Tucked into Luke’s ten-chapter account of Jesus’s journey to Jerusalem is a narrative featuring ten lepers (Luke 17:11–19). Prevented by Jewish purity laws from approaching Jesus, those ten lepers call out to him from a distance, begging to be healed. Jesus agrees to their request with a Naaman-like test of faith: “Go and show yourselves to the priests” (verse 14). All ten lepers comply, discovering on their way that they have been cleansed.
At this point, one lone leper chooses to defer his face to face with the priest and to delay his restoration to society in order to turn back, find Jesus, and thank him. Cleansed and now unafraid of spreading his dreadful disease, he approaches Jesus, loudly praising God before falling on his face at his Savior’s feet (verses 15–16).
What happens next may have surprised the unnamed leper. Jesus delays his customary “your faith has made you well” (verse 19) in preference for three piercing questions. Jesus’s response simultaneously exposes a sobering reality about ingratitude and offers a healing balm to those familiar with its sting, a pain Shakespeare’s King Lear described as “sharper than a serpent’s tooth” (King Lear, 1.4.302–303).
1. ‘Were not ten cleansed?’
Jesus’s first question exposes the pervasiveness of ingratitude: So many were healed, and yet so few returned. By calling out the many who had not returned to praise and thank God, Jesus unveils ingratitude as sin and rightly assesses its weight. Ingratitude — a blindness to God’s grace and failure to honor him with our thanks — justly provokes God’s anger. Paul includes it in a list of grievous sins in Romans 1, alongside the likes of idolatry, murder, and sexual immorality (Romans 1:21, 26–32).
With his piercing question, Jesus, far from excusing ingratitude, exposes it and laments its pervasiveness.
2. ‘Where are the nine?’
Similar to the first, Jesus’s second question hints at the sting of ingratitude. Only one among ten men had a heart that was properly oriented toward God in that moment. Only one returned — only one — when all should have done so. Where were the rest? Hadn’t they also believed, obeyed, and been healed?
The 9:1 ratio confronts believers with the possibility that we, too, might be among the nine. We may want to believe we’re the one who came back, singular in virtue, but this encounter causes us to pause and take stock. Are we among the nine? Too often, we also are slow to perceive God’s grace in our lives. We blithely go about our business, consuming God’s good gifts, when, much like the lone leper, we ought to turn back and sing with the hymn,
Dissolved by thy goodness, I fall to the ground
And weep to the praise of the mercy I’ve found.
3. ‘Was no one found except this foreigner?’
The third question distinguishes the lone leper as a foreigner among Jesus’s people; Luke identifies him as a Samaritan (Luke 17:16). We might expect to find hearts rightly oriented toward God among the people with whom Jesus lived and served, but the sorry state of affairs was this: Most of Jesus’s countrymen rejected him. He received little gratitude from those he came to save, and little praise to God issued from their mouths. Those who professed to love God best not only rejected Jesus but murdered him. More often, it was the foreigners and the social outcasts who were quicker to perceive God’s grace to them in Jesus. It was they who begged not to be parted from him (Luke 8:38).
Jesus’s piercing questions unmask our own hearts. Are we quick to see God’s grace at work in our lives and praise him for it? Do we thank those who are his means of accomplishing his good purposes?
Jesus Kept Walking
However spotty our gratitude-record toward God may be, our failures do little to diminish the pain when we experience the sting of ingratitude. The wounds from ungrateful children, spouses, friends, church members, and church leaders have barely scabbed over; they remain ready to break open and bleed again. And when they do, bitterness floods our thoughts, and pride and anger seek to reestablish dominion in our hearts.
But a soothing ointment for those wounds is found in fellowship with Jesus, who knows — better than anyone — the sting of ingratitude. Within this fellowship, Jesus sets the example for us. It isn’t wrong to feel the sting of ingratitude or to expose its pervasiveness. We need not excuse the behavior. Oh, the other nine were so overcome with joy, it drove every other thought from their minds. But neither need others’ ingratitude keep us from joy in God, obedience to his will, and persistent love for ungrateful neighbors. We need not linger over the sting any longer than Jesus did.
You see, after this episode, undeterred by the continual ingratitude of his people, Jesus once more “set his face to go to Jerusalem” (Luke 9:51). There were more miles to walk, more people to heal, more sins to forgive, more parables to tell. Zacchaeus would be waiting in a sycamore tree, and a blind beggar along the Jericho road. There was the Last Supper to prepare and eleventh-hour instructions to give his disciples. There was the cross, the grave, and the crown. The hours were short, and nothing would prevent Jesus from completing his journey.
So we walk Jesus’s steps after him, following as closely as we dare. Aware that few may praise God, few may return to thank us, and those who do are often the ones we’d least expect, we nevertheless set our faces to Jerusalem and take up our appointed crosses, for the time is short, and much remains to be done.
Desiring God