Luke17chapter 17

The ten men keep their distance, as the Law required of anyone with a defiling skin disease, and call out from a way off. Sending them to show themselves to the priests is not a detour: a priest's inspection was the only route back into the community, and there was a prescribed offering to be made afterwards. They are healed as they go, on the strength of being told to go.

That the group is mixed tells you something about the disease. Exclusion put a Samaritan and Jews in the same camp outside the villages, sharing a life that the border between their peoples would otherwise have kept apart.

The mustard seed and the mulberry tree are chosen for contrast — the smallest seed a farmer handled, and a deep-rooted tree notoriously hard to shift.

The parable of the servant reflects household reality with no sentiment in it. A slave who had been ploughing all day came in and cooked and served before eating himself, and no one thanked him for doing his job. The comparison is deliberately unflattering: when you have done everything commanded, say you are unworthy servants.

The pictures of the last day are drawn from ordinary night and morning work: two people asleep on the one sleeping platform a village house had, and two women at the hand mill grinding the day's flour before dawn — a two-person job.