Let us give thanks to the Lord our God.

Today as we celebrate our family life and our many blessings on this day of Thanksgiving, the Church has us ponder in the Gospel the story of the ten lepers. All ten were cured of a disease that had been eating away their flesh and bones,  that had made them the worst of outcasts and forced them to stay at least 50 feet away from any non-leper, that had compelled them at all times to yell out “unclean!, unclean!,” anytime someone was approaching. Only one of the ten returned to thank the Lord Jesus. Jesus poignantly asks, “Ten were cleansed, were they not? Where are the other nine?”

But while all ten were cured of the physical leprosy, nine retained a leprosy of the soul, an ingratitude that took for granted the greatest gift they had received in life until then.

There’s a lot that we all have to learn from this scene to help us understand and celebrate better Thanksgiving, because this attitude of the grateful leper was the attitude that marked the pilgrims who celebrated the first day of Thanksgiving.

When the pilgrims lowered the anchor in Plymouth harbor in December 1620, they were filled with hope. They had survived a perilous three-month journey on an inhospitable Atlantic ocean with only one casualty. Their incessant prayers for a safe arrival had been heard. They had finally landed in the new world and were ready to begin a new life.

Little did they know the year that would await them.   Of the 103 that disembarked, more than half would die before winter was over. Governor John Carver, their leader, succumbed quickly to fever. Ten of the seventeen husbands and fathers died. Fourteen of their seventeen wives also perished. The young wife of soon-to-be Governor William Bradford drowned in Plymouth harbor before even reaching shore. Those who avoided the grave remained in grave danger because of fevers, famine and freezing temperatures. Yet they didn’t give up hope.

The fifty-one survivors easily could have looked at the previous eleven months as the worst year of their lives. The reason they were able to thank God so heartily in spite of the suffering they had endured was because they believed those hardships and blessings were both part of God’s providential care. No amount of personal suffering could shake their faith. No amount of hardship could rock their trust in a God whom they knew loved them and was looking over them. They convened full of gratitude on that first Thanksgiving.

I like to think of today, Thanksgiving Day, as a moment which clearly puts life into perspective. Do we have that same spirit of Thanksgiving that marked the grateful leper and the Pilgrims who had survived?   May we approach this day with hearts and souls bursting with thanks to God and to others for all of the blessings we have received, including the crosses and hardships?  Lord God, give us grateful hearts. 

I am mindful every day but especially on this day of Thanksgiving, that there’s a very important dialogue of prayer that happens in the heart of every Mass.  After the priest prays that the Lord be with all present and the people pray that God will be in a special way with the priest to do what God ordained him to do, after the priest commands the people in God’s name to lift up their hearts, the desires and their lives to God and the people reply that they have in fact lifted them up to the Lord, the priest says, “Let us give thanks to the Lord our God” and the people respond, “It is right and just.” The priest then echoes that sentiment saying, “It is right and just, our duty and salvation, always and everywhere to give you thanks, holy Father, almighty and eternal God.”

To give God thanks always and everywhere is the right thing to do, whether we’re perfectly healthy or have leprosy, AIDS, cancer or any other suffering. To give God thanks always and everywhere is the just thing to do even when whether we win or lose the lottery, whether we get a promotion or a pink-slip, whether we are celebrating a wedding or a funeral. To give God thanks always and everywhere is our duty and our salvation. We are saved through thanksgiving! The grateful leper received salvation by faith precisely through his gratitude, not because God makes salvation conditioned on our saying thanks but because if we’re not grateful, if our hearts are hardened, we can’t receive that grace.

The Mass is a school of Thanksgiving where we are trained how to give thanks to God always and everywhere as the right thing to do, as a duty of justice, and as the path to salvation. It’s highly significant that when the first Christians described what they were doing when they got together to “do this in memory” of the Lord, they didn’t called it the celebration of the body and blood of the Lord Jesus. They didn’t call it the Feast of the Lord’s Supper or the Banquet of the Lamb. They called it the Eucharist, from the Greek word, Eucaristein, which means thanksgiving.

 Every time they came together for Mass, it was Thanksgiving Day. It was Thanksgiving during the times of growth and peace. It was Thanksgiving during the times of persecution. But their fundamental approach to the Mass was that it was the greatest way possible for them to thank God for the gift of life, to thank God for so many blessings of family and friends, to thank God for the gift of the Christian faith and the new life and family they had received in baptism, and to thank God for the gift of salvation.

They saw what they were doing as entering into Jesus’ own prayer of Thanksgiving to the Father. To enter into Jesus’ prayer is to become filled with a spirit of Thanksgiving. His prayers were always marked by gratitude. He thanked the Father before the multiplication of the loaves and fish. He thanked the Father for revealing his wisdom to the merest of children instead of to the clever and proud of the world. He thanked the Father before raising Lazarus from the dead. During the Mass, he thanked the Father profusely even before he was to give his own body and blood during the Last Supper. He thanked the Father before he would be crucified because through that sacrifice he would be able to save us all out of love. The Mass is the school in which we enter into Jesus’ own thanksgiving, always and everywhere, to the Father. The Mass is our continual thanksgiving from the rising of the sun to its setting. It is a school that transforms us to be fully Christian and to be Christian is to be grateful.

The Lord has done far more for us than he ever did for the ten lepers or the Pilgrims. Here at Mass he gives us in a concrete way even more than what he gave to the one grateful leper when he said: “your faith has saved you.” This is where we receive salvation-in-the-flesh. No matter what we have experienced in this past year, no matter what hardships we’re still enduring, God comes into our world, to accompany us, to strengthen us, to heal us, to help us.

Our best response is always gratitude.  Thanks be to God.  And so, we gather to give thanks to the Lord our God.