How often have you encouraged your young children to say ‘thank you’ after they are given something? Saying ‘thank you’ is a common courtesy that is used almost without thinking. Yet it’s much more than a courtesy.

When you give your children food or a gift, or do something for them, you do so without question because you love and care for them. Your giving is an expression of your relationship with them.

So too for saying ‘thank you’. It is the relationship that is most important. Saying thanks is a personal acknowledgment of what you have done for them, sometimes with considerable effort on your part. Saying ‘thank you’ implies that I am not taking for granted what you have done for me. It can be very annoying if we feel others are taking for granted what we do for them.

Even Jesus may have been annoyed with the nine lepers who did not return to say thank you for being cured. The word translated as ‘lepers’ does not refer to the disease that is known today as leprosy. It did not exist at that time in Palestine. But the disfiguring skin disease suffered by these 10 people meant they were isolated from their families and communities and could not even approach Jesus. How distressing this must have been for all concerned.

Jesus sent all 10 lepers to the Jewish priests, because only after the priests had formally verified they were cured would they be able to return to their homes and families. Soon after setting off to see the priests, they realise they’ve been cured, but it is only the Samaritan who returns to thank Jesus. This Samaritan must have been doubly isolated, suffering from this disease – being ritually unclean – and belonging to a heretical religion and tribe. Jews were not supposed to have any contact with Samaritans because they had separated from the Jewish people and established their own temple worship.

How excited and overcome with emotion was this Samaritan, ‘praising God at the top of his voice’ and throwing himself at the feet of Jesus. The other nine disappeared, but the Samaritan enters into an intense personal relationship with Jesus. Being cured is really a springboard into a deeper relationship.

St Luke is telling us something significant. It is the most excluded and marginalised of the group who responds to Jesus, while the other nine, Jesus’ own co-religionists, have taken the gift but ignored the giver. By thanking God and falling to the ground before Jesus, the Samaritan is relating with God on an entirely new level. He is not only cured but, as Jesus remarks, it is his faith that has saved him.

For us too, saying thanks to God for all the gifts of life and love around us will surely enrich our relationship with God.

Bruce Duncan CSsR

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