37. Therefore observe that when God appears to be farthest away, he is nearest. This word of Christ reads as though we cannot know what he will do, he does not refuse nor promise anything, so that the lepers, who previously certainly relied on his kindness for all things, might have become offended at it, and begun to doubt, and taken quite a different sense of it than Christ meant. Christ speaks it out of an overflowing kindness that he thinks it unnecessary to tell them that they have already obtained what they want. But as the sense was not clear to them they might have thought he was entirely of a different opinion, and farther from them than before.
Sermons of Martin Luther, Volume 5
The Fourteenth Sunday after Trinity, Healing Ten Lepers
Lenker Edition
