We Are Called to Give Thanks Always
28th Sunday of the Year
“Has none but this foreigner returned to give thanks to God?”
There are two main themes in our readings this week, and as you might guess from the line that I just repeated, one of these themes is gratitude. The other theme is that the Lord cleanses, heals, and restores us when we turn to him in faith. And these two themes are meant to go hand-in-hand: the right way to respond to Christ’s work of healing and restoration in our lives is to be grateful. I know this might strike us as obvious, but here we see in the Gospel that only one man out of ten recognizes how important it is to give thanks to God. So there must be something going on — there must be some stumbling block that Christ wants us to see in this story — something that gets in the way and keeps us from placing gratitude at the very center of our lives of faith.
Sometimes the cause of our lack of gratitude is that we’re busy. We have work to do; we don’t pay much attention to the presence of God in our lives until something or someone forces us to do so. And oftentimes, the work that we have to do is good and important work; oftentimes it is holy and righteous work. Sometimes the work that we have to do is given to us directly by God: the work of committing yourself to a spouse, to raising a family, to serve the Church, to care for the poor and the suffering. These are all parts of what we might call our Christian “mission.” This is the work that Christ has asked us to do.
But we can’t let that kind of work prevent us from giving thanks to God. I think it fascinating that Christ gives a mission to these ten lepers today. He tells them to go and present themselves to the priest of whatever town or village was nearby. All ten of the lepers follow Christ’s command, but only one returns to give thanks when he realizes he is healed. What Christ wants us to understand — what this single leper seems to understand — is that gratitude to God must rest at the very heart of our Christian mission. Whatever might be the work that we do in this life, it must flow from and follow from gratitude. Gratitude for the fact that Christ has saved us. Gratitude for the fact that Christ heals us and restores us through the sacraments of the Church.
Sometimes the cause of our lack of gratitude is our own foolish self-regard. The myth of modern culture that there is some such thing as an individual who precedes society — that individuals exist before society, that individuals create society, that the individual comes first and then comes relationships and social bonds — here is a myth that tells us that we as individuals are the cause of our own success or goodness. We love the fictitious narrative that by our own efforts we achieve greatness: work hard enough and you will reach your goal; there is nothing you cannot do if you set your mind to it. We attribute to ourselves the cause of our own success or goodness, and so gratitude becomes irrelevant. To whom would we give thanks when we ourselves are the cause of the goodness that we possess or the success that we know in our lives?
Sometimes the cause of our lack of gratitude is our own expectations or way of seeing the world. In our readings today, both Naaman and the leper give thanks to Christ after the experience of a miracle. I imagine that many of us have never experienced a miracle like those that we hear about in our readings today; maybe some of you have. But my guess is that most of us have not. When I looked at the readings for today, this was one of the first thoughts that crossed my mind; this idea that if we experienced the kind of miracles that we hear about in these readings, we could never forget to give thanks to God. But the truth of the matter is that we experience greater miracles than what we hear about today every time that we participate in the sacraments of the Church. If a miracle is the in-breaking of the supernatural into the natural world around us, then the reception of a sacrament is absolutely miraculous. Here the supernatural love of God becomes united to our natural lives; strengthening us; cleansing us; healing us; restoring us.
I think that in the past, it was probably easier to see in a sacrament something of the miraculous. In the first several hundred years of the Church, most people received the sacrament of baptism as adults. The baptism itself took place in a separate room attached to the church, away from where the people would be gathered for the Easter Vigil Mass. The person to be baptized would enter into this room, turn and face the West, and say something like the following words: I renounce Satan, and all his angels, and all his works, and all his worship, and all his vanity, and all wordly error; and I bind myself by vow to be baptized in the name of the Father, of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.1 Sometimes, the person to be baptized would then spit toward the West to signify the renunciation of Satan. St. Cyril of Jerusalem tells us why the candidate for baptism would face the West. He writes: I will explain to you why you stand facing the West. As the West is the region of visible darkness, and since Satan, who has darkness for his portion, has his empire in the darkness, so, when you turn symbolically toward the West, you renounce this dark and obscure tyrant. Having renounced Satan to the West, the candidate would then turn to the East, profess the faith, and accept the light of Christ into their life. At this point, the candidate would be anointed with oil, remove all of their clothes, and descend whole-body into the waters of a large font to receive the sacrament of baptism itself. Then the new Christian would ascend from the waters and put on a white tunic to symbolize the reality that they were now cleansed, healed, and restored through the sacrament; baptism had made them into a new creation in Christ.
I haven’t checked with my parents yet, but I’m pretty sure that my baptism looked nothing like that. Over the course of centuries, the theology of baptism in the Church developed and matured. We baptize infants now, and we no longer ask adults seeking baptism to enter a separate room and remove all of their clothes. But all of the symbology that I just described is still found in the sacrament itself: the renunciation of Satan, the profession of faith, the reception of the light of Christ, the clothing in a white garment. And the kind of power and drama that distinguished baptism in the life of the early Church is still with us today as well; it’s just harder for us to see and appreciate. Which is precisely the point of our readings today: Christ is telling us that we need to become better at seeing the ways in which he strengthens, cleanses, heals, and restores us. If we can’t see the miracle, we won’t respond with genuine gratitude. And the miracles — if we’re on the search for one — are easily found in the sacraments of the Church. In fact, one is about to occur in just a few moments at this altar. Simple bread and wine will transform into the body and blood of Christ. We will receive that body and blood. And as one of the Fathers of our Church wrote some 1600 years ago: through the Eucharist, we who are mortal by nature, expect to receive immortality; corruptible, we become incorruptible; from the earth and earthly evils, we pass to all the blessings and delights of heaven.2 What more of a miracle could we want.
Homily preached at the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary on October 8th, 2022
For an excellent overview of baptism in the early Church, see The Bible and the Liturgy by Jean Danielou, S.J.
Theodore of Mopsuestia.