October 12, 2025
XXVIII Sunday of Ordinary Time C
(Lk 17:11–19)
To enter into today’s Gospel (Lk 17:11–19), let us begin with a detail in the text that holds a specific symbolic value, consistent with the rest of the Gospel.
In verse 11, Luke recounts that Jesus is walking toward Jerusalem, passing through Samaria and Galilee (“As Jesus continued his journey to Jerusalem, he traveled through Samaria and Galilee” –Lk 17:11).
In reality, from a geographical point of view, the route would begin from Galilee, passing through Samaria, and then arriving in Jerusalem. Luke reverses the order of the route, and this inversion is not a mistake but an important narrative sign.
In the Gospel of Luke, the journey to Jerusalem is at the heart of the entire Gospel narrative: Jesus is heading towards the place where he will fully live out his loving obedience to the Father, loving his own to the very end (cf. Luke 9:51). And to get there, he must pass through various border areas, where boundaries are blurred, where the logic that divides good and bad, just and unjust, is disrupted.
Well, by reversing the steps of Jesus' journey, turning the direction upside down, the evangelist Luke anticipates and highlights what will also be the journey of every disciple, of every person who allows themselves to be saved.
Luke recounts that a group of ten lepers saw Jesus and, remaining at a distance, asked for mercy (“and raised their voice, saying, ‘Jesus, Master! Have pity on us!’” - Lk 17:13). Jesus instructs all the lepers to set out on a journey to present themselves to the priests, where their healing and reintegration into society could be publicly confirmed. All of them set out on their journey, and all are healed, but only one returns before reaching to the priests (Lk 17:15).
The evangelist emphasizes the gesture of “returning”: a little further on, Jesus also emphasizes this: “Has none but this foreigner returned to give thanks to God?” (Lk 17:15).
The healed leper, therefore returns, and his returning is not merely a physical gesture, but an inner movement: the movement of someone who is not satisfied with the miracle alone, of someone who knows that the miracle is truly a miracle when it changes one’s life, when it overturns logic, and most importantly, when it puts the Lord back at the center, so from that moment on, one continually returns to Him.
For the healed leper, returning to thank Jesus becomes the most important thing of all: more important than the commitment he had undertaken, more important even than his reintegration into society, that is what he had longed for above all else. For him, it was enough just to be healed; that, in itself was his salvation.
The opening verse also gives the episode a new dimension and opens it up to further interpretation.
The first to "return", in fact, is not the Samaritan, but Jesus himself.
It is He who, going to Jerusalem, will descend into death, only to return. It is He who, ascending to the Father, will return back bringing with Him all our distance, precisely that which Luke speaks of in verse 12, saying that the lepers stood “at a distance”.
This distance cannot be eliminated except through Jesus' return, His reversing the course of humanity, which was destined for death. With Him, the human journey is reversed and becomes, for those who follow Him, a path back to the Father.
Not only that. This reversal of direction heralds the overturning which the Gospels continuously testify of: the last become first, sinners are forgiven, those who are far are brought near, the poor are blessed...
It is no coincidence, then, that among the ten who had been healed, it was a Samaritan who returned. This man was doubly excluded: as a leper and as a Samaritan. His path was inevitably that of a lost person, excluded from salvation.
Yet it is precisely this man who in his own story experiences the heart of Jesus’ mystery, his return.
Because while he senses that his life has been restored to him by grace alone, he is able to stop and interrupt his journey, he is able to take time, he is able to recognise where the gift comes from and where the gift can lead. He is no longer on the route to death, but to life.
+Pierbattista
*Translated by the Media Office of the Latin Patriarchate from the orginal text in Italian
