And one of them, realizing he had been healed,
returned, glorifying God in a loud voice;
and he fell at the feet of Jesus and thanked him.
Do we realize all that God has done for us? Almost certainly the amount for which we remember to thank him is fractional compared to the countless blessings he has bestowed. We could spend the rest of our lives thanking him for the goodness of creation without ever exhausting it or approaching the end. Each day further multiples such goodness with every new sunrise, every new song of a bird, every embrace of family, every greeting of a friend. Beyond the goodness of created things there is also all that God has done to redeem the human race by becoming taking on flesh in the person of Jesus Christ, teaching, healing, and ultimately dying for us. The Paschal mystery is a font of blessing that is probably even more inexhaustible than the original creation. Because of the goodness of our redemption we even sing with gratitude in the Exultet of our 'felix culpa', our happy fault.
Where would we now be if the Word had not chosen to take on flesh in order to bring us salvation? In what darkness would be now be forced to remain? We take for granted that it is possible to strive for holiness because we are accustomed to the grace that God never ceases to make available to us. If we have ever known what it is like to be a slave to sin and addiction we have probably mostly forgotten by now. It is very easy to take the new normal of Christian life for granted. But there we should pause to remember that the freedom we now enjoy is a gift that we only have because of the generous lengths to which Jesus freely chose to go to give it.
“Ten were cleansed, were they not?
Where are the other nine?
Has none but this foreigner returned to give thanks to God?”
It is obvious to us that a leper who was cured ought to be grateful. But we forget that we owe a debt much deeper than that of any leper. As Paul says, "we ourselves were once foolish, disobedient, led astray, slaves to various passions and pleasures, passing our days in malice and envy, hated by others and hating one another" (see Titus 3:3). And if any of us managed to survive to adulthood without being quite that bad we should remember that this too was a grace and gift given by Jesus himself.
I give thanks to my God always on your account
for the grace of God bestowed on you in Christ Jesus,
that in him you were enriched in every way,
with all discourse and all knowledge,
as the testimony to Christ was confirmed among you,
so that you are not lacking in any spiritual gift
as you wait for the revelation of our Lord Jesus Christ.
We do sometimes remember to give thanks for the fact that we have been saved from sin and damnation. But we are often less attentive to all the spiritual blessings we have received, less attentive to that for which we have been saved. Even when we remember to be grateful for the possibility of heaven which Jesus gained for us we tend to think of it more as a negation of the negatives of this world, a lack of suffering, rather than the positive goods of eternal love and divine worship. Since we take for granted how we are even now "enriched in every way with all discourse and all knowledge" and "are not lacking in any spiritual gift" we have a hard time imaging or appreciating the possibility of heaven where these blessings will even more entirely define our existence.
How can we become more like the one leper that remembered to return and give thanks, rather than the other nine who were happy to take their healing and run? We can make a practice of thanksgiving, knowing that we will never exhaust all of the possible gifts for which we can give thanks. Rather than do nothing because there are so many, we can ask God himself to help us know how blessed we are, so that we can return those blessings to him in thanks and praise. When we live lives defined by thanksgiving we become by definition a Eucharistic people. And this thankfulness will result in rooting us more firmly in God and making us stronger in the face of circumstances that do not lead to obvious and immediate gratitude.
He will keep you firm to the end,
irreproachable on the day of our Lord Jesus Christ.
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