There were ten of them altogether, all suffering from some wretched skin disease. So here are 10 points about them. You may like to have the text in front of you.

1. Note that the ten stood "at a distance". As the law required of lepers, they were "outside the camp" (Numbers 5.2-3) – the mediaeval equivalent was the leper colony on the edge of a town, and the leper squint though which they could see Mass from a distance. That is where we belong, too, if we are disciples of Jesus (Hebrews 13. 13). We are not asked to feel sorry for "lepers" — or for Samaritans — but to join them.

2. The ten cried out to Jesus, and so must we. Their prayer was the primal, basic prayer — from which comes the Jesus Prayer — "Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner." No doubt they repeated it continually, as did the tax-collector in the Temple in Luke 18, who also "stood far off", as all of us must.

3. Luke chooses three words carefully. On their way to the priests, the ten are "cleaned". Yes, they are "cleansed" or "made clean", as our familiar versions say. The reason for their ceremonial impurity is removed. But there is more than a whiff of church and old Bibles about such expressions. Better to use a word people use, as we are doing at the moment also over illness, in our case hospitals and clostridium difficile.
Then the Samaritan saw that he was "healed", that he was cured of his disease. But it is Jesus, who, with Luke’s third word, tells the full story of what has been done for him. "Your faith has saved you." "God has made you all that you were meant to be."

4. It does not belittle what has been done to the nine to note that the miracle has been only ten-per-cent successful. The miracles of Jesus do not reward faith. They invite faith. Ten plead with Jesus, the Samaritan no less desperately but no more confidently than the rest. Ten are cured. The sign of God’s coming Kingdom has been performed, the invitation extended. But only one of the ten reads the sign, hears the invitation, and accepts it. Only the Samaritan responds in faith.

5. The Samaritan "turned back". The vocabulary of turning in the New Testament is extensive and significant. What matters is the new direction — where we are now heading, not how far we have got. "Turn" is the simpler word behind the more complicated word "repent".

6. Turning towards Jesus involves turning to work. The Gerasene demoniac -remember him? his bad spirit went into a herd of swine - was told to "turn" home and to tell everyone what had been done for him (Luke 8.39). Each step of faith, including the first, is a step of obedience.
 Faith in Jesus is a moral response, or it is not faith at all. We are not told that the Samaritan "followed Jesus in the way", as Bartimaeus did (Mark 10.52). Jesus simply tells the Samaritan to get up and go. But, wherever he goes and whatever befalls him, he is now, and always will be, a disciple.

7. "Your faith has saved you" or "made you well". The same words are said several times in Luke’s Gospel an in each case, the one "made well" is an outcast. If we are rejected, we disintegrate. We fall to bits and need someone to put us together again. That is the healing work of Christ and his friends.

8. A point that Luke hopes will not be lost on his readers is that the Samaritan who sets out to see the priests never arrives. There is no suggestion that the Samaritan, once on his way again, reports to a priest, either to one in Jerusalem or to one of his own persuasion. Priests are gatekeepers to social acceptance and to the presence of God. But one greater than the priest is here, and it is to him the Samaritan turns.

9. Jesus asks: "Where are the other nine?" We ask the same question, in our case about the great majority in Western Europe, who may once have come under Christian influence in some way — at home, at school, at church — but for whom now the Christian faith seems to mean little or nothing? Some of those "other nine" do speak of a sense of loss – I think of a man who brought his family to our Candlelight Carol service one year and afterwards told a member of our congregation that participating in that act of worship had brought home to him what he had deprived his children of by bringing them up separate from the Christian community. But others speak of a sense of liberation. Either way, Jesus has not forgotten them. "Where are they?" he asks.

10. Notice that the Samaritan praised God, and thanked Jesus. We do not know how deliberate it was of Like to place those statements so close together. Luke does not in so may words say that Jesus is God and yet he ahs the Samaritan, prostrate at Jesus’s feet, coming very close to doing so.

11. The 11th point sums up the previous ten. In the words of the Scottish theologian Thomas Erskine: "In New Testament, religion is grace and ethics is gratitude." What we are before God is recipients of his love, mercy and sheer desire for us: what we do after that cannot begin to earn God’s favour, it is simply what one does in response to being loved – one loves back and counts oneself blessed indeed.