Proper 23 (28) – Year C
Eighteenth Sunday after Pentecost: October 12, 2025
Gospel Lectionary Text
Luke 17:11-19
17:11 On the way to Jerusalem Jesus was going through the region between Samaria and Galilee.
17:12 As he entered a village, ten lepers approached him. Keeping their distance,
17:13 they called out, saying, "Jesus, Master, have mercy on us!"
17:14 When he saw them, he said to them, "Go and show yourselves to the priests." And as they went, they were made clean.
17:15 Then one of them, when he saw that he was healed, turned back, praising God with a loud voice.
17:16 He prostrated himself at Jesus' feet and thanked him. And he was a Samaritan.
17:17 Then Jesus asked, "Were not ten made clean? But the other nine, where are they?
17:18 Was none of them found to return and give praise to God except this foreigner?"
17:19 Then he said to him, "Get up and go on your way; your faith has made you well."
Context
Coming soon.
Question
Coming soon.
Reflections
Praying Eucharistically - Weekly Homily by James Alison:
Understanding the Bible anew through the Mimetic Theory of René Girard.
Poetry
This week, we invite you to read and reflect on “Mindful,” by Mary Oliver.
Throughout the Gospels, whenever Jesus pronounces healing, it’s very often more than physical healing. When he heals a paralytic in Luke 5, for example, or when he addresses the man born blind in John 9, Jesus makes direct connections between physical ailments and the fallenness of the world, the weight of sin and the gift of forgiveness which works an even deeper healing. In today’s lectionary text, he pronounces to the single grateful leper, “Your faith has made you whole.” Ten men are physically healed, but through his gratitude (for he is, as Oliver writes, “instructed…in joy, / and acclimation”), one man is “made whole,” inducted into a whole other form of life—the sort of life Oliver rhapsodizes about below:
“To look, to listen, / to lose inside this soft world” . . . This is the life we were all born for.
Mindful
by Mary Oliver
Every day
I see or hear
something
that more or less
kills me
with delight,
that leaves me
like a needle
in the haystack
of light.
It was what I was born for –
to look, to listen,
to lose myself
inside this soft world –
to instruct myself
over and over
in joy,
and acclamation.
Nor am I talking
about the exceptional,
the fearful, the dreadful,
the very extravagant –
but of the ordinary,
the common, the very drab,
the daily presentations.
Oh, good scholar,
I say to myself,
how can you help
but grow wise
with such teachings
as these –
the untrimmable light
of the world,
the ocean’s shine,
the prayers that are made
out of grass?
Prayer
This week, the call to prayer comes from the Street Psalms Centering Prayer:
Come, Holy Spirit, wild and free. Do as you please. Shine your light on me that I might see things as they are, not as I am. Free me to act in your name with courage, creativity, and compassion.
