Clearly,
the miraculous cure from leprosy is only half the story here, for Jesus then
says to the one who returned to give thanks, “Get up and go on your way; your
faith has saved you.” His words
suggest that the Samaritan received more than the physical healing that all ten
lepers received. As the biblical commentator Pablo Gadenz points out, “the word
for ‘get up’ is a word early Christians would have recognized as having to do
with ‘resurrection.’ Like the prodigal son, this man ‘was dead, and is alive
again.’ New life, the life which Israel was longing for as part of the age to
come, had arrived in his village that day and had evoked a faith in him he
didn’t know he had. Once again, we see that faith and healing go hand in hand. But
it is grateful faith in the person of Jesus that leads to salvation.
What
about us who fail to thank God “always and for everything,” as St. Paul exhorts
in Ephesians? Albert Schweitzer wrote in his Reverence for Life: “The greatest thing is to give thanks for
everything. Whoever has learned this knows what it means to live…They have
penetrated the whole mystery of life: giving thanks for everything.” Ingratitude
is of a corresponding magnitude. The Russian Orthodox theologian Alexander
Schmemann identified ingratitude as the sin of the fall: humanity’s discontent
with all that God freely gives. Other thinkers through the ages have ranked
ingratitude among the greatest sins, as a repudiation of the good, a form of
rejection that strikes at the heart of community, relationship and continuity. We
can conclude no one can understand life who is ungrateful for it; no one can
totally misunderstand life who is grateful.
We know
that God is the giver of all good things, and that we have nothing that we have
not received—all good gifts are from his generosity. Now, there is an old
spiritual discipline of listing one’s blessings, naming them before God, and
giving thanks. This is exactly what the Canadian writer Ann Voskamp endeavors
to do in her bestseller book One Thousand
Gifts. She claims that thanksgiving—eucharist—is the central symbol of
Christianity, the essence of what it means to live the Christ-life.
She
marvels in her poetic style:
Doesn’t
Christ, at His death-meal, set the entirety of our everyday bread and drink
lives into the framework of eucharistēo? . . . Eucharistēo—thanksgiving—always
precedes the miracle. Think how Jesus once took the bread and gave thanks, and then
the miracle of the multiplying of the loaves and fishes. How he now took the
bread and gave thanks, and then the miracle of enduring the cross for the joy
set before Him. How Jesus stood outside Lazarus’s tomb, the tears streaming
down His face, and He looked up and prayed, “Father, I thank you that you have
heard me”—and then the miracle of a dead man rising! Thanksgiving raises the
dead!
I would
suggest that the Good News of today’s Gospel is that Jesus counts thanksgiving as integral to a faith that saves. In
other words, we only enter into the fullness of life if our faith gives thanks.
For how else do we accept His free gift of salvation if not with thanksgiving?
Thanksgiving is the evidence of our acceptance of whatever He gives.
Thanksgiving is the manifestation of our Yes!
to his grace. Thanksgiving is therefore inherent to a true salvation
experience, as we see in the case of the Samaritan leper. What we do at every
Eucharist is to remember with thanks,
and it is precisely this that is held up to us this morning as the foremost
quality of a believing disciple.
Of
course, it is not easy in the midst of terrible, horrific circumstances to
believe that we have every reason to “always and everywhere give thanks.” But even
then we may experience a stark moment of awe in which we realize that the simple
fact that we are is an abiding gift
of God to us. Perhaps this is what happened to the Samaritan leper in a
particularly poignant way when he suddenly realized he was healed. So for us as
well: to receive ourselves constantly from the hand of God and to thank him for
this isn’t circumstance-based but belongs to our essential being, even if we
are rarely conscious of it. But the moment we intentionally “return” to give
thanks to the one who gives and renews our life day after day, this moment of
gratitude always sets us right. In a
moment of simple gratitude everything
between God and ourselves will come to life, and things will be right. Perhaps
it is gratitude more than anything that allows us to encounter everyday epiphanies,
those transcendent moments of awe that change forever how we experience life
and the world.
I’d like
to conclude with a good word from the 14th century English mystic Julian
of Norwich:
The
highest form of prayer is to the goodness of God…. God only desires that our
soul cling to him with all its strength; in particular, that it clings to his
goodness. For of all the things our minds can think about God, it is thinking
upon his goodness that pleases him most and brings the most profit to our soul.
To “think
upon His goodness” is to “give
thanks” to Him. Someday the Lord will show us how He received our gift of
thanks, and that will be a part of our blessedness!
Father Dominic's Homily for the Twenty-Eighth Sunday.
