Daily lesson for November 19, 2014

Today's daily lesson comes from Luke chapter 17 verses 17 through 19:

17 Then Jesus answered, “Were not ten cleansed? Where are the nine? 18 Was no one found to return and give praise to God except this foreigner?” 19 And he said to him, “Rise and go your way; your faith has made you well.”

Jesus sent ten lepers to the priests and along the way the lepers were healed.  Only one of the lepers returned to say thanks. Why?

My guess is its because he was a Samaritan -- an outsider. What bound the ten together originally was their leprosy. So long as all of them had leprosy they were all equals. But when the priests pronounced the other nine clean the nine stayed right where they were with the priests. The Samaritan went back to Jesus.  Jesus told him that his faith had saved him.

I wonder if this might be a parable about the church. We get cleansed of our sins and then form church based on our little social cliques, affinity groups, racial compositions, and socioeconomic status.  This becomes our salvation.  But the social outcasts -- the alcoholics, the addicts, the parolees, the poor, the gays, the transgendered, the tattooed, the racially mixed, the publicly humiliated -- find no salvation in the group. They are still unclean according to the world. So in desperation they turn back to the only place they can turn. They turn back to Jesus. And like the Samaritan, in Jesus they find that they are not only cleansed, they are actually accepted and made whole.