In today’s passage, Jesus questions the faithfulness of a group of people he had healed. But more than that, he questions the level of their gratitude. After a group had come to be healed, Jesus had sent them on, but only one of the healed returned to say thank you. I’ve been thinking about this a lot, and I don’t know who I’m frustrated with here. The 9 who didn’t return, or Jesus for expecting them to. I think it’s worth exploring.
Expectations are hard things to manage. We get our hopes up. We especially get our hopes up when it comes to people. We expect that people will be grateful and that they will do the right thing or say the right thing. I think that’s a normal human response. I think this passage and Jesus’ frustrations are a reflection of expectation versus reality.
Expectations are what we think will happen, while reality is what actually transpires. While we hope these two will match up, they often don't. This disparity of expectations vs. reality can often lead to feelings of discontentment and unhappiness. And I think that’s what happened here.
Jesus had an expectation. Reality had other plans.
I find it really interesting that Jesus had an expectation that he’d receive gratitude for healing people. I mean, obviously, he healed people so I assume they would be thankful. And that has been demonstrated in other passages about healing. But this time, Jesus heals WITH AN EXPECTATION. And I’m not sure this is something that has happened before. Jesus is…annoyed, disappointed, and perhaps even hurt. This is a unique window into a very HUMAN Jesus.
I think it’s really easy to put Jesus up on a pedestal of perfection and pretend that he wasn’t a very human person with feelings and emotions. And his reactions were probably not all perfectly Christlike all the time. I’m sure there were moments of anger, frustration, and even disappointment. We’ve seen his anger- when he throws the tables in the temple. We’ve seen his fear- in the garden before the crucifixion. But this is something different. This is the disappointment of unmet expectations, and we get to see Jesus wrestle with it.
So let’s think about this from Jesus’ perspective for just a moment to try to understand his reaction. He’s been doing a LOT of work during his travels, healing, teaching, leading. And for the most part people have been extremely grateful, some even falling to their knees in gratitude or calling him Lord. Now, this was likely an ego boost of some kind, even for Jesus, but more than that it was a reflection of the power he was wielding. And yet we have this situation, where the heals 10 people but only one returns to say thank you. This is a different moment because not everyone was falling over themselves to show their gratitude. And this hits Jesus a certain way.
And I think, he’s faced with disappointment. I think the successes of his previous big moments, the outpouring of gratitude, the confessions of faith, have built up his expectations. Do I think that Jesus healed so that he could be thanked? No, of course not. I don’t think there was any ego in his motivation. But I do think, somwehere along the way, he developed an expectation that those he healed would respond with gratitude.
That’s how expectations happen though. They sneak in. We go from being happy *IF* something happens to being unhappy if it doesn’t. I think this happens a lot in our own day to day lives. We start out doing something and are content- and then we add more and more expectations until we ruin our own contentment and steal our own joy. This level of expectation is what breaks relationships, breaks hearts, and breaks us.
I know this is something I struggle with. I often have hope that things are going to work out a certain way, but they very often don’t. But I think there’s a pretty big difference between expectations and hope. Expectations make plans based on what we think should happen. Hope just sits back and watches. And, frankly, expectations can be the enemy of hope. When we get so caught up in what we want to occur that we fail to leave room for what COULD occur.
So let’s turn our thoughts for a second to the ten people who showed up to get healed by Jesus. Did they show up with an expectation of healing or did they show up with hope and get surprised. I think it’s the latter, and I think..that maybe that’s what ultimately caused the problem of them not returning. Imagine it from their perspective for a moment. They had lived with disease, they had heard someone could help, they had hope that they would be healed. They had hope.
And they were healed. Jesus told them to go into the city to be pronounced clean- to be approved by the priests. And that’s exactly what they did. After years of exile and pain, their plight was over. So what next? I imagine that they weren’t quite sure what to do and then they could go back to their families- back to their communities- they could go on with their lives. I’m not surprised that they didn’t immediately head back to find Jesus and say thank you. They were likely overwhelmed overcome. So only one of them went back.
It’s interesting isn’t it? Jesus told them to go- he told them to go to the priest. He dismissed them after healing them. So I’m not sure why he expected them to return, and yet, he did. But did he tell them that? Did he tell them, “go get approved by the priests and then come back”? No. See, this is where expectations run amok. When we don’t communicate what we expect, we are leaving ourselves open for disappointment. When we assume that people know what we want or need, we leave oiruselves open for disappointment. When we live only in expectation, we also live in disappointment.
But here’s the thing I’m kind of stuck on. When you give someone a gift, what do you prefer… do you prefer that they fawn all over you with a thousand thank yous, or do you prefer to see that gift put to use? See, maybe I’m weird, but I’d rather know that the gift was useful. Maybe a single thank you is nice, but I don’t need fawning gratitude. I want to know my gift is out there in the world doing something. I struggle with thinking that Jesus wouldn’t also want his gifts out there in the world. Wouldn’t that make more sense- why come back and thank him when instead they could go share with others what he had done? Which would have had the greater impact?
I don’t have a tidy way to come to resolution with this text. I feel like it’s far too trite to boil this down to a lesson in gratitude, especially seeing that they were living out their gratitude by returning to the lives they had lost. I also feel like it’s too easy to blame Jesus and call him passive aggressive or impatient. I think it goes deeper than all of that to a lesson on the importance of expectation versus hope. When we come to a situation with expectation, we may leave disappointed. When we come to a situation with hope, we may leave healed.