Our Unexpected God: The God Who Breaks the Rules to Make Us Whole

In Luke 17:11-19, Jesus encounters ten men with leprosy who were considered untouchable outcasts by society. When they cry out for mercy, Jesus tells them to show themselves to the priests, and they are healed as they go. However, only one returns to thank Jesus - a Samaritan, the most unlikely person in the group. Jesus tells this grateful man that his faith has made him well, using a word that means complete wholeness, not just physical healing. This story reveals that Jesus walks toward those society pushes away and that gratitude transforms healing into true restoration.

Transcript

All right, church, if you have your Bibles this morning, I'm going to invite you to pull them out and open up to the book of Luke. It's in the New Testament. We're going to start in Luke 17. We're going to read just a few verses. This morning.

It's going to be 17 verses 11 through 19. If you don't have your Bibles, you can follow along on the screens, but I always invite you. Bring your Bibles, make notes, highlight stuff that you can check out online, but just make sure you. You dive in. All right, let's read this together from Luke 17:11 through 19.

Here is the word of the Lord for us this morning. Now, on his way to Jerusalem, Jesus traveled along the border between Samaria and Galilee. As he was going into a village, 10 men who had leprosy met him. They stood at a distance and they called out in a loud voice, jesus, master, have pity on us. When he saw them, he said, go show yourselves to the priests.

And as they went, they were cleansed. One of them, when he saw that he was healed, came back praising God and a loud voice. He threw himself at Jesus Fe he thanked him, and he was a Samaritan. Jesus asked, were not all 10 cleansed? Where are the other nine?

Has no one returned to give praise to God except this foreigner? Then he said to him, rise and go. Your faith has made you well.

There are rules in life. I don't know if you remember some of your favorite rules in your house when you are a child. Things like, don't touch the stove. Things like, don't run with scissors. Don't talk with your mouth full.

Anybody have a great unique rule that your parents had at your house? What was it? Don't stick the fork in the toaster. Don't stick the fork in the toaster. That's a solid rule.

Do what words to live by. Literally, don't cut your own hair. Don't cut your own hair. Or your sisters. Okay, that's.

Okay. Good. All right. Those are good rules. What else?

Anybody else have a yes, Nicole. We had to create one for Alyssa that was don't put your sandwich on the DVD player. Ah, sometimes. Yeah. She's gotten so smart since then.

I'm so proud of you, honey. Don't use your mom's fabric scissors on anything. Oh, yes, we had this rule. It was, don't use your mom's fabric scissors for anything. They are fabric only, okay?

All the moms are like, yes, I like the don't cut your own hair. However, Just so you guys know, I cut my own hair. Yeah. Okay. Yeah.

All right. It got really quiet in here when I said that just now. Oh, man. Nicole helps me a lot sometimes. Occasionally.

Anyway. If you grew up in the church, one of the most important rules that the church has is don't break the rules. Right? Just whatever the rules are, don't break them. But what happens, church, when rules end up getting in the way of what God is trying to do?

What happens when rules are put up in such a way or, you know, so rigid that they get in the way of what God wants to do? What happens when the religious system says, don't touch, don't approach, don't come near?

So today, in the story that we read, we read about 10 lepers, and they've heard their whole entire lives. You are untouchable. You're unclean, you're unsafe. You can't be here. And then Jesus walks straight into this no go zone, right?

So he's walking on, you know, in a place that's already kind of strange for Jesus to be walking. It's on the border between Samaria and Galilee. And we know that Samaritans live in Samaria. And those Samaritans, by golly, they're not us. Right.

They're the foreigners. They're the people who for a long time, kind of intermarried with some of the other colonizers that lived in this area. They kind of took on some of their worship practices. It became synonymous with Samaria and Samaritans, that they just were not as good as us. Right.

And Jesus walks into that direction intentionally. Luke says it simply, as Jesus entered a village, 10 men with leprosy stood at a distance and called out jesus, master, have mercy on us.

What do you think about when you hear about these 10 men who met Jesus on his way to Jerusalem? What are some of the thoughts that come to your mind whenever you think about leprosy? It's a skin disease, right. It was pretty nasty. The thing about leprosy back in the Old Testament and even in Jesus time is that leprosy was a disease that spread basically without any sort of control.

What did you say, Valerie? It was incredibly contagious. I didn't mind hanging out together with the Sumerians when they all had leprosy. That's true. Right?

Yeah. When the Israelites had leprosy, they didn't mind hanging out at that point with the Samaritans who had leprosy, because they were all, at that point, just unworthy. Unclean. And so lepers, a lot of times had to stay in leper colonies. They were reduced to staying outside of the city gates.

They were literally the most ostracized people in this story.

What makes it so important is it wasn't that just one person got healed. It was 10. Lepers got healed. They were cleansed. These men, because of their skin disease, were unwelcome anywhere.

They were forced to sit outside city gates to beg for food, to beg for money. They relied completely on the kindness of strangers. I don't know if you guys are familiar with kind of the state of homelessness in our city, but I. I have gotten so used to seeing homeless people at so many corners that I've become almost blind to it. That's the same way that people in ancient Israel would have dealt with people who were lepers. They might have heard their crying from a distance.

Unclean, don't come close, but hey, can you throw me some. Some change? And people would just keep walking because they were beginning to ignore the needs of those in these colonies. And each One of those 10 men had stories, right? Each one of them were ripped away from their futures because they contracted a disease at some point in their lives.

Some of them probably had it for months or years, some of them probably decades. Think about it this way. When you think about these 10 men, they have 10 families that they can't go home to. 10 lives that were put on pause. These 10 men were pushed to the very edge of society.

And notice that when Jesus gets close to where this crowd of men were, Scripture says they still stood at a distance. They didn't want to get too close. They knew the rules. They knew the routine, and they shouted. They didn't do it because they wanted to stay at a distance.

They did it because the law required them to stay at a distance. They were required to warn people of their disease. They were required to live outside of the city, to carry their shame publicly. I don't know if you guys. How many of you grew up going to Sunday school?

Oh, okay. Surprising. Did you guys ever talk about leprosy in Sunday school as a kid? Because I still remember the lesson. So my dad was actually my Sunday school teacher.

I think it was third grade. My dad was my Sunday school teacher. And I remember my dad and who was very. He liked to give very unique sermons, or not sermons, but like, stories. I mean, I remember great things that my dad did when I was growing up.

And one of those was this conversation about leprosy. And in the middle of A quiet Sunday school hour at St. Mark's United Methodist Church when I'm in third grade. All of a sudden, breaking the silence was unclean. My dad just screaming, unclean.

And he said, that is how you had to announce yourself. If you had leprosy because you didn't want to give your disease to anybody else, that would have been the worst shame imaginable, that your communicable disease became somebody else's. You have caused harm in somebody else's life.

So these men were bound by the tradition that they were a part of, by religious rules that were put in place during Moses time. We're talking 2,000 years before this moment when we read about it in the gospel, to keep their flesh rotting disease to themselves. But desperation pushed these 10 lepers to shout across the boundaries that religious society had placed on them, jesus, master, have mercy on us. Did you hear the word unclean in any of that? No.

They didn't yell, stay away. They yelled, have mercy on us.

They were desperate. They knew that Jesus was something special and he was heading their way. And in this moment, they didn't have anything else to lose. Right? They had lost their families.

They couldn't hold a job. They had no one to watch over them. They were lucky just to be alive. And they had nothing else to look forward to. What does it matter?

Let's just see if Jesus will heal us.

Sometimes the deepest prayer is the one you shout from a distance because you're not sure that you're allowed to get close.

And in that moment, Jesus sees them. He doesn't avoid them. He doesn't walk around them. He doesn't pretend to not hear him and go along doing his own thing. He doesn't tell them, whoa, whoa, whoa, back away.

Jesus, in that moment, sees these 10 men, and then he does something unexpected.

Scripture doesn't tell us that he heals them on the spot in that moment. He doesn't reach out and touch them. He doesn't pray over them or say some magical words. He doesn't spit on the ground and make mud like we've seen him do before and rub it all over them. He doesn't even move toward them.

He just simply speaks. And the words that he says are pretty simple. Now go show yourself to the priests.

And that's wild. There's no scriptural mention that they had any change in their physicality in any sort of way. They're not healed in that moment. They still look sick. They probably still feel sick.

They are for every intent and purpose, they are sick. Still. But Jesus says, go show yourself to the priests. Why? Because Jesus is inviting them to a healing that begins with trust.

Jesus says, I'm going to do all the work for you, but you've got to meet me halfway, right? Church I believe that sometimes healing still starts with a step and not necessarily the miracle. It still requires us to do something in order to receive the healing that God promises. And Luke says, as they went, they were made clean. Not before, not instantly, not in front of the crowd, not when they showed up in front of the priest, but it happened on their journey toward the priests.

Healing happened in motion. It happened on the way. Could you imagine being one of those 10 people, figuring out like, Jesus just told us to go show ourselves to the like. I know I'm unclean. I've been unclean for decades, and I've got to go to a priest to present myself to the priest, to show him, all right, Jesus, I'm going to trust you.

And to begin to walk that now, would you do that if you had some disease that you have been carrying in your body for decades? Would you just be willing to follow if a man shows up and says, hey, just go to the doctor and he'll pronounce you well, man, that would be great. Wouldn't would take a lot of trust for me to leave that community that I'm supposed to be a part of and then to go into the city where I would have brought shame to anybody who saw me in order to go show myself to the priests.

It would have taken a ton of trust in Jesus, simple words, to make these men go into a place that if they would have been seen, would have been unwelcomed and could have put their lives in jeopardy.

It happens on the way and during their trip. It doesn't show us that there's any sort of bright, miraculous light. There's no chorus of angels singing over them, just a command from a man that they heard was holy and they chose to obey. They chose to just journey in the direction that Jesus told them to go.

I couldn't imagine taking that walk. Not sure if anything was really different in my life. Not quite sure if the priest would be angry at me because I showed up with a skin disease. Could you imagine, like, having to cover your face and your hands because of the sores that would have been visible.

You could have been outcast, you could have been called unclean. And if somebody saw you unclean walking in the city, they could have stoned you to death right there.

That walk, that simple walk to go show the priest would have taken so much faith in the words of Jesus. And all 10 of them left to go get healed. And then the story turns, because 10 are healed, but only one comes back. One man stops in his tracks, and he realizes, my skin is clear, I've been healed. And he refuses to let the moment pass.

So he turns back, he runs to Jesus and falls at his feet. He praises God with a loud voice. Scripture says. And at the very end of verse 16, we see that Luke adds the detail that would have shocked the original audience. It's a really simple phrase.

The simple phrase is, and he was a Samaritan.

So this Samaritan would have been considered the outsider among outsiders, the one that nobody expected to be grateful, right? The one that the religious crowd would have written off. We don't care about him so much as we care about our Israelite brothers and sisters, right? He's not one of us. This Samaritan was the only one of the ten original Jewish audience would have cared whether he was healed or not.

But this person was considered inferior. He was a threat to Jewish tradition, not just for the disease, but for his racial makeup, right? This was the only man who came back to Jesus to thank him, even in the midst of his outcast feeling.

And this goes to show us that sometimes the person we least expect becomes the loudest witness to God's grace. And we've seen that over and over and over again in Scripture. Just a couple of weeks ago, we talked about Zacchaeus, who was once the most despised man in his whole town. And when he met Jesus, became a witness to radical repentance and the extravagant generosity that Christ calls us to. We also have heard the story repeatedly about a Samaritan woman who shows up at a well.

She meets Jesus and then works to help change the lives of her entire town. She becomes an incredible evangelist for the gift that Jesus is to humanity. And if we think about it, the story of Jesus even includes those condemned to death, like the criminal on the cross who received forgiveness as he was actively dying. And his story that illustrates God's radical forgiveness echoes throughout all generations to to this day. Right, friends?

God loves to use people that we overlook to preach the sermons that sometimes we need to hear the most.

So when the cleansed leper comes back to thank Jesus, Jesus asks three kind of haunting questions just right in a row. He says, were not all 10 cleansed? Huh? Where are the other nine? Was no one found to return and give praise to God except the foreigner?

You can kind of hear the disdain in that, right? Jesus is making a point and he's not angry. Jesus in this moment is revealing something deeper. Healing should not be the end of the story for us.

Gratitude is what completes healing. The nine received the same healing, but it was only the one who returned who receives wholeness. Jesus says to him, rise and go. Your faith has made you well. Okay, so I'm going to tell you a little bit of Greek here.

The Greek word here is sesokan, which is. Yeah, you heard it. Sesokin, obviously. And it comes from the Greek root word sozo. And that word means something more than physical healing.

It means to save, to rescue, to deliver, to make whole. Sozo is like salvation of physical and physical. Sorry. Physical and spiritual together. He wasn't just cured of his illness.

Using that word tells us that his whole life was restored. It was given back to him. Leprosy was a disease that meant you were dead. Whether you were actively dying or not. You were dead to your community, dead to your family.

And when you were healed of leprosy, you were restored. You were given your life back. He was delivered from that death sentence and given a new chance at his life.

Church. This story shows us that the healing that Jesus offers changes our condition. But it's our gratitude to God that changes our whole lives.

So to talk about the impact of the healing that Jesus gave to these leprous men, we have to remember that leprosy just wasn't a disease. It was so much more. It was also a social death. To be healed of leprosy meant you could go home, right? It meant you could hug your children if you had them, or your wife or your family that you had to leave.

You could go back to the temple and worship again. Could you imagine being kept out of church because you have a disease? Friends, I don't know if you remember, but it wasn't all that long ago if you had aids, you weren't welcome in churches. It's something that still happens in our recent past. If you had a very specific disease, you're not welcome.

It meant you could go to work again. It meant that you might be able to provide for your family in a way that you've not been able to for years or decades. It meant that you could belong to your community again. Guys, that is a major, major deal. We were not made to be individuals as much as this American individuality has kind of taught us that we should.

Everything is our own, and we are brought up on our brute. No, no, we. We rely on one Another for so much.

Jesus in this moment didn't just fix their skin. Jesus restores to them their humanity. And here's the twist. The nine got their health back, but the one who comes back and gives thanks to Jesus gets his health and his soul back because he returned to the source of the healing church. We don't just believe in a Jesus who restores what we've lost.

We believe in a Jesus who restores who we are and who we're meant to be.

So if we dive deeper into the story, we see that in the midst of this story of healing, Jesus ends up trading places with this whole group of men. Where is Jesus going on his trip? Do you remember? It's to Jerusalem. And he happens to be on the border between Samaria and Galilee.

Where is Jesus going? To Jerusalem. Why is Jesus going to Jerusalem? Oh, that's right, because Jesus knows he's going to die. So in this moment, he trades places with these men who were condemned to death outside of their city, outside of the social structure.

And Jesus is going to take their place. Jesus is going to his death.

After this moment of excitement, healing and restoration, Jesus is still heading towards rejection, isolation, toward being an outcast or being treated as unclean. He's moving toward his own demise.

Friends, Jesus doesn't just heal the outcast. Jesus becomes the outcast to bring us healing and the salvation that we need.

So what does the story of the 10 lepers mean for us today in 2026? I know we don't see a whole lot of leprosy anymore here in the United States, but this story means for us that Jesus is still walking into the places where we might be afraid to travel. It means that Jesus is still stepping into the places where polite religion continues to avoid. Jesus in this time is still hearing the cries shouted from those who stand at a distance. It means that Jesus is still actively healing people, still restoring the ones that we have pushed to the edges of society, still honoring the gratitude of those who are unexpected.

Jesus is still loving those that polite society says are too broken to be loved. So that means for us that we have to ask some questions. Who is it in our lives that we have kept at a distance? Who is it in our lives that we have labeled unclean or unworthy to receive the same kind of love that we get from Jesus? Who is it that we have decided are too far broken or too far gone for restoration?

Who is it in our lives that are shouting for mercy while we pretend to not hear them? Who in our world is waiting for someone to walk toward them instead of around them in order to avoid them because the example of Jesus shows us that we have to move toward them. So here's my invitation.

Don't be afraid to call out to Jesus asking him to heal the parts of your life that are still unclean. Jesus is healing you today. All we've got to do is speak up. Ask Jesus to restore the parts of your life that have made you live at a distance. Let Jesus turn your healing into gratitude.

Let Jesus make you whole not just better.

And then as a response to that we have to be the people that walk toward those that the world avoids.

We have got to be the people who close the distance we've got to go and be the hands that reach. Go to be the voice that calls back. Go to be the gratitude that echoes through the world Because I still believe that our unexpected God is the God who breaks rules to make whole communities not just individuals. Church let's pray.