28th Sunday in Ordinary Time
Bishop of Lake Charles
Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception
October 10, 2010
28th Sunday in Ordinary Time
“He fell at the feet of Jesus and thanked him.” Luke 17:16
Thanksgiving is one of the most important types of prayer. All prayer is important, but thanksgiving is a form of praise because it is a return. When we thank God, we return praise to Him because we are recognizing that all gifts come from Him. He is the origin of all that we have.
It is no accident that we give the Greek word for “thanksgiving” found in the Scriptures as the name for our greatest act of worship: ευχάριστία — Eucharist. In the Eucharist, we give thanks. Our Eucharistic Prayer, which forms the centerpiece of the Mass, is a great prayer of thanksgiving. As in the Gospel of this Sunday, our Lord wonders where the other nine lepers who were cured are. “Has none but this foreigner returned to give thanks to God?” (Luke 17:18).
We, the Christian faithful, the followers of Jesus Christ, come to the altar of God, and we give thanks — Eucharist. We follow the example of Jesus himself who, the night before He died, gave thanks. This is recorded in every account of the Lord’s Supper in the New Testament (Matthew 26:27; Mark 14:23; Luke 22:17; I Corinthians 11:22). Notice how often in the Eucharistic Prayers mention is made of thanksgiving. The priest will say, “We offer you in thanksgiving this holy and living sacrifice” (Eucharistic Prayer III) or “We thank you for counting us worthy to stand in your presence and serve you” (Eucharistic Prayer II). Whether repeating the words of the Scriptures or repeating anew the gestures of our Lord Jesus Christ, we give thanks.
We are returning to the Lord like the Samaritan who is healed. We “… [g]o show [our]selves to the priests” (Luke 17:14), as the ancient law stipulated (Numbers 5:5-10). Return had to be made for something that had come from God. The priest, as God’s representative, was the recipient of that thank offering.
Now in the new dispensation Christ is that priest. It is to Him that we return and offer thanks. And Christ has willed His sacramental priesthood to represent Him to the world. “As you sent me into the world, so I sent them into the world” (John 17:18), Jesus prays the night before He dies. And so the individual priest stands before the altar of God not for himself but to represent Christ who takes unto Him all the thanksgiving that we offer in profound gratitude for His marvelous gifts, the first of which is the gift of His Son, the gift of salvation.
Thanksgiving means that we recognize the gift of God. It is part of a great cycle of gift and return. God gives us everything. In the Eucharist, we give back to him the bread and wine that He has first given us. Then, He returns the gift to us, not as bread and wine, but as the gift of His Son. We consume the gift and by transformation of His Grace offer back to Him the gift of a holier life. And at each and every Mass this great dynamic of Thanksgiving is relived.
We are speaking here of spiritual realities. These spiritual realities are seen in and through the tangible signs that “re-present” them. The sacrament remains what it is it signifies, and we are brought into God’s holiness by what He makes present to us.
I am humbled by it all. Actually I find it overwhelming. Who am I to receive this gift and can I give adequate thanks? Yet, God knows that there is in fact nothing that we could give Him that would be adequate thanks. This is the great mystery. He knows that we are lacking in the sufficient means to render thanks. So He gives us His Son, His Beloved, as the gift of thanksgiving, and we call it Eucharist, a reality that is what it means. We said earlier that thanksgiving was a form of praise because it is a return. Christ is our praise, because He is our gift, both the benefit and the return. In offering Him we become one with the gift. We become our thanksgiving sacrifice.