“[He] fell down on his face at his feet, giving him thanks”
This is actually a thanksgiving gospel story. It appears twice in our Prayer Book; once as the Gospel for the Fourteenth Sunday after Trinity (BCP, p. 240), and as the Gospel appointed for Thanksgiving Day (BCP, p. 308). For us in Canada, Thanksgiving day and Harvest Thanksgiving are often observed at the same time; thanksgiving for the fruits of creation and human labour, on the one hand, and thanksgiving for the rational and spiritual freedoms that we have politically, on the other hand. When thanksgiving for the harvest is being emphasized then readings for Harvest Thanksgiving are often used that focus on the harvest gathering of the fruits of creation. But it is instructive to realize that this Gospel plays such an important role in our learning a very hard and necessary thing; the hard and necessary activity of thanksgiving itself.
We learn from this gospel that being grateful is both healthy for you and it makes you whole! Here is the gospel story, we might say, that teaches us most fully about the spiritual nature of the activity of thanksgiving. And once again, it is a Samaritan who provides the telling illustration.
Last week, we heard the parable of the Good Samaritan, so-called, and we commented on how what makes it possible to “go and do likewise”, going and doing good works and reaching out and helping others, is really nothing less than the grace of Christ in us. The grace which comes from God to our humanity is the meaning of our life in the body of Christ; left to ourselves, it seems, we can only “look and pass by,” conflicted and implicated in all of the confusions of our broken and wounded world. The parable, in its context of the unity of the love of God and the love of neighbour, points us strongly to the grace of Christ in his Incarnation. He has “c[o]me to where [we] are”, and the grace of human redemption is signaled in the healing and care of the one whom we have come to call the Good Samaritan. The Good Samaritan, I suggested, is Christ and Christ in us.
Here, too, it is a Samaritan, the one out of the ten lepers, outcasts and rejects standing afar off as Jesus enters a certain village, who returned and gave thanks. What moved him? It is at once the highest freedom of the human soul and the grace of God in him. “When he saw that he was healed, [he] turned back” and then does a most remarkable thing, a strange and extravagant thing. “With a loud voice [he] glorified God, and fell down on his face at his feet, giving him thanks.” Only at this point does Luke add simply and pointedly, “and he was a Samaritan.” For us, hearing this story after last week’s gospel story of the Good Samaritan, there is a powerful echo effect. Once again, we are presented with the conjunction between the Samaritan, a kind of cultural outsider, and Christ, the God who is utterly other than us who has come near to us. And here, the context is about a further aspect of healing and salvation. It is found in the simple yet powerful activity of being thankful.
The Samaritan saw that he was healed. He knows himself to have been given something. He “turned back” to Christ “and with a loud voice glorified God.” In other words, he is thankful for something and he is thankful to someone, and, indeed, not just any someone, but God in Christ. It is Jesus who points out to us the marvel of the situation. We forget just how powerful the spiritual activity of thanksgiving really is.
The Samaritan has marveled at his being healed and freely and simply returns to give thanks to the one whom he acknowledges as the author of his being healed. Jesus’ response, in turn, is his own amazement and delight at what this Samaritan has done. “There are not found that returned to give glory to God, save this stranger.” Again, there is the echo of the parable of the Good Samaritan – the stranger, the outsider, the Samaritan who comes near to us in our woundedness and brokenness. Here the stranger, the outsider, the Samaritan “falls down on his face at [Jesus’] feet, giving him thanks.”
He is thankful for something and he is thankful to someone. Such things are the key ingredients to any kind of real thankfulness. A sense of gratitude for each day and for the events of each day and a sense of thankfulness to God for everything is the healing grace for all of the various distempers of our souls and the disorders of our lives, such as the ones which Paul mentions in the epistle reading from Galatians. Living and walking in the Spirit means being thankful; it is the counter to our pride and vain-glory, our contentiousness and our envy, and the deep, deep bitterness of our souls. Being thankful ultimately places us in a community of spirit where we learn to bear one another’s burdens in part by being responsible for our own.
Yet, even more, we are caught up into the very life of God in the thanksgiving of the Son to the Father in the bond of the Holy Spirit. It is the very meaning of our liturgy. More than healing, we find another marvel – we are being made whole and complete. Our wholeness and completeness is found in giving thanks. The Samaritan is not only healed; he is made whole.
“Arise, go thy way,” Jesus says, “thy faith hath made thee whole.” And all because he “fell down on his face at his feet, giving him thanks.” In returning and giving thanks we are made whole. Such is thanksgiving.
“[He] fell down on his face at his feet, giving him thanks”
Fr. David Curry
Christ Church, Windsor
Trinity XIV, Sept. 13th, 2009