28th Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year C
First reading: 2 Kgs 5:14-17
Second reading: 2 Tim 2:8-13
Gospel reading: Lk 17:11-19
This weekend we celebrate Thanksgiving Day. Coincidentally, two of the Sunday readings illustrate gratitude. Jesus cures 10 lepers, but only one returns to thank him. Elisha cures Naaman, and in gratitude Naaman urges him to accept a present.
The essence of gratitude is a grateful heart. However, its expression includes acknowledgement of a gift, appreciation, and, if possible, some return.
In gratitude, therefore, we should acknowledge, appreciate, and make some return to God for everything, whether he acts directly, as in the miraculous cure of the lepers; through humans, like Elisha; or through material things, like water. It is always his gift.
For example, if a cancer patient is cured after an operation, chemotherapy, radiation, and the prayers of his friends, should he thank God, the doctors, or nature?
The answer is all three. God has done everything. Calling the cure “natural” means that God has done it in his usual way, through doctors and medicine. Calling the doctors responsible means that they have co-operated with God.
God not only creates us, but also, at every moment, provides for us, says the Catechism of the Catholic Church. As Jesus said, “not a single sparrow” alights on the ground without his consent.
We can petition God about every need, says the Catechism: not just those that “influence the march of history,” but also basic, everyday needs. Accordingly, we should also thank him, not just when someone’s life is spared or a war ends, but also when the traffic light stays green, we find the item we were shopping for, or we finish a meal (“Grace After Meals”).
We should thank God for whatever he sends, whether welcome or unwelcome. “We often, almost sulkily, reject the good that God offers us because, at that moment, we expected some other good,” says C.S. Lewis. “God shows us a new facet of the glory, and we refuse to look at it because we are still looking for the old one.”
We should thank him even for physical evils like climate change, storms, or fleas, whether or not we understand his reasons for them. God “is in no way, directly or indirectly, the cause of moral evil,” says the Catechism, but in his “wisdom and goodness” he has built “physical evil” into his “good and ordered” world. We must never think that he cannot help it, or has to be excused for it.
God’s providence – the solicitude with which he guides creation “toward its ultimate perfection” – is concrete, immediate (or direct), and universal, says the Catechism. “God cares for all, from the least things to the great events of the world and its history.” Nothing is hidden from him. “Nothing is impossible” for him. With all our science, the universe “remains wholly subject to him and at his disposal.”
“I form the light, and create the darkness,” God says; “I make well-being and create woe: I, the Lord, do all these things.” “I, the Lord, bring low the high tree, lift high the lowly tree, wither up the green tree, and make the withered tree bloom.”
Before our Creator, whose ways are as high above ours “as the heavens are above the earth,” we can only say, with Job, that “we accept good things from God; and should we not accept evil?” As St. Paul says, we must “give thanks in all circumstances.”
The best way to thank God is to participate in the Mass. The very word Eucharist comes from the Latin eucharistia, “the virtue of thanksgiving or thankfulness.” As the Church says in most of her prefaces, “we do well” to give him thanks “always and everywhere.”
It is in the Mass that God gives us his supreme gift: his Son. How much time do we spend thanking him after Communion?
This weekend, “let us thank him as we should” by attending an extra Mass – just to say “thank you.”
Father Hawkswell is again teaching The Catholic Faith in Plain English, with new insights. The whole course is available in written form and, one session per week, in YouTube form at beholdvancouver.org/catholic-faith-course. Father is also teaching the course in person: on Sundays at 2 p.m. in the John Paul II Pastoral Centre, 4885 St John Paul II Way, Vancouver (33rd and Willows); and on Mondays at 10 a.m. in St. Anthony’s Church hall, 2347 Inglewood Avenue, West Vancouver. Next week’s topic is “What is the Catholic Church?”