“And one … turned back … giving him thanks”
There were ten that cried out for mercy. There were ten that were healed. Yet only “one of them, when he saw that he was healed, turned back, and with a loud voice glorified God, and fell down on his face at his feet, giving him thanks.” Luke pointedly adds, “And he was a Samaritan.”“Where,”Jesus asks, rhetorically and ironically, “are the nine?”
Certain Gospel stories stand out and bear repeating even in the course of the year. They have a certain resonance. This is one such Gospel. Read today in the midst of the Trinity Season and in the beginnings of the turn to the Fall, it is also appointed for Thanksgiving Day; not for Harvest Thanksgiving but for our national thanksgiving day. As such it reminds us of the larger spiritual dimensions of giving thanks. And so, more significantly, it recalls us to the mystery of thanksgiving. It is, we might say, the quintessential thanksgiving Gospel which highlights the spiritual necessity of thanksgiving as altogether critical for our understanding of human redemption.
Thanksgiving is our highest freedom and yet it is nothing less than the grace of God active and alive in us. To give thanks requires our recognition of others and of God beyond ourselves. The counter to our selfish tendency to take everything and one another for granted, thanksgiving recognises the profound gift of life which God alone has given us in and through one another. It belongs to our life and walk in the Spirit, to our fulfilling the law of Christ, to our bearing one another’s burdens as well as our own.
You are alive. I know, we ‘all’ got problems. “All God’s children got troubles” as the old spiritual puts it. But we are alive only if we are alive to God, the author of life and of all good things. Thanksgiving is the realization in us of God’s surpassing goodness signalled in our recognition of God as life and the gift of life in each and every one of us. That is a kind of radical mindfulness – of God, of ourselves, of our world, and of one another. And all as gifts given – in short, grace. It is not about what we think we are owed. It is about freely giving thanks for the simple truth that we are, that we exist and that existence is itself an unconditional good. Such is the wonder of the God-given reality of creation and of our lives within it despite all our complaints and concerns. We can only have those, after all, because we exist. I know. There may be times when you think that you want to die – a very different matter from causing death – but wanting to die presupposes that you are alive and know yourself to be alive. From this standpoint, even the devil is good because he exists even if he exists in contradiction with the very principle of his being and truth, God. This highlights even more the significance of thanksgiving.
Eucharist means giving thanks. The word in Greek contains both the words grace and good. Giving thanks is God’s good grace in us. It happens in us when we turn back to God. But that turning is about our being turned to the truth of our being which is found in God in Christ, the very point which this story emphasises. God turns us to the real truth of our being. It is found in communion with God. Therein lies our salvation, our wholeness, which is more than being healed or cleansed. Ten were healed or cleansed but only the one who turned back and gave thanks is said to be saved or made whole. There is the greater grace, we might say, of our giving thanks which brings us more knowingly into the presence and truth of God.
Thanksgiving is not something coerced or forced. It is not mechanically or externally imposed on us. It is about our hearts and minds as turned to the God in whom “we live and move and have our being”. This is our highest and greatest freedom. We are freed to God and to the power of his life in us; the source and end of our life is God. Thanksgiving is at once all God in us and all us in God in the truth of our humanity. We are who we are meant to be in being thankful.We are ourselves only as we are turned to God.
Last week you heard the Gospel story of the so-called Good Samaritan which constitutes the Christian ethic of compassion. Such is the love of Christ in us. Christ, we have to say, is the Good Samaritan whose grace in us alone transcends the limitations and shortcomings of our fallen humanity. We are raised up and taken care of by the one who binds up our wounds, the one who pours in oil and wine, the one who takes care of us in the inn of the Church sacramentally – the two pence are symbolically understood as baptism and eucharist as many of the Fathers suggest. And now today, it is another Samaritan who provides the illustration for the fuller meaning of human redemption. We are taken care of for a purpose. The purpose of our humanity is thanksgiving to God. Therein we find our wholeness, our truth.
That it is, again, a Samaritan is significant. They were the outsiders, the despised and the rejected of the Jewish culture of Jesus’ day. Jesus does not agree with the claims of the Samaritans on matters of worship and scripture but he uses them to counter all false claims to cultural superiority, to a kind of cultural racism, as it were, that so besets our world and day. The two stories serve as a critique of sectarianism itself, the idea that merely belonging to a certain group or culture conveys superiority. Paradoxically, Jesus uses a sect, the Samaritans, to critique all forms of sectarianism, all forms of false exclusivity, all false claims to superiority, in order to show us the universal community of our humanity as found in our communion with God.
Our communion with God is not a human construction. It is about the grace of God in us that brings us into true communion with Him and with one another. At the heart of that communion is thanksgiving. In the Holy Eucharist, we participate in the Son’s Thanksgiving to the Father in the bond of the Holy Spirit. Such is the deeper meaning of thanksgiving. It is not just a thanksgiving for certain things – in this case, healing – it is about thanksgiving to God himself. Such is grace and glory. That is why Jesus says “There are not found that returned to give glory to God, save this stranger.” It takes the outsider to bring us into the heart of God whose grace and glory are revealed in Christ. In giving thanks we are constantly turned to God.
“And one turned back … giving him thanks”
Fr. David Curry
Trinity XIV, 2018