Battle Faith
Luke 17:11-19
In the name of the Father and of the + Son and of the Holy Spirit.
St. Luke 17:19 And He said to him, “Arise, go your way. Your faith has made you well.”
Dear fellow redeemed in Christ our Lord… There is a battle raging on in this country right now between good and evil. That almost goes without saying as we can’t escape the horrible news footage of rioters, looters, and domestic terrorists tromping basically unchecked through major cities in our nation. Lord have mercy! And we pray that local elected officials stop this madness before it gets any worse!
But there is another battle between good and evil going on, and I think you know what I’m talking about. You and I fight in this battle every single day. In fact, only Christians fight in this particular battle. But this battle isn’t waged with other people or on major city streets. It is waged within us. It is a battle fought between the flesh and the spirit; a battle between the Old Adam in us and the New Man; a battle between the selfish sinful nature that is hostile to God and the spiritual nature that loves and serves God.
St. Paul teaches us about this battle in today’s Epistle (Gal 5:17) when he writes, “For the flesh lusts against the Spirit, and the Spirit against the flesh; and these are contrary to one another, so that you do not do the things that you wish.” We also see this battle played out in our Gospel of the Ten Lepers. We see the saving effects of faith in Christ, and we see the tragic results when that salvation is taken for granted and faith is allowed to die. But we also see the victory of faith over the flesh, and we are encouraged to stay in the battle to which God has called us.
It was during His final journey to Jerusalem, on His way to the cross, that Jesus encountered a group of ten lepers there along the border between Galilee and Samaria. Leprosy was a disease that left a person with flesh that was spotted, disfigured, twisted, rotten, and sometimes even crumbling. It was horrible not only because of what it did to one’s flesh, but horrible also because the condition isolated a person from the rest of society, and especially from the temple of God.
These lepers had heard the good word about Jesus, and that word, powerful as it was, kindled faith in their hearts and convinced them that Jesus was kind and good and merciful, and that His mercy had power behind it – power even to heal their dreadful disease. Faith, of course, is what drove them to go out to meet Jesus. Faith is what moved them to stand there calling out to Him, “Jesus, Master, have mercy!”
That’s what faith does. It drives a person to run to Jesus; it drives a person to seek help from Him and to expect help from Him, not because anyone deserves it, but because we know Jesus is willing and able to help those who don’t deserve anything but wrath and punishment.
And our dear Lord Jesus honored their faith. And that means Jesus honored His own Holy Spirit who had created that faith through the Word in the first place. Jesus told them, “Go, show yourselves to the priests.” That is what lepers were supposed to, according to the Law of Moses, after their leprosy had healed, so that the priests could evaluate them and certify that they were indeed healthy again and ready to reenter society. Jesus asked for nothing in return. He didn’t ask for them to prove their worth. He just showered them with mercy and healed the disease of their flesh.
The Holy Spirit uses this account to teach us once again how Christ heals all sinners who come to Him seeking mercy, who come to Him in faith, for the healing of the disease of our flesh.
Our fleshly disease is called Original Sin, also known as inherited sin. This sinful nature infects everyone from the moment of conception, and it has various symptoms, some of which Paul listed in our Epistle when he wrote: “Now the works of the flesh are evident, which are: adultery, fornication, uncleanness, lewdness, 20 idolatry, sorcery, hatred, contentions, jealousies, outbursts of wrath, selfish ambitions, dissensions, heresies, envy, murders, drunkenness, revelries, and the like.” And then Paul tells us what the judgment of God is: “I tell you beforehand, just as I also told you in time past, that those who practice such things will not inherit the kingdom of God.”
So the holy Law of God bans us from the society of God’s people, because we are by nature sinful and unclean. But then Jesus comes to us through the word of His apostles and says, “Repent, and let every one of you be baptized in the name of Jesus Christ for the remission of sins” (Acts 2:38). And “Whoever believes and is baptized will be saved” (Mark 16:16). So it is that faith heals and Baptism cleanses. Forgiveness doesn’t take away our flesh so that it’s gone; but it absolves us of the guilt of our sins. And, as Paul also writes to the Galatians, it crucifies our flesh; it hangs our flesh up there on the cross together with Jesus, where God the Father punished our sins, leaving us spotless and blameless in His sight.
And, dear fellow redeemed, faith alone does that. As Jesus said to the one leper who returned to give thanks, “Your faith has made you well.”
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But that brings us to the tragedy we encounter in our Gospel. All ten lepers were healed by faith. All ten cried out in faith, “Jesus, Master, have mercy on us!” But nine out of ten quickly fell away; only one returned to give Jesus thanks. So, we have to ask, what happened?
In a sermon on this text Martin Luther assumes that, since Jesus told them to go show themselves to the priests, they all went to the priests immediately. But when they arrived, the priests turned them against Jesus—as we often find the priests doing in the Gospels, urging the ten healed men to give glory to God, but not to give glory to God where Jesus was, in the person of Jesus, urging them to go fulfill their legal obligations and to trust, not in Jesus, but in their obedience from this time forward, so that they may remain clean.
We cannot discern from this text whether it was the priests who persuaded the nine to trust no longer in Jesus, or whether it was just their own sinful flesh that fought against their faith and won, turning them away from Jesus to focus inward again, to focus on themselves, as the sinful flesh always likes to do. The bottom line is that the result was the same: a falling away from faith, and back into unbelief. The Spirit of God who created their faith in the first place was urging them all to go back to Jesus, to go back to where Jesus was, to give glory to God in the person of Christ, to give thanks to God through Jesus Christ for the healing they had received. Sadly, however, nine of them were led by their flesh, not by the Spirit of God. Nine of them left Jesus behind in their rearview mirror, as it were, and carried on with their lives without Him.
Be aware, dear Christians: our flesh would like to do the same thing. We have been healed before God. We have been baptized and brought to faith and cleansed of our guilty record in God’s divine courtroom. All of us here, at one time or another have taken catechism classes – instruction in the Christian faith ultimately toward right and proper reception of the Lord’s Supper. We have been confirmed as Lutherans, that is, as Christians.
But now that we’re healed, our flesh thinks it can back off from the Word of God and from the Means of Grace, and is very tempted to leave these things behind. Now that we’re healed, our flesh thinks we should focus on ourselves and our family and our friends and our job and our hobbies and our leisure activities, and…what were we healed from, again? Who was responsible for that? Oh, that’s in the past. Surely God just wants us to be “happy” now, right?
Repent! Beware of the flesh. It is still hostile toward God. And as Jeremiah 17:9 declares, “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked; who can know it?” Our sinful heat wants to lead us away from Jesus any which way it can, whether by temptation or by false doctrine or by plain old apathy or by spiritual atrophy – by lack of the spiritual nutrition that comes from the Word of God. The flesh was successful in nine out of the ten lepers, because, although their physical flesh was healed, they all still carried around with them their corrupt spiritual flesh, and they let it get the better of them in the battle.
It didn’t have to be that way for them, and it doesn’t have to be that way for you and me either. Look at the one leper who came back. Look at the one who was still a believer in Jesus, who came back to give glory to God in the person of Christ and to give thanks at Jesus’ feet, even though all nine of his friends had left him to go back to Jesus all by himself. He was a Samaritan, Jesus points out. Of all the ten who were healed, he was the least likely to remain a believer. And yet his faith was preserved. It was victorious over his flesh. And Jesus acknowledged him before men.
The battle rages in every Christian between the spirit and the flesh, between faith and unbelief, and we are most susceptible when we forget that this battle exists. If you remember the battle, then you’ll remember Jesus, the one who gives us the victory over every battle, because He is victorious over sin, death and the devil.
Remember Jesus. Remember His unfettered love and commitment to each and every one of you. Look at that crucifix: that’s Jesus’ love for you! That’s His horrid suffering and dying for you! That’s His death-defeating, grave-busting love for you! That’s the “It is finished!” for every sin, temptation, and care you will ever have.
We have come to the Divine Service today to remember Jesus, to seek mercy from Him, to receive His Absolution, His Body, His Blood, and to give thanks to Him. And the Sacrament of the Altar is the Eucharist, the Thanksgiving! This is where we poor sinners who have been cleansed of the guilt of sin in Holy Baptism now come back to Jesus regularly to give thanks to Him. Not by offering Him our works, but by simply acknowledging Him as our Savior, and by receiving again His mercy and His forgiveness in the place where He has promised to be found – under bread and wine in His own body and blood.
Christ Jesus, who has cleansed you from sin and made you whole before God, now calls you to battle – a battle that begins and ends with thankfulness, a battle that you cannot lose, because the battle depends solely on the strength and power of the Holy Spirit, who will always strengthen and fortify you through His Means of Grace.
And this battle rages on as long as we live on this earth, because as long as we live on this earth, our crucified flesh is still clinging to us. But since we are led by the Spirit of God here on this earth, we are not under the law. We live by the Spirit of Jesus who loved us and gave Himself for us. And He will keep fighting the fight of faith for us.
In the name of the Father and of the + Son and of the Holy Spirit.
