Simply Fellowship — Episode 5: The One Who Came Back

WELCOME

Welcome to Above All Love. This is Simply Fellowship — the Good News, quietly told.

This is a gentle space. No pressure, no performance. You don't have to have it together to be here. You don't have to be healed, or feeling anything in particular today. You're welcome exactly as you are, wherever you are reading this.

If you need to move, or step away and come back later — that's completely fine. There's no right way to be here. Just be here.

HYMN

We begin with a hymn verse. Read it slowly. You might want to sit with each line before moving on.

Breathe on me, Breath of God,

Fill me with life anew,

That I may love what thou dost love,

And do what thou wouldst do.

— Edwin Hatch

PRAYER

Loving God,

Thank you that you do not wait for us to be well before you notice us.

Thank you that in the middle of our years — in the middle of our waiting, our weariness, our half-lived lives — you are not absent.

Revive us today, not in some distant future,

but here, in the midst of things.

And if we find ourselves healed and walking forward,

may we be the kind of people who turn back.

Amen.

OLD TESTAMENT ANCHOR

"Lord, I have heard your fame. I stand in awe of your deeds, Lord. Renew them in our day, make them known in our time; in wrath remember mercy."

— Habakkuk 3:2

The prophet Habakkuk is not praying from a place of triumph. He is praying from the middle. He has heard what God has done in the past — the great deeds, the ancient mercies — and he is asking that those same deeds might happen again, now, in his own time. Not in some golden age. Not when things are better. Now. In the midst of the years.

Revive us, O Lord, in the midst of the years.

It is one of the most honest prayers in scripture. It does not pretend things are fine. It does not wait until they are. It simply asks: would you do it again? Here? For us?

SCRIPTURE

Our reading today is from Luke chapter seventeen, verses eleven to nineteen, from the Easy English Bible.

As Jesus was going to Jerusalem, he walked along the border between Samaria and Galilee. He was going into a village when ten men met him who had a skin disease. They were standing far away from him. They called out to him, "Jesus! Master! Please help us!" When Jesus saw them, he said to them, "Go and show yourselves to the priests." As they went, they were healed and made clean. When one of them saw that he was healed, he came back. He praised God with a loud voice. He bowed down at Jesus' feet with his face on the ground. He thanked Jesus. This man was from Samaria. Jesus asked, "Were not ten healed? Where are the other nine? Has no one come back to praise God except this man from another country?" Then Jesus said to him, "Stand up and go. Your faith has made you well."

DEVOTION

They were standing far away.

That is where the story begins. Not in a crowd, not in a conversation — at a distance. Because they had to be. The law said so. They were unclean, and the world had arranged itself accordingly: over there, not here. Close enough to be seen, far enough not to touch.

But they had heard about Jesus. And so they called out — a single, desperate cry across the gap: Jesus! Master! Please help us!

It is not an elaborate prayer. There is no theology in it, no doctrinal precision. Just a name, a title, and a please. Just ten human beings, standing at a distance from everything they wanted to belong to, asking to be brought back in.

And Jesus does something surprising. He doesn't touch them, doesn't pronounce them healed, doesn't make a spectacle. He simply says: Go and show yourselves to the priests. Go. As if it's already done. As if the healing will happen on the way.

And it does. As they went, they were healed.

We don't know what that felt like — to look down at your hands mid-walk and find the skin changed. To feel the wrongness lifting. To realise, somewhere between where you were and where you were going, that something had shifted in the world. That you were not who you had been.

Nine of them keep walking. Which is not, perhaps, as heartless as it sounds — Jesus told them to go to the priests, and they are going. They are obeying. They are doing the sensible next thing. They have what they came for.

But one of them stops. And turns around.

He is a Samaritan — the detail Luke gives us quietly, without fanfare, but it matters. He is the outsider among the outsiders. The one who, even after healing, would have had the least to go back to in the religious system Jesus pointed toward. The priests would not have welcomed him. The community he was returning to was already one that looked at him sideways. He had every practical reason to keep walking.

And yet.

He turns. He comes back. He falls at Jesus' feet, face to the ground, praising God. And Jesus asks the question that still hangs in the air: Where are the other nine?

It is not a question of accounting. Jesus is not keeping score. It is a question of wonder — of something like grief, perhaps, at how much can be received and how little noticed. How easy it is to be changed and not know it. To receive a gift so overwhelming that you simply carry it away, too stunned or too busy or too focused on the next thing to look back at where it came from.

This story is the answer to Habakkuk's prayer. Revive us, O Lord, in the midst of the years. Not at the end. Not when we are ready. Not when the priests have certified it and the paperwork is done. In the midst of the going, while the feet are still moving, on the ordinary road between one place and another — there it is. The reviving. The skin made clean. The life given back.

The question the story leaves us with is not whether God revives. It is what we do when he does.

The nine received a gift. The one received a relationship. Both were healed. But only one came back to know the healer.

Stand up and go, Jesus says to him. Your faith has made you well.

He was already well. The skin had already changed. What Jesus is speaking to here is something deeper — a wholeness that goes beyond the body. A being-known that the nine, walking away, did not stop to receive.

There are seasons in a life when we are mid-healing. When things are better than they were but not yet where we want them to be. When we have been changed but haven't fully understood how. When God has done something, quietly, on the road — and we are not quite sure whether to keep walking forward or to stop and look back at where it came from.

The good news in this story is that it is not too late to turn around.

The one who came back did not arrive at Jesus' feet with everything together. He arrived with a loud voice and a face on the ground and a gratitude he couldn't contain. He arrived exactly as he was — just changed.

That is enough. It has always been enough.

In the midst of the years, God revives. And when we notice — when we stop and turn and fall at the feet of the one who did it — we find that the healing was only the beginning.

WONDERING QUESTIONS

These aren't questions that need answers. They're just things to hold and sit with. You might want to pause here, step away from the screen for a few minutes, and let them settle.

I wonder what it felt like to be standing far away — to call out and not be sure anyone would answer?

I wonder what happened in those ten bodies as they walked, and the moment each one noticed they were healed?

I wonder why nine kept going and one came back — and whether the answer is simple or complicated?

I wonder what it cost the Samaritan, as the outside outsider, to be the one who turned around?

I wonder what Jesus meant when he said something beyond the physical healing to the one who returned?

I wonder if there is something God has already done for me — quietly, on some road I was walking — that I have not yet stopped to acknowledge?

I wonder what it would look like, today, to turn back?

A Query — in the spirit of the Quaker tradition:

Is there a healing in my life — a reviving, however small — that I have received and carried away, without yet turning to notice where it came from?

A MOMENT OF QUIET

Before you read on, you might like to pause here. Close your eyes, or look out of a window. There's no rush. Just rest for a moment.

AN INVITATION

Before you go — a quiet word.

If you have never followed Jesus, or if faith has felt, for a long time, like something happening at a distance — you do not need to be clean before you call out. The ten weren't. They called from exactly where they were, with exactly what they had, and Jesus heard them.

If you want to respond to that love today, you might simply say, in your own words or in the quiet of your heart:

I am standing at a distance. But I am calling out. And I am willing to notice what changes on the road.

And if you already walk with Jesus — if you have been revived before, and are perhaps in need of reviving again — may this be the moment you stop and turn. Not because you have to. Not because nine others didn't. Simply because the one who gave the gift is still there, and it is not too late to look him in the face.

The road is not over. The reviving is not finished. In the midst of the years, he is still at work.

GOING OUT

Go in peace to love and serve the Lord.

May you know today that you are not standing at a distance from a God who cannot reach you.

You are standing within earshot of the one who heals on the road.

May something change for you, quietly, in the midst of the going —

and may you have the grace to notice.

May you be the one who turns back.

May you find him still there when you do.

And may you hear, in whatever language your heart speaks,

the words that were spoken on that dusty road:

Stand up and go. Your faith has made you well.

Above all, love.

Amen.

Thank you for being here. Above all, love.