If
you’re at Mass two weeks from tomorrow, Thanksgiving morning, you’ll hear this
very same Gospel proclaimed. Which is
quite appropriate for that day, as this Gospel is a beautiful story of
thankfulness – it’s all about thankfulness.
The ten lepers went off, and one, upon realizing he was healed, came
back to glorify God and fall at Jesus’ feet in thanksgiving.
But
Jesus asks the key question – where are the other nine? He’s rightfully pointing out the real problem
– with those nine lepers, and with you and me.
Too often we fail to be thankful, too often we take our blessings for
granted. Or worse, we come to believe we are somehow entitled to what is really
God’s gratuitous gift.
The
feast of Thanksgiving is about recognizing, for one day at least, our
giftedness. It’s about recognizing that
we have a fundamentally unbalanced relationship – God is the gracious giver and
we are the unworthy receiver. That all
that we have, our relationships, our material goods, our faith, our very lives!
– are gifts from God which we can never repay.
So all we can do is give God our deep gratitude. And out of deep gratitude, freely share our
gifts with others.
Today
is a day for recognizing, for one day at least, the gift we’ve been given by
our veterans. We all desire peace and
freedom and long for the day when there will be no more wars. But until that day comes, we live in a world
in which military service is necessary to secure our safety, freedom, and
peace. It’s so easy for us to take the
blessings of peace and freedom for granted, forgetting the great sacrifices
paid by our veterans to secure that peace and freedom. And so we pause today to give thanks for our
veterans, and to our veterans, for their great sacrifice and service to us and
our nation.
And
as Christians we pray for that day when the Kingdom of God is fully realized,
that day when the need for standing armies is a thing of history, that day when
all people and all nations may live together in true peace.
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