If I would say to you what's your most base sin, your worst action of evil, would you come up with something like failure to be grateful to God?

And if a person is truly grateful, he shows it in worship and in service to God.

We read in verse 12 as he entered a certain village.

He met ten men who were lepers who stood afar off.

Now we know, of course, that once you had been diagnosed with leprosy in ancient Israel,

you suffered the worst of all possible kinds of quarantines, not a quarantine that would last a week or two weeks, but it would

be a quarantine that would last for the rest of your life unless by some marvelous means

you were cured of that leprosy. You were sentenced to a solitary life removed from the community,

removed from your family, removed from the religious institutions of your day.

You were a social pariah, and the only fellowship that you could have with other human beings would be with other lepers.

And so there were reasons why lepers gathered together in groups such as this group of

10, because that was the only companionship that they could enjoy was with other miserable human beings.

And now, as they are outside the village and Jesus approached, while they were standing afar off,

they lifted up their voices because Jesus was at a distance, and so they shouted

out to him, Jesus, master, have mercy on us. And said, when he saw them, he said to them,

go show yourselves to the priests.

A citation from the book of Leviticus, where it was the priest who was authorized to make

the diagnosis in the first place of leprosy, and if a person were recovering or if it was a false diagnosis, it would take the priest's declaration

to free them from the quarantine. So Jesus doesn't say, be clean, you're healed. He said, go, go see

the priests, which meant what?

This is not an idle mission.

It's not a fool's errand.

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