As They Went: Healing in the Midst of Daily Obedience
A Reflection on the Twenty-Eighth Sunday after Pentecost (within the Nativity Fast)
Twenty-Eighth Sunday after Pentecost – (Colossians 1:12–18 / St. Luke 17:12–19)
Beloved in Christ: Saint Paul speaks a phrase today that seems almost incidental – and yet upon it the whole of our life in Christ depends: “And He is before all things.”
Christ is before prayer. Before fasting. Before obedience. Before work, before failure, before repentance, and before thanksgiving.
And because He is before all things, He is able to sanctify all things, even the most ordinary duties of our daily life.
The Gospel gives us a quiet but profound image of how this sanctification unfolds.
Ten men approach Christ – lepers, broken in body and cut off from society. Standing at a distance, as the Law required, they cry out: “Jesus, Master, have mercy on us.”
Christ answers, but not in a way that we might have expected, especially given the recent accounts we have been reading in the Gospel of our Lord’s healing miracles.
He does not touch them; He does not heal them immediately in the sight of the Apostles; He does not draw attention to them or to Himself.
Instead, He gives them a simple command: “Go, shew yourselves to the priests.”
This is not dramatic. It is not mystical. It is simply the duty appointed by the Law: the necessary step toward restoration to ordinary life.
And Saint Luke tells us something essential: “And it came to pass, as they went, they were made clean.”
Note that well! Not while they stood before Christ, not in the sight of the multitude, but as they went.
Their healing took place in obedience, in motion, in the midst of daily duty.
Christ did not remove their responsibility; He met them within it.
He did not lift them out of ordinary life; He sanctified ordinary life by standing at its head.
And notice this as well: Christ gives this command not only to the Jews, but also to the Samaritan – one who would likely have been despised, perhaps even rejected, by the priests.
Yet the Samaritan goes. He does not argue or protest. He obeys the word of Christ, even when obedience may lead him into discomfort or humiliation.
This teaches us something vital.
Christ does not always heal us by removing us from our circumstances. Very often, He heals us through them. He heals us through work done faithfully, or duties carried out patiently, through obedience that feels slow, unnoticed, and unrewarded.
How many of us have been helped by Christ in precisely this way – quietly, invisibly, in the middle of ordinary life?
And yet Saint Luke tells us that one of the ten, “when he saw that he was made clean,” did something different.
He returned.
He came back “with a loud voice glorifying God.”
He fell at the feet of Christ and gave thanks.
And the Evangelist adds the detail that changes everything: “And this was a Samaritan.”
The outsider is the one who recognizes what has truly happened.
Healing is not complete without thanksgiving. Obedience carried him forward – but thanksgiving brought him back.
The Greek word for thanksgiving is eucharistia.
The Samaritan returns to give thanks – and in doing so, he returns into the physical presence of Christ. He does not merely resume life; he enters communion. He falls at the Lord’s feet and acknowledges the Giver, not only the gift.
Christ then asks the question that still echoes in every age: “Where are the nine?”
They are gone. They are not hostile or unbelieving. They are simply gone – absorbed back into life, content with benefits received, and inattentive to paying gratitude to the One who gave them.
This is the danger of a faith that receives but does not return.
Saint Paul reminds us that Christ is “the Head of the Body, the Church.” Our obedience flows outward from Him into daily life – but our thanksgiving draws us back into Him.
This is why the Church gathers. This is why the Eucharist stands at the heart of Christian life.
The Church does not pull us out of the world; she gathers the world back to Christ. The scattered days of the week – the labor, the healing, the endurance – all of these are offered back in thanksgiving.
Beloved we are healed as we go, and we are made whole when we return.
Let us learn from the Samaritan. Let us do the work given to us according to our state in life. And when we see that we have been helped, let us come back. Let us fall at the feet of Christ in thanksgiving.
For He is before all things. And when we place Him there – in obedience, and in thanksgiving –
then, and only then, are we made whole.
21 December 2025