Day: October 12, 2025

“One turned back … giving him thanks”

It is the quintessential thanksgiving Gospel that embraces all the forms of thanksgiving, both harvest thanksgiving and national thanksgivings. It does so in the face of poor harvests and trying political, social, and economic times. Thanksgiving is profoundly spiritual. As the Gospel shows, in returning and giving thanks, we are made whole. Here is the deeper meaning of thanksgiving for it is about the greater gathering of all things to God, from the lowly zucchini to the mighty pumpkin, and of our humanity to its truth in God. This is signalled in the Eucharist, which means thanksgiving, thanksgiving as rooted and grounded in the love of Christ for us and for our world.

Thanksgiving is the freest thing that we can do. Like learning and religion, it can’t be forced. It has to come freely from our hearts and minds. We constantly remind children to say ‘thank-you’, but real thanksgiving can’t be coerced. It belongs to the intellectual and spiritual freedom of our humanity as embodied spiritual and intellectual beings. It counters all and every aspect of the entitlement culture in the assumption that we are owed whatever we want and think we deserve. Its significance is captured in the power of prepositions. Prepositions?! Why prepositions? Because we can’t make any sense of thanksgiving without giving serious consideration to prepositions, particularly three prepositions, namely ‘for’, ‘to’, and ‘with’.

What is so special about prepositions? What are they? They are one of the parts of speech. They are those little words which carry a great weight of meaning and are often so hard to master when learning a new language. They position nouns and verbs in relation to one another to indicate meaning and purpose. Theology is really all about prepositions in the idea of the gathering of all things into unity in God: the God from whom all things come, the God to whom all things return, and the God in whom all things have their being, especially our being with God – to use but a few. Paul in Ephesians, the Epistle for Trinity 17, recalls our vocation to “one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is above all, and through all, and in you all;” more prepositions that complement the thanksgiving theme of the gathering of all things to their truth and fullness in God.

First, thanksgiving is for something or other acknowledged as good. Rather than taking all the good things of life for granted and/or thinking that we deserve what we enjoy, we give thanks for the good things we have as a gift. Secondly, there can be no thanksgiving without the idea of giving thanks to someone; ultimately, in the religious and spiritual traditions, to God, the ultimate source of all and every good. We give thanks to God for what we recognise that we have received through the labours, the care, the thought and the actions of ourselves and others. At harvest thanksgiving, those labours and the fruits of the earth in their season are only conceivable by human labour working with the good order of creation. And all because of the providential care and love of the author of all that is, God.

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