Sermon: "The Medicine of Mercy"- October 12, 2025

The Eighteenth Sunday after Pentecost, Luke 17:11-19

The Rev'd Ezgi Saribay Perkins, Rector 

Transcript

A cousin of mine, who is conducting her postgraduate research in Los Angeles, recently described me her experience of American medicine. She calls her last 4 months an experience of “the quiet crisis of invisibility.” As part of her studies, she is doing clinical work in a large metropolitan hospital where the pace is relentless. Patients come and go, charts are updated, diagnostics are reviewed, and yet, she says, “there are moments I think we are just treating symptoms, not souls.”

One day, she walked into a room to examine a patient recovering from major surgery. The woman was alert but withdrawn, her eyes unfocused. The doctor adjusted the IV, made a few notes, and then paused. Then my cousin said softly, “Ma’am, you’ve been through something extraordinary, haven’t you?” And held her hand. The patient said: “Yes, but no one’s looked at me long enough to notice.”

My cousin said this moment shifted something, not in the patient alone, but in her own understanding of healing. “I realized medicine could heal a body,” she said, “but mercy restores a person.”

That phrase kept coming back to me as I wrote this sermon: mercy restores a person. 

That brings us to the point of today’s Gospel: Through faith in the divine mercy and power of Jesus, the Samaritan discovers a healing that transforms not only his body but also his heart and his worship.

Our Gospel story meets us today, in a borderland where the overlooked and unclean stand at a distance on a Middle Eastern road, waiting to be seen. Jesus is passing not through the centers of power but through the space between Samaria and Galilee, where ten voices cry out from the margins: “Jesus, Master, have mercy on us.”

First thing Luke teaches us is that healing begins when the outcasts recognize Jesus as the true Master and the fountain of mercy.

Luke tells us that Jesus was walking “between Samaria and Galilee,” a borderland that was neither one place nor the other. It is not simply a geographical note but a theological one. Jesus often intentionally walked where social, racial, and religious boundaries blurred. He positioned himself where the excluded live, where polite society does not go frequently.

If Luke were writing today, he might say Jesus was walking between neighborhoods, between the gated subdivision and the trailer park, between the places of privilege and the places people cross the street to avoid. That’s where the story of grace begins.

At the edge of that unnamed village stand ten men with leprosy. In their world, having leprosy meant more than physical pain; it meant social exile. They could not touch, hug, worship, or even enter their own homes because they would be physically and religiously contagious. They stood at a distance, the distance of shame, fear, and other people’s disgust. And yet, they raised their voices from a distance and cried out together: “Jesus, Master, have mercy on us!”

In that desperate cry, we find the hinge of our story. The word Master, epistatēs in Greek, was normally used only by Jesus’ disciples. These men who never followed him, never sat under his teaching, instinctively recognize his authority. They see what others, closer to him, still struggle to grasp. They may be social outcasts, but they are spiritual insiders.

It’s striking, isn’t it, that genuine, raw, desperate, and what we would so frequently call uneducated blind faith so often shows up on the margins? Today, it might sound like the prayer of an addict in recovery, or an immigrant stepping into an unknown land with the promise of a freer life, or a young person who dares to believe that God exists and hears his prayers. Like the lepers, our faith is not our perfect understanding of something; it’s our courage shouted across the distance. That shout can be something like this: Hey, is anyone there? Or I know someone is there, will you restore me to wholeness?

Luke tells us that Jesus saw those men. That small verb changes something. He didn’t just notice their presence; he saw them in a way that cut through the stigma. In Luke’s Gospel, seeing is always the first act of compassion. 

Having seen them, Jesus doesn’t perform a dramatic healing or lay hands on them. Instead, he gives them a simple command: “Go and show yourselves to the priests.”

That was what the law required in Leviticus 14. The priest was the one who could officially declare a person clean, restoring them to community life after leprosy. But Jesus gave this command before any healing happened. They were asked to walk toward wholeness while they were still broken, daring to believe in the supernatural power of Jesus.

That’s faith. It’s obedience before and in addition to logical evidence. It’s trusting the Word while our body, our circumstances, or our heart still tell us otherwise. And as they walked, something began to change. Step by step, the numbness faded, color returned to their skin, and strength filled their bodies again. Luke’s phrase is quietly astonishing: “As they went, they were made clean.”

It didn’t happen all at once. It happened in motion. It happened while obeying Jesus. That’s often how healing still comes to us, not in the instant but in the journey.

The ten lepers show us that the first stage of healing is recognition, recognizing who Jesus truly is and daring to move toward him even while the evidence of our healing is unfinished.

In every generation, that’s where it begins: when those standing far off, those who feel unworthy, unseen, or too damaged to belong, find the courage to call him Master and discover that he has already seen them.

In other words, true healing begins the moment we recognize the mercy of Jesus that has already recognized us.

Second thing Luke teaches us is that healing deepens when the lepers, unclean and undeserving, dare to ask the True Physician for help.

Faith begins when we recognize mercy from a distance, but it deepens when we draw near to the One who gives it. Ten lepers were healed as they went, yet only one returned, and Luke wants us to notice that it was the foreigner. “And he fell at Jesus’ feet, giving him thanks. And he was a Samaritan.”

It is easy to read this as a story about gratitude, but the deeper truth is about courage, the courage to approach holiness as one who is a stranger. In the ancient world, Samaritans were doubly despised: religious heretics to the Jews and outsiders to the Gentiles. They worshiped on the wrong mountain, in the wrong way, and were thought to be beyond God’s covenant mercy. Yet this man, healed in body but still aware of his otherness, turns back anyway. He breaks every boundary that once defined him, disease, ethnicity, even theology, and throws himself at the feet of a Jewish rabbi. What others might call presumption, Jesus calls worship.

As Cyril of Alexandria observed, the Samaritan alone perceives that the healing was not merely physical but divine. His act of returning is itself a conversion, a turning around that mirrors repentance and resurrection. 

As one theologian (Alan Culpepper) argues, this moment fuses healing and salvation into one. When Jesus says, “Your faith has made you well,” the Greek word in the sentence, sozo can mean “healed” or “saved.” Luke intentionally blurs the line, reminding us that salvation is never simply the absence of disease but the restoration of relationship, with God, with others, and with oneself.

And perhaps that is what distinguishes the Samaritan from the nine. The others were cleansed in body but continued to the priests, the representatives of a system that had already judged them unclean. The Samaritan, knowing he would never be accepted there, turns instead to the source of mercy itself.

In that single movement, he teaches us something essential about faith. Healing that begins with recognition is completed in relationship. Grace invites us from distance into intimacy.

Many people today, educated, successful, respected, find it easier to keep God at a polite distance than to fall at Christ’s feet. Yet the Gospel insists that fullness of life comes not to those who prove themselves worthy, but to those who dare to draw near as beggars of grace.

True faith is not about having the right doctrine. It is about turning back, again and again, and ask the True Physician whose mercy heals in totality what no achievement, status, or self-improvement can. And that is where healing deepens: when the undeserving kneel at the feet of Jesus and ask that the ground of mercy could be made wide enough even for them.

Third thing Luke teaches us is that the Samaritan’s healing is completed when his gratitude becomes a way of seeing the world, and when his healing turns into loud worship.

The Samaritan’s story does not end with his physical healing. Luke tells us he saw that he was healed, and then he returned, glorifying God with a loud voice. The other nine saw their healing too, but their sight stopped at the surface. The Samaritan’s vision went further. He recognized that the mercy he had received came not merely from a man of Nazareth but from the heart of God.

Alan Culpepper notes that this double vision, first Jesus’ seeing the lepers, then the leper seeing that he was healed, is the pivot of the story. The verb “to see” (idōn) becomes theological: it means perceiving divine action where others see only coincidence or relief. Ten bodies were made whole, but only one soul perceived the miracle. Gratitude requires slowing down enough to notice grace, to say, “This, too, is gift.”

And when the Samaritan turns back, he does not whisper his thanks discreetly. Luke says he praised God with a loud voice, the same loudness as his cry for mercy. The voice that once begged for healing now shouts with thanksgiving. This is faith completing its circle.

He falls at Jesus’ feet, a gesture not of fear but of adoration. In this moment, he becomes the first true worshiper in the story and the first to enact what will become the heart of the Christian life: Thanksgiving. His posture prefigures what the Church does every Sunday: we gather to see again, to remember mercy, to give thanks, and to fall at Christ’s feet in the breaking of bread.

Jesus’ final words carry profound weight: “Rise and go; your faith has made you well.” The word “rise” (anastēthi) is the same used for resurrection. The Samaritan not only stands, he is raised. In other words, gratitude becomes a vehicle for resurrection in miniature.

For us, the question is not whether we have been blessed, but whether we have learned to see that blessing, whether we have turned our healed lives into acts of loud praise. It is one thing to be healed. It is another to rise, to live every day as an act of praise to the Giver.

So, the question that lingers is not simply, how were the ten cleansed? but, how do we see Jesus in this moment? Do we gather here, week after week, as people who are simply trying to be nice to one another, to speak kindly, to maintain a respectable rhythm of faith because, well, this is what we’ve always done, and we don’t need to know any better? Or do we come as those who have seen the Master of Mercy, the True Physician, and who know that apart from him we cannot be made whole? Are we like the 9 who went away, or the foreigner who returns?

The truth is, we live in an age that prizes mastery. We can chart the human genome, replace organs, and send telescopes beyond the edges of our galaxy. We believe in evidence and logic and critical inquiry, and rightly so. We are Anglicans. But somewhere along the way, many of us began to believe that science could not only mend bodies but make souls whole as well. We assumed that if we could name every disorder, debunk miracles, and explain every mystery, then perhaps we could cure the ache that Scripture calls sin, the fracture that runs through every human heart. We are responsible for our individual and collective breakdown. Please don’t misunderstand me. The matter is not that medicine cannot heal us, or that it is not the most amazing advancement we should take advantage of. Indeed, it is. And it can. Curing of a body is something remarkably awesome and worthy of great awe and respect.

But the leper who turned back knew something we are often afraid to see. He knew that wholeness cannot be engineered, achieved, or administered; it must be received from above. And it must be received from a person, not from an idea, not from a theory, but from the One whose touch restores us to the humanity we lost.

From the very beginning, humanity has searched for that wholeness. In Eden, Adam reached for knowledge apart from God, knowledge meant to make him wise, autonomous, self-sufficient. In doing so, he fractured the very image he bore. The first Adam reached for mastery and lost intimacy. The Second Adam, Christ, relinquished mastery to restore intimacy through the Cross. He stooped down into our leprosy, our alienation, and our clever self-improvement projects, and he said, “Be made whole through me.”

That is why the Samaritan’s act of turning back is radical. It is the opposite of what Adam has done. He is turning back to the God who made him, to the One who alone can make humanity whole again. And that is worth shouting from the rooftops.

Conclusion: Friends, when we gather here each Sunday, we are not just performing a ritual of polite religion. We are standing together in the borderland between Samaria and Galilee, between brokenness and healing, and calling out, “Jesus, Master, have mercy on us.” And in this holy place, he does. He sees us. He feeds us. He gives us the promise of wholeness in the Eucharist.

But the question remains: when we rise and go forth from this place, will we see this gathering merely as a social habit or a spiritual formality? Or will we see it as the meeting place of mercy, the place where the Second Adam reaches across the tear of sin to restore the image of God in us?

For to come to Jesus, to see him, to thank him, to fall at his feet, is to be made whole in the complete sense. Wholeness is not found in the perfection of intellect, but in the joy of being known by the fountain of Mercy. 

And perhaps, like the Samaritan, we too will discover that our faith, small as a mustard seed, trembling and imperfect, is enough to raise us up. Perhaps if we let it, we too will rise and heal in small increments. Medicine heals us, but mercy restores us, whether this is in an instant or over time.

For the same voice that spoke light into creation now says to each of us: “Rise and go; your faith has made you well.” [Can we dare to believe that? Or is it a bunch of Biblical babble we will tune out for a better and more interesting option?] May our prayer be this today: “Lord, we believe; help our unbelief.” Can we dare to believe just that? AMEN.