained him to see what others overlook. Yet before we sentimentalize that, it’s worth noting that his marginality isn’t just social, it may be relational too. Even among the ten lepers, this Samaritan may have been the outsider of the outsiders. We don’t know if the other nine were all Jews, but their movement toward the priests (the ones who could declare them clean) suggests a path still tied to religious belonging. The Samaritan’s turn back to Jesus, by contrast, reveals a different kind of faith: one that recognizes holiness outside the established system and returns in gratitude to the source of mercy.

Here, in this in-between land, Jesus meets people between exclusion and belonging, and the one who sees clearly is the one whose whole life has been lived on the edge of edges. Luke places this story as a bridge between Jesus’ teachings on discipleship (chapters 15–17) and the apocalyptic sayings that follow. In that sense, this story becomes a hinge in the Gospel, showing what kind of faith prepares us to see God’s reign breaking in, especially in liminal spaces.  

Faith, Luke suggests, is not a quantity to increase but a posture of gratitude and return. The Samaritan’s turning back embodies what Jesus had just taught: faith that sees, faith that thanks, faith that returns.

Sozo – Healing Salvation

There’s a pitfall in this text. Jesus says, “Your faith has made you well.” The Greek sozo means both to heal and to save. What can and has been preach is this begins as a physical healing expands into a story of salvation and belonging. The other nine are cleansed, yes, but this one is made whole. He is restored not just to society, but to God. This is work’s righteousness. The action precedes justification/salvation.

But if we bring a Lutheran lens to this, the center of gravity shifts from the Samaritan’s action to Jesus’ word, to the declaration “Your faith has made you well.” In Greek narrative rhythm, the healing has already happened. This statement is the pronouncement of what that healing truly means. It is God’s word naming reality, naming salvation, and in Luke, that word is always performative. It does what it says.

From this Lutheran perspective, this story isn’t about a Samaritan earning salvation through an act of gratitude. It’s about what happens when Jesus’ word encounters human need. All ten lepers are cleansed by that word of command, “Go and show yourselves to the priests.” The power of salvation is already at work before anyone returns to say thank you. Grace precedes response.

So when Jesus tells the Samaritan, “Your faith has made you well,” we shouldn’t hear it as a reward for good behavior but as a naming of what faith is: the open hand that receives what God is already doing. The Samaritan doesn’t cause his salvation, he hears it. Faith is the hearing that recognizes Jesus as the source of mercy.

This begins to sound like what will come soon in the story of Zacchaeus (Luke 19), when Jesus says, “Today salvation has come to this house.” In both cases, salvation isn’t a transaction. It’s an arrival. Jesus himself is the presence of salvation entering into a person’s life and declaring a new reality.

That’s what’s happening here. Salvation is not contained in the act of returning or in gratitude itself, but in the encounter with Christ. The one who names what is already true: “You are made well. You are whole.”

The Samaritan’s response simply reveals that he has heard this word and recognized its giver. His return in praise is the fruit of faith, not its cause. Or, to paraphrase Reformation terms: faith justifies because it clings to the promise, not because it accomplishes something.

Preaching Possibilities

This text gives preachers an opportunity to proclaim that salvation is not something we perform or earn but something that meets us on the way. The word of Christ creates what it declares: restoration and wholeness.

The Samaritan’s return becomes an image of what faith looks like when it hears and recognizes grace. Gratitude doesn’t cause salvation, it’s what happens when salvation has already taken root.

In a world obsessed with proving worth and showing results, Luke’s story reminds us that the Gospel begins not with our movement toward God but with God’s movement toward us: on the borders, in the in-between, in the Word that makes us whole before we even know to turn back.

In that liminal space, between what was and what will be, Christ still speaks: ‘Get up and go; your faith has made you well.’ The word that heals also sends us, not to prove our worth, but to live in the freedom of already being made whole.