Then one of them, when he saw that he was healed, turned back, praising God with a loud voice. He prostrated himself at Jesus’ feet and thanked him. And he was a Samaritan. Then Jesus asked, “Were not ten made clean? But the other nine, where are they? Was none of them found to return and give praise to God except this foreigner?” — Luke 17:15–18
Jesus speaks these words—part of the Gospel reading (Luke 17:11–19) assigned for this upcoming Sunday, the Eighteenth Sunday after Pentecost, RCL Year C—with a peculiar edge. Not quite anger—more like astonished disappointment. Ten men healed. One returns. And Jesus doesn’t speak to the Samaritan but over him, as if addressing someone else entirely. “This foreigner,” he says, making the man simultaneously visible and invisible—praised yet distanced by a single word: allogenēs—foreigner, the one who doesn’t belong.
As I was taught many years ago, if Jesus’ words don’t often strike us as strange—if they don’t unsettle us or provoke significant spiritual unrest—we can be sure of one thing: we’re missing something important.
The Battle Before the Tomb
The NRSV translates the affliction as “skin disease” rather than “leprosy,” and this matters. As New Testament scholar Matthew Thiessen has shown, the ancient condition wasn’t equivalent to modern Hansen’s disease. It was seen more as a sloughing off of skin—an image of living decomposition. The afflicted resembled the dead. They didn’t just suffer—they embodied impurity’s source: death itself.
So Jesus isn’t merely performing a healing. He’s battling death before ever reaching the Roman cross or the borrowed tomb. These ten were the walking dead—ritually unclean because they manifested the boundary between life and decay. When Jesus sends them to the priests and they are healed en route, he’s pushing back against the powers of death, prefiguring resurrection.
The Greek in one of my commentaries helps us here: all ten were cleansed (katharisthēte)—made ritually clean. But only one was saved (sesōken). “Your faith has made you well,” Jesus says to the Samaritan—yet the word is stronger: saved, made whole, restored in the fullest sense. The nine received clean skin. The one received salvation. Entirely different orders of reality.
The Echo of Naaman
This week’s Old Testament pairing—Naaman the Syrian (2 Kings 5)—amplifies the theme. Earlier in Luke, Jesus had recalled the story: “There were many lepers in Israel in the time of Elisha, and none of them was cleansed except Naaman the Syrian” (Luke 4:27). Jesus’ neighbors tried to kill him for suggesting God’s mercy reached outsiders.
Naaman and the Samaritan: two insiders-turned-outsiders. Both healed without being touched. Both returning to the source. Both dismissed ritual pathways. Both sent away with a single word: Go.
The nine weren’t wrong to continue toward the priests. Levitical law required it. They followed tradition, aiming to be certified clean and welcomed back into community. But somewhere along that journey, they missed something: their encounter with Jesus wasn’t a restoration story. Instead, this was the Kingdom of God breaking in—death undone, shalom arriving. And only the foreigner saw it.
Why the Foreigner Sees
This Lukan text offers an important principle: that the outsider/foreigner often sees God’s grace more clearly than the insider. The foreigner lives with a double homelessness. The old home is gone—not just geographically, but existentially. The new place is never quite home. Familiarity remains elusive. The foreigner lives suspended—between departure and arrival, between alienation and belonging.
This was Israel’s own story. Abraham leaving Ur. Slavery in Egypt. The Babylonian exile. One of this week’s other lectionary texts, Jeremiah 29, speaks directly to this condition. The prophet says: Build houses. Plant gardens. Seek the welfare of the city where you find yourselves, for in its welfare you will find your own.
“Remember that you were foreigners in Egypt”—this refrain echoes across Torah not just as ethical guidance, but as theological insight. To be displaced is to see grace clearly. Outsiders can’t rely on inherited belonging. They must live in dependence. They recognize gift as gift. And that recognition becomes the key to insight.
The nine had everything: ritual knowledge, covenant identity, paths toward inclusion. That abundance may have blinded them. They didn’t see. They walked the road they knew.
The Samaritan had none of that. He had no institutional bridge, no script. His healing came unbidden, undeserved. And recognizing it as sheer gift, he turned back, praising God, falling at Jesus’ feet.
When We Are the Nine
Most of us, most of the time, are the nine.
We’re embedded in structures—good ones, often. Church membership. Baptismal identity. Spiritual practices. We know the steps: how prayer works, how grace is taught, how confession is done. And that familiarity brings comfort. But it can also dull our vision.
Notice what Luke doesn’t tell us. There’s no dramatic moment. No “be clean!” No hand stretched out. The healing just happens—along the way. Instead of focusing on mechanics, Luke cares what comes after.
After the Samaritan saw he was healed, Luke gives us four verbs: he turned back, praised God, prostrated himself, and gave thanks. Jesus highlights the first two: return and praise. These frame the Gospel itself. At Jesus’ birth, the shepherds “returned, glorifying and praising God” (Luke 2:20). At his ascension, the disciples “returned to Jerusalem with great joy” (Luke 24:52). Recognition → return → praise.
The nine kept walking—rightly so, perhaps. But they missed the moment. They missed the pivot—the spiritual inversion that leads not to the temple, but to Jesus himself.
Foreigners in the Kingdom
When I say “foreigner,” I’m speaking theologically. First Peter calls the church “aliens and exiles” (2:11). The early Christians understood themselves as paroikia—resident aliens, with citizenship elsewhere. We are all outsiders to the Kingdom until grace makes us otherwise.
And those who are literally foreigners—immigrants, refugees, the displaced—may have spiritual vision we lack. They don’t assume belonging. They don’t expect entitlement. So they recognize grace when it appears. They return. They praise.
This passage doesn’t resolve today’s political debates about immigration or borders. But it does press a hard question: Might those we deem outsiders see more clearly than we do? Might our very comfort—our ecclesial or national belonging—sometimes impede our vision?
Get Up and Go
One last thing. Jesus doesn’t let the Samaritan stay at his feet.
“Get up (anistēmi) and go (poreuomai) on your way; your faith has saved you.”
In Luke-Acts, this phrase often precedes revelation or mission. After the Annunciation, Mary “gets up and goes” to Elizabeth (Luke 1:39). The Prodigal Son “gets up and goes” to his father (Luke 15:18). God tells Paul to “get up and go” to Damascus (Acts 22:10). It’s resurrection language (anistēmi) paired with journey language.
The Samaritan has been saved, yes. Made whole. But salvation isn’t a destination where he remains frozen in grateful prostration. Instead, it’s a launching point. He’s sent forward—though where, we’re not told. The nine got their healing and continued to the priests, completing the circuit they’d begun. The Samaritan got his healing, returned in praise, and then was sent… somewhere else. He doesn’t go back to normal. He goes forward into something we can’t quite see.
Have we often mistaken the Christian life for getting back to normal? For restoration to our proper place in comfortable structures? The nine were healed and went where the law directed them. Correct. Orderly. But the Samaritan—the one who saw clearly, who turned back, who fell on his face in astonished gratitude—he gets sent forward into ambiguity. “Go on your way.” What way? We’re not told. That too is part of the point.
And Us?
I suspect that recognizing gift and responding with gratitude opens us to a future we can’t map in advance. The nine knew where they were going. The Samaritan just knew he’d been saved.
The loud voice still echoes. The prostration still instructs. But it’s the rising and going that unsettles us most—this sense that an encounter with grace doesn’t return us to familiar paths but sends us forward into territory we haven’t charted.
Where does that leave us? I’m not entirely sure. But I suspect that’s exactly where the text means to leave us.
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