The holiday season is here, and with it comes that familiar mix of nostalgia and noise. The lights appear in windows, the temperature drops, and suddenly the world feels both tender and frantic. People hold doors for strangers, volunteer at food drives, and share kindness in ways they forget the rest of the year. But the season also brings short tempers, restless shoppers, and entire aisles of folks who seem to have forgotten how to speak to one another with a bit of humanity. The holidays reveal our contradictions. They show us who we hope to be and who we sometimes are at our worst. Maybe that is why my mind keeps circling back to the story in Luke where Jesus heals ten lepers and only one returns to give thanks.
Growing up, that story was usually framed as a simple moral lesson. Say thank you. Show gratitude. Don’t be like the ungrateful nine. It sounded straightforward. But life has a way of deepening these old stories. Once you have lived through loss, disappointment, and moments of unexpected grace, the story becomes far richer and far more unsettling.
Why Only One Returned: Gratitude That Changes Us
Jesus is traveling along the borderlands between Samaria and Galilee, that liminal space where insiders and outsiders brush up against each other. There, he encounters ten men with leprosy. Their bodies marked them as unclean. Their society marked them as unworthy. They call out to him from a distance, because distance is all they have been taught to expect. “Jesus, Master, have mercy on us.” Their plea is simple but freighted with years of isolation.
Jesus tells them to go and show themselves to the priests. This is not just a religious command but a social restoration. It means they are healed. It means they can reenter the world that pushed them out. Their healing arrives on the road, somewhere between where they have been and where they are heading. Healing often meets us like that, in motion, in the middle of ordinary life, when we are thinking about something else entirely.
Then comes the part that lingers. Ten are healed, but only one turns around. One man feels the weight of what has happened and refuses to let the moment pass without response. He stops, pivots, lifts his voice, and praises God with the full energy of someone who has been given his life back. He falls at Jesus’ feet in gratitude. Luke tells us he is a Samaritan, someone doubly marginalized, the last person anyone would expect to return.
Jesus asks the question hanging in the air. “Were not ten cleansed? Where are the other nine?” He is not confused. He does not lack information. He wants us to feel the tension. He wants us to sit with the gap between receiving a gift and recognizing it as one.
Where Are the Nine? The Empathy Gap in Modern Culture
The more time I spend with that story, the more I realize the issue is not just ingratitude. It is something deeper. It is the way people lose their capacity to pause, reflect, feel, and respond. And that is where the story feels eerily connected to our world today.
Empathy is thinning out. Not gone but stretched so thin it sometimes feels translucent. We witness suffering on screens every single day. We take in heartbreaking images and world-shaking tragedies while scrolling past them on the way to a funny video or a political argument. It becomes easier to disengage than to feel. The heart learns to protect itself by growing numb. And once numbness takes root, gratitude has very little room to grow.
The nine who kept walking were not villains. They were human beings trying to reclaim their lives. They had families to see and futures to rebuild. Their momentum kept them from noticing the sacred moment they had just lived through. Their healing did not awaken empathy or gratitude because they were already rushing ahead.
But the Samaritan allowed himself to feel. He let the moment hit him with its full force. His gratitude pulled him back toward Jesus, back toward the Source, back toward his own heart.
How Gratitude Reawakens Empathy
That is what gratitude does. It reopens what pain and hurry have closed. It invites us to see clearly again. It makes room for empathy, not as a soft sentiment, but as a grounded way of recognizing our shared humanity. Gratitude and empathy grow together. When one dies, the other weakens.
Our culture feels like it is sprinting with the nine. Forward, forward, forward. Don’t stop, don’t think, don’t feel. Keep moving. Produce. React. Consume. And somewhere in that constant motion, we lose the ability to sense the sacred within our own lives. We forget to turn around.
Yet the lone Samaritan stands as a counter-voice. A reminder that healing can be recognized instead of assumed. A reminder that gratitude can anchor us in a world that rewards detachment. Something in him knew that if he did not pause long enough to acknowledge what had happened, he would lose more than time. He might lose himself.
Choosing Gratitude During the Holidays
As we settle into the holiday season, with its glow and its grief and its memories that rise like incense, I want to carry his example with me. I want to slow down enough to notice where healing has touched my life. I want to recognize kindness when it comes, even in small or ordinary ways. I want to let gratitude soften me, rather than letting the world harden me.
Gratitude is a posture. A way of living awake. A way of resisting the numbness that creeps in when life feels overwhelming. And if enough of us learn to practice that posture, something shifts. Conversations become gentler. Moments become fuller. Hearts become more open.
We cannot repair everything broken in the world. But we can turn around. We can pay attention. We can choose gratitude. And in doing so, we might rediscover the empathy that makes us human in the first place.
Image: Pamela Reynoso
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