For Thy Great Glory

Ten lepers.  All ten cry out, “Jesus, Master, have mercy on us.”  All ten are healed.  But then, only one returns to our Lord to say “Thank you.”  Today’s Gospel is about thanksgiving and our duty to give thanks to God.  It is a real responsibility that we must keep in mind and practice frequently.  We will never run out of things for which to thank God.  Every single good thing in our lives is a gift from God and we must never forget it.  “All good things come from above.”

But have you noticed, every time we think of God, we somehow manage to bring it round to human terms, and in particular, to ourselves.  We thank God, yes, but why?  Because he gives us good things.  And not just our thanksgiving, but indeed every aspect of our prayer life somehow seems to end up being about us rather than God.  We adore, we confess our sins, we give thanks, and we make our supplications.  Adoration, confession, thanksgiving, supplication.  A, C, T, S.  We’ve mentioned this many times, but today, let’s examine our motivation for these four acts of prayer, and perhaps make room for a little criticism of how we’ve managed to turn these acts into self-centered attempts to benefit ourselves.

Let’s face it, we adore God because we know we must do so in order that we can go to heaven.  We repent and confess our sins so that we may be forgiven and go to heaven.  We give thanks for all the good things God has given us.  And of course, let’s not forget why we petition God to give us more of those good things we need, or sadly, that we simply like to have!  None of this is wrong in itself.  Beyond our natural aspirations for a more comfortable and pleasant material life, we have a vested self-interest in the spiritual life, our soul, and our attempts to become more worthy of our eternal reward are virtuous and necessary.  Without these attempts, we’ll surely never get there, and our chief purpose in life, is it not to save our souls?  But even here, in the spiritual realm, it still manages to be all about us, doesn’t it, and our own salvation.

What I propose to you today, though, is the possibility that there is something missing from this self-centered approach.  We have an inkling of this in our act of contrition.  In this prayer that we rattle off in the confessional with such ease, there’s a very timely reminder of the true reason we should be sorry: our sins not only deserve the loss of heaven and the pains of hell—all very bad for us, certainly—but “because they offend thee, my God, who art deserving of all my love.”  Our self-centered motivation to avoid the pains of hell is all very well, and is even sufficient in the confessional to receive absolution.  But outside of the sacrament of Penance it’s a different story.  Only sorrow for having offended God is enough to make an Act of Perfect Contrition.  It is, therefore, the focusing of our repentance on God and not on ourselves that makes our act of contrition truly perfect.

We must apply this same principle to the other three acts of prayer.  Our adoration of God should be above all because God is worthy of our worship.  Dignus est Agnus—”Worthy is the Lamb that was slain to receive power, and riches, and wisdom, and strength, and honour, and glory, and blessing.”  This was St. John’s vision of the New Jerusalem in the Book of the Apocalypse.  In heaven, our adoration of God is pure and totally devoid of any reference to our own spiritual benefits.  It’s obvious when you think about it, because when we’re already in heaven we no longer have need for any more graces from God, we have achieved our salvation already by his graces, and no more are needed.  All we have to do for the rest of eternity is to adore the Lamb of God.  This should be our chief motivation when we worship God in this life too—leave the desire and petition for graces to our acts of supplication, and make our adoration all about God, and him alone.

Even those petitions we make, when we ask God for any good thing, whether it be spiritual, like the grace to avoid a particular temptation for instance, or whether it be physical—please take away my toothache, please find my missing car keys—whatever we ask for, let it be not merely for our own benefit, not even for the benefit of our neighbor, but with God first and foremost in mind.  What we said earlier, that all good things come from above, comes from the Epistle of St. James.  The exact quotation is “Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, and cometh down from the Father of lights, with whom is no variableness, neither shadow of turning.”  Holy Scripture points us again to the glory of God as being the source of all good things, and not to ourselves, miserable creatures, who are the beneficiaries of these good things.

And this, of course, leads us full circle back to our ten lepers.  Nine of them were so engrossed in their own new-found health that they failed to thank God for their miraculous cure.  It was all about them—wow, look at me, I’m healed!  Only one of them walked over to our blessed Lord and fell down at his feet, giving him thanks.  We know he was more concerned with the glory of God than he was with the gift this God had given him.  We know it because it says that he “turned back, and with a loud voice glorified God.”  His priority was God and not himself.

Life is about God, not about “me”.  Learn this and all will fall into place.  All four acts of prayer—adoration, confession, thanksgiving and supplication—are in the end one and the same act of worship.  The angels and saints have proven this to us time and again, beginning with the song of the Herald Angels at Bethlehem, first “Glory be to God in the Highest,” and only then “in earth peace to men of good will.”  That same Gloria in our Holy Mass goes on to perfect our thanksgiving by glorifying God as did the grateful leper.   That one humble phrase of thanksgiving is the essence of today’s Gospel:  “We give thee thanks for thy great glory.”  Let us thank God today, not for the wealth of goodness we receive from his bounty, not for this gift or that gift, but solely because of his great glory, because he is God, our great and glorious Father of lights, with whom is no variableness neither shadow of turning. With the leper, we turn to the great God Almighty, we fall down on our face at this feet, and we glorify God:  Laudamus te, benedicimus te, adoramus te, glorificamus te; “We praise thee, we bless thee, we worship thee, we glorify thee, we give thee thanks for thy great glory.”