Sermon CXVII.
Thanksgiving.
Where are the nine?
—St. Luke xvii. 11.
[USCCB: St. Luke xvii. 17.]
Of the ten lepers whose cure is related in this day's Gospel, only one returned to give thanks, and he was a Samaritan; the others went their way; they were cured indeed of their dreadful disease, but disgraced by our Lord's sad question, Where are the nine?
Thanksgiving, brethren, should follow after God's mercies to us, not only as a matter of justice, but in order to secure the effect of those mercies themselves. Just as, in our bodily life, in order to get the benefit of fresh air, breathing in must be followed by breathing out, so the giving of thanks must follow the reception of all divine favors. The grace of God is to the soul what the breath is to the body; and the body, to live, must not only draw the air in, but give it forth again to make room for new and fresher air. So in the life of our souls we breathe in God's grace and we breathe out thanksgiving.
Thanksgiving is furthermore a matter of justice. The holiest debt we owe to God or man is the debt of thanks. Every honest man gives thanks for favors received from other men, and every upright soul gives thanks to God. It is the most indispensable of all our obligations, because it is the least that we can do. In all our traffic with heaven, gratitude is the only coin we can mint ourselves. Thanksgiving is that part of our sanctification necessarily our own. Well, brethren, if this be really true and who can deny it?—then a great many of us are insolvent debtors of the worst kind. Now you hear it said sometimes that the man who does not pay his debts is as bad as a thief, and in many cases this is perfectly true. So the difference between an open sinner and a thankless Christian is that between a thief and a man who by his own fault does not pay his debts. Indeed, we sometimes feel as if God ought to thank us for the favor we do him by condescending to serve him. Confession and Communion and daily prayer, forgiveness of in juries and resisting temptations so puff us up with conceit that we are apt to blame God because in view of our holiness he does not exempt us from the ordinary ills of life!
As a matter of fact it is with God and us as with a storekeeper and his customer. You know why a man cannot get trust at a store; it is because he was trusted before and didn't pay his debts. Now pretty nearly all the pay that God asks for his favors is that we shall give him thanks, and if we will not do that much he can hardly think us worthy of his further bounty. If we do give thanks he multiplies his favors; for he is determined to keep us in his debt, and as fast as we return thanks so much the faster does he lavish his love upon us.
So when we ask why we suffer this miserable stagnation in our spiritual career, perhaps the true answer would be that we are members of a big multiple of that original thankless nine.
Oh! let us thank God that we have the blessings of the true religion, that he is our Father, Jesus Christ our Redeemer, and the Blessed Virgin Mary our Mother. Let us thank him for his gracious promise of the everlasting joys of Paradise. For these unspeakable favors our thanks should be ceaseless.
Let us give thanks, too, in our fervent morning prayers that we have escaped the dangers of the night, and in our night prayers that we have been saved from the noon-day demon. When we rise from our meals let us offer a word of thanks, making at least the sign of the cross, blessing God for the health he gives us and our family. Let us thank him for our afflictions—yes, even for temptations; for the pains we suffer thereby are the growing-pains of the soul. Especially after receiving Holy Communion let us give long and heartfelt thanks for all God's dealing with us; for we have then received the greatest of all his gifts, his only-begotten Son.