This week, we'll reflect on our times of ungratefulness, along with encouragements to be more thankful. Some pleas and prayers on Thanksgiving Day will be given with a large dose of sentimental emotions and even patriotism.
There are some questions that nag... is thankfulness something we can “conjure up” when a thanksgiving family feast rolls around, just once a year? Or is it something like happiness, which we can never manufacture but which is always the product of something else, the effect, not the cause? Can genuine thankfulness be manufactured... in a world where feeling thankful is hard to do?
Yes, to a certain level. For example, we've come up with verbal formulas to snap us out of ungrateful funks: "Look for the silver lining in the dark cloud"; or "Look at the glass as half full, not half empty"; or that universally used cliché, "Count your blessings." Then you have the espousers of positive thinking, giving admonitions about possibility thinking and thinking only positive thoughts. Such advice on positive thinking is so infectious... it sells tons of books, and yes, some of the ideas do in fact work to a level.
Such band-aids can help for a time. But here's the truth of the matter... We can't keep it up. There are days when we just don't have the energy to count our blessings. And sometimes those days turn into weeks, months and even years. There are long stretches when we'd like to be thankful, but frankly, we just don't give a rip.
The Lord Jesus encountered an interesting situation that speaks to the truest understanding of thanklessness while traversing the frontier-country between Samaria and Galilee. The story is found in Luke 17.
"Now on his way to Jerusalem, Jesus traveled along the border between Samaria and Galilee. As he was going into a village, ten men who had leprosy met him. They stood at a distance and called out in a loud voice, "Jesus, Master, have pity on us!"
Jesus is called aside by the plaintive shouts of men afflicted with a serious illness... leprosy. Surely, they must have thought, if Jesus could cure the blind, heal the lame, and raise the dead, he had the power to help them too. They were already outcasts and had nothing to lose, so they raised their voices in desperate hope.
When he saw them, he said, "Go, show yourselves to the priests."
Jesus simply tells them to go to the priests, who were the first-century referees as to whether a healing had taken place. Any cure, according to the Book of Leviticus, would need the equivalent of a "Good Housekeeping seal of approval" so that the formerly unclean could be ritually restored to the community.
Will they go? How can they, since Jesus has done nothing outwardly to assure them of a cure? Was this a trial of their obedience? How would they respond to the Lord's ambiguous command? Something in the reputation of Jesus, or perhaps in the way he looked them in the eye, encouraged them that they had met not divine indifference, but God's mercy, on that day on that lonely road.
And as they went, they were cleansed.
The progression, the unfolding of the events is important... "as they went, they were cleansed." Their obedience precedes their healing. What happens now?
One of them, when he saw he was healed, came back, praising God in a loud voice. He threw himself at Jesus' feet and thanked him—and he was a Samaritan.
Until this point, the 10 lepers had acted as one. They had lived together, they had cried out together, they suffered together, they had gone off to find Jesus together, and they had been cleansed together. Now, however, one of them turns back towards Jesus. Whatever has happened, the man knows he has been blessed, and the blessing requires a personal response. First he sees, then he turns, then he praises.
While the healed Samaritan was still humbly at Jesus' feet... come three pointed, rapid-fire questions, which cast a shadow over the celebration and the encounter with the ten men.
Jesus asked, "Were not all ten cleansed? Where are the other nine? Has no one returned to give praise to God except this foreigner?"
Here, in this encounter with the lepers we learn a deep thing of God... of His holiness... of His unfathomable love for humanity. Praise and recognition are being sought from these ten by Jesus. Why did Jesus need to be thanked in such a way?
He already had rewarded their obedience, but it seems Jesus wants something more. What is he hoping for? He wants their gratitude. Gratitude or gratefulness is a knowing awareness that we are the recipients of a level of goodness that we can not hope to produce from within ourselves. Didn't the “other nine men” know what Jesus [God] had done for them? Didn’t they care?
The nine who did not return to give thanks were rude, ignorant and misaligned with a fundamental truth of the universe. It’s hard to escape such truth, because humanity is hard-wired by God to be thankful. We are wired by Him to be thankful beyond just the acknowledgements of acts of kindness... we are naturally wired to dig into the depths of our souls and express genuine gratitude for things undeserved.
We are the recipients, not the creators, of goodness. Goodness is in fact an attribute of God’s love that humanity benefits from. In acknowledging this simple truth we elevate ourselves by reflecting the qualities God created within us. God is the one Being in all the universe for whom seeking his own praise is the ultimate loving act. Jesus was well justified and entitled to receive praise for what he had done for the 10 lepers.
We are designed to “give” to God praise from the depths of our hearts... from the core of our very souls. The capacity to draw upon our created essence requires that we recognize our inability to do anything in thanksgiving without God. The Apostle Paul's words in Ephesians 5:20 sum it up nicely... "giving thanks always and for everything to God the Father.”
Those words reveal the utter inadequacy of all our human attempts to manufacture genuine thanksgiving without involving God. It is that essence within us that prompts our “worship” of the Living God. Thankful... always and in everything? Think about “always and for everything” very carefully... because there’s no wiggle room in those words. Paul means for us to be genuinely thankful for all the circumstances of our lives.
Given that fact, thankfulness, praise and gratitude are really not options when you call yourself a Christian. They’re a joyful inevitability in a world designed and upheld by God. The only question is whether we will live our “lot in life” with thankful gratitude?
Then he [Jesus] said to him [the healed leper], "Rise and go; your faith has made you well."
I wonder how the nine felt when the man, returning from his worship, finally caught up with them, telling of his grateful exchange with Jesus. They had missed the opportunity to deepen their elation by giving thanks. The grateful man received more than the other nine because he had his cure confirmed by Jesus, the Christ... “your faith has made you well.” What this one healed leper now knows is priceless and sustaining of his faith. He knows the true depths and magnitude of God’s mercies... discovered beyond thankfulness, in “grateful gratitude”... sweetened by his worship, his prayers and praises of faith.
To give thanks in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ means to recognize that Christian gratefulness begins with an affirmation of a great negative: we simply can't thank God in a manner that matches His great love for us.
To paraphrase the Apostle Paul... "For while we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungrateful. For one will scarcely die for a righteous person—though perhaps for a good person one would dare even to die—but God shows his love for us in that while we were still self-centered and ungrateful, Christ died for us … And so we rejoice in God in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ …" (Rom. 5:6-11). Sobering thoughts to say the least.
Our calling to live and breathe thanksgiving is high, so high as to be humanly impossible. So we will fall far short of it in this life, and fall short time and time again. We will have moments when a pure and complete thanksgiving floods forth from our souls, but most days we'll live somewhere far south of that superlative moment of genuine gratitude.
Gratitude brings benefits in this world and in the world to come. The nine had their cure and went off to live out their lives restored to family and community... the one who showed his gratefulness, his gratitude had his cure, plus an eternal relationship with Jesus.
This Thanksgiving, let's remember that we are all the recipients of God's goodness. Be thankful from the depths of your heart, be grateful for all that God does for you even when it seems like there’s nothing to be thankful for.
Today and everyday of your life... you have His grace and mercy... His boundless love. Be deeply thankful from the depths of your heart for all you have and for all God has done for you.
