October 12, 2025
I speak to you in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
This is the second week in a row that we hear Jesus say something about faith that might lead us to despair. And while last week was difficult with the mustard seed of faith, I think this week’s reading is even harder for many of us, with its phrase “your faith has made you well.”
Faith is like most things in one important way. It’s pretty easy to be faithful when things are going well. When it feels like God is smiling on us – blessing our lives. But in my experience, one of the most dangerous times for our faith is when things go wrong for us – when we or someone we love falls victim to sickness or suffering or even death. Because, among other things, we hear Jesus say these words to the Samaritan and all sorts of emotions hit. Jealousy – why does God relieve some peoples’ suffering, and not others? Guilt and anger – I’m a faithful person, we might say to ourselves. What’s wrong with my faith that this bad thing has happened? Fear. Regret. Rage. Grief. The possibilities for being angry and bitter and hurt are endless. And all these possibilities are capable of harming, or even destroying, our faith in a God who loves each and every one of us more than we can ever imagine.
So today I want us to focus on Jesus’ final words in this story: “go, your faith has made you well”.
In Jesus’ time, the world was filled with all kinds of serious diseases. But what the people in this story faced was at the top of the list of things you didn’t want to have. Especially if you worshipped in the Jewish or Samaritan traditions. The leprosy these men had wasn’t the disfiguring condition that often comes to mind for us, but it was a contagious skin disease that made you ritually “unclean” – meaning that you couldn’t worship or participate in community activities. And because uncleanliness itself was contagious, these men would have had to live in a camp outside the village as outcasts from society. They were cut off from their family and friends, from the synagogue and Temple, and from all the things that are needed to live a life of dignity.
Whether then or now, sickness has the power to sever our relationships and wipe out our identities, whether it’s something physical, or a mental illness, or something else that affects our spirit. Maybe it keeps us homebound. Or prevents us from working. Or limits our capacity to socialize. I don’t know about you, but my experiences during the COVID pandemic helps me put myself in the lepers’ shoes. To realize that without relationships, we lose not just our identity, but our humanity. All that’s left is isolation, and desperation, and hopelessness.
And then these lepers encounter Jesus. The person of the Trinity for whom sickness and suffering and feeling alienated isn’t an abstract thought. In the person of Jesus, God has faced all these things in the same ways we have. Living among us, Christ experienced sickness. He felt grief and anger. He wept at his friend Lazarus’ death. And Jesus’ words on the Cross: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” testify to the abandonment he felt in those terrible moments. In other words, we have a God, my friends, who knows – completely and utterly – how deeply humans can suffer, how alone we feel when our relationships are broken, and how desperately we can be in need of healing. I don’t know about you, but I find that very comforting.
Jesus cures these lepers’ skin disease. But this miracle works something far more important in the Samaritan’s heart. Because – and this is critically important, so pay attention – the Samaritan’s faith wasn’t expressed by his request for help. It wasn’t expressed by his belief that Jesus could cure him. In reality, his faith was expressed after the cure. Upon his return. The Samaritan’s faithful response to the deliverance and blessing and empowerment he’s received is the gratitude and praise for God he utters at Jesus’ feet. Gratitude for the gift of life. Gratitude for the world. Thanksgiving for restored relationships and liberation from despair. This is the true wellness that his faith has brought about.
Like I said at the beginning of my sermon this morning, it’s easy to be faithful when things are going well. But to think that our lives are going to be all sweetness and light misses the cross-shaped pattern of Christian living. Moments of despair and spiritual suffering – of feeling abandoned and isolated – are just as much a part of the spiritual life as moments of joy and amazement.
When we experience these difficult moments, we walk the path of authentic Christianity. It is real life for us as it has been for so many before us. Saint John of the Cross, for example and his dark night of the soul. Or Saint Ignatius of Loyola and the spiritual desolation he wrote about. And so many others. All of whom prayed for deliverance. But all of whom were – and are – sustained by their gratitude that the God who experienced pain and death on the cross is always – always – yearning to draw us into closer relationship. Even when – like the lepers – we feel isolated, and desperate, and all seems hopeless. Because at the heart of our faith is the knowledge that God brings life out of death.
Sometimes the God who profoundly knows our suffering cures our illness, and that’s amazing and wonderful. And we should pray for that always. But Jesus’ Good News to us today is that the path to being made well – to being delivered, liberated, empowered – to being saved – comes through the life-giving gratitude that is faith’s response to God’s action in our lives. Life-giving gratitude for God’s abiding presence in our lives in bread and wine, in water, and in the Word of Scripture. Life-giving gratitude for the promise of life together in the world to come with the Crucified One who will return with the marks of pain and suffering in his hands and his feet. Where pain and suffering are no more, neither sighing, but life everlasting. Amen.