28th Sunday in Ordinary Time

The Healed Body Returns to Dust: But the Grateful Heart Lives Forever 

(28 Week in Ordinary Time, Luke 17:11-19, 12 October 2025) 

This Sunday’s Gospel presents Jesus healing 10 lepers, of whom only one, a Samaritan and therefore a foreigner, returned to thank him (Luke 17:11-19). The Lord said to him: Rise and go your way; your faith has made you well (Luke 17:19). This Gospel passage invites us to a twofold reflection. It first evokes two levels of healing: one, more superficial, concerns the body. The other deeper level touches the innermost depths of the person, what the Bible calls the heart, and from there spreads to the whole of a person’s life. Complete and radical healing is salvation. By making a distinction between health and salvation, even ordinary language helps us to understand that salvation is far more than health: indeed, it is new, full and definitive life. Furthermore, Jesus here, as in other circumstances, says the words: Your faith has made you whole. It is faith that saves human beings, re-establishing them in their profound relationship with God, themselves and others; and faith is expressed in gratitude. 

(Pope Benedict XVI, Angelus, 2007) 

Dearly Beloved Brothers and Sisters in Jesus Christ, In this Sunday’s Gospel, ten lepers cry out to Jesus from a distance: Jesus, Master, have mercy on us! Ten voices, united by suffering, call for healing. And Jesus, moved with compassion, responds not by touch or immediate word of power, but with a command: Go, show yourselves to the priests. As they go, they are made clean. Yet, among the ten, only one turns back—one, a Samaritan, a foreigner. Only he returns to glorify God and to fall at the feet of Jesus in gratitude. To him, the Lord says the mysterious and luminous words: Rise and go your way; your faith has made you well. Here, the Gospel invites us into a profound meditation on the nature of healing, faith, and salvation. 

The Twofold Healing-Pope Benedict XVI beautifully distinguishes two levels of healing in this passage: the superficial and the profound. The first is bodily—an external restoration from disease. It is real and merciful, yet limited. The second, deeper level is spiritual and interior. It concerns not merely the skin, but the heart—the center of the person, the space where the human being stands before God. The nine lepers receive the first kind of healing, the cleansing of the body. The Samaritan alone receives the second: the healing of the heart. This distinction reminds us that faith does not merely seek relief from suffering; it seeks communion. Physical health, though precious, remains fragile and transitory. Salvation, however, is health transfigured into wholeness—a restoration of the person in relationship with God, with oneself, and with others. In this light, the leper’s return becomes a symbol of humanity’s return to its Source. The act of turning back—conversion—is itself the sign of deeper healing. 

Faith and Gratitude-At the heart of this Gospel lies a profound truth: faith and gratitude are inseparable. Faith recognizes that life itself is gift; gratitude is the soul’s spontaneous response to that recognition. The Samaritan’s thanksgiving is not mere politeness—it is theology in action. In turning to thank Christ, he confesses who Jesus is: not merely a healer, but the living presence of God’s mercy. 

Your faith has made you well—in Greek, sesōken se, literally, your faith has saved you.” Jesus points beyond the physical cure to the mystery of salvation. Faith saves because it restores right relationship—what sin had fractured, faith makes whole. Gratitude is therefore not an afterthought to healing, but its very completion. The ungrateful nine remain externally healed but inwardly incomplete; the thankful one becomes whole, for gratitude integrates the gift with the Giver. 

Salvation as Communion-This Gospel unveils the anthropology of salvation: to be saved is not merely to exist without pain, but to live in communion. The human person, made imago Dei, is not self-contained; our being is relational. The Samaritan’s return to Jesus is the return of the creature to the Creator, the finite to the Infinite. It is a gesture that discloses the structure of salvation itself: to be saved is to be reoriented toward love, to live in thanksgiving—eucharistia. In this sense, gratitude becomes the highest form of reason. The thankful heart perceives the world not as possession, but as gift. It lives out what St. Augustine called the ordo amoris—the right ordering of love—where every good received becomes an occasion for praise rather than pride. 

The Eucharistic Dimension-Every Sunday, the Church gathers to repeat the act of the Samaritan: to return and give thanks. The word Eucharist itself means thanksgiving. Here we learn that salvation is not an abstract state, but a relationship continually renewed in gratitude. The Eucharist heals the deepest leprosy of the soul—our forgetfulness of God. In remembering and giving thanks, we are made whole. 

The story of the ten lepers, then, is the story of every believer. We all cry out for mercy from a distance. Grace comes to meet us. But only when we turn back in thanksgiving, do we truly encounter the face of Christ and enter into salvation. Healing may restore us to life; gratitude restores us to God. 

The Samaritan Leper: A Portrait of Grateful Faith-The Samaritan who returned to thank Jesus stands as one of the most luminous figures in the Gospel — a paradoxical hero whose very marginality reveals the truth of salvation. He is doubly excluded: first by his disease, which makes him ritually and socially impure, and second by his identity as a Samaritan, a religious outsider despised by the Jews. Yet in this double exile, he becomes the privileged vessel of revelation. 

The Samaritan represents the human condition in its most existential form — stripped of status, boundary, and belonging. He stands as homo viator, the human being on the road, seeking meaning and restoration. In him, we glimpse the drama of the finite before the Infinite: a creature wounded by existence yet still capable of recognizing grace when it appears. His cry, Jesus, Master, have mercy on us, is not merely a plea for health; it is an act of metaphysical openness, the soul’s acknowledgment of its dependence on the divine. 

Theologically, his encounter with Christ discloses the universality of salvation. While the nine, secure in religious identity, obey the command to show themselves to the priests, it is the foreigner — the one beyond the covenant — who perceives the true Priest in the person of Jesus himself. His return to give thanks (eucharistein) becomes a confession of faith: he recognizes that the locus of holiness has shifted from the temple to the living presence of Christ. In bowing before Jesus, he performs an act of pure theology — adoration — and thus reveals what true religion means: not ritual compliance, but relational communion. 

Gratitude transforms him. The return to give thanks marks the interior journey from healing to salvation. His body was cleansed, but in gratitude, his heart is made whole. The foreigner’s thanksgiving becomes the archetype of redeemed humanity — a humanity that no longer defines itself by borders, purity, or law, but by the capacity to recognize gift and respond in love. His faith is not institutional but existential; it is born not from belonging but from encounter. 

In the Samaritan leper, the Gospel unveils a profound anthropology of grace: that the outsider often sees what the insiders overlook. He teaches that faith begins not with possession, but with wonder; not with privilege, but with poverty of spirit. Gratitude is the highest form of knowing, for it perceives being itself as grace. 

Thus, the Samaritan is not merely a healed man — he is a theologian of thanksgiving. His posture at the feet of Christ foreshadows the worship of all nations, the universal Eucharistia that will unite humanity in gratitude. In him, the borders between Jew and Samaritan, clean and unclean, insider and outsider dissolve in the light of divine mercy. He is the first fruits of a new humanity: one healed not only in flesh, but in truth — made whole by faith that gives thanks. 

Dear Epiphany, faith is what made the difference. I think this Samaritan leper who has been healed is for us a model of faith. He is an example of faith. What is faith? Faith is trust in Jesus Christ, dependence on Jesus Christ. You can see some things about him that make his response different from the other nine. 

You can see the contrast between the ten and the one. In the first part of the story the ten come to Jesus, in the second half just the one returns. In the first part of the story the ten lepers are keeping their distance from Jesus; in contrast to that, the one who returns comes and falls at Jesus’ feet. The ten cry out for mercy, but only one returns to praise God for receiving mercy. Jesus sends the ten to the priests, but he also sends the one with other words, as we will see in a moment, words of great encouragement. The ten are cleansed, but only one is saved. 

Here is one: he not only received the gift, but he came back and he thanked the giver. Here was a man who, when he saw who Jesus was and what Jesus did, was more taken with the person of Jesus Christ than with what Jesus would do for him. Sometimes we love the gifts of God, but we forget that God himself is the giver. We love the blessings, but we forget the blesser. We are all about what we can get out of God, but we do not really give ourselves back to him in thankful worship and praise. But here is a man who, as soon as he realizes he is healed, he comes back, glorifying God, praising God with a loud voice, and he gives thanks to Jesus, falling at his feet. His faith overflows in praise and in gratitude. 

We could say that gratitude is a Christian virtue. It is the response of the redeemed person to the goodness of God and the lavish grace given to us in Jesus Christ, and we need gratitude in our lives, not just because it is better for us but because God is worthy to receive our thanks and our praise and our gratefulness. 

Dear Epiphany, let us therefore ask for the faith that not only seeks blessings but recognizes the Blesser; faith that not only receives, but remembers; faith that, like the Samaritan’s, bows in gratitude and rises in wholeness. For to be healed is to stand again before God and to hear the words: Rise and go your way; your faith has made you well. 

Fraternally, 
Fr. John Peter Lazaar SAC, Pastor