Giving Him Thanks

There’s a temptation to be avoided when we read today’s Gospel of the Ten Lepers.  We may be tempted to imagine that it’s just one of those nice little Bible stories, kind of like Aesop’s Fables, that are meant to give us a simple message: “And the moral of the story is dot, dot, dot…”   The story of the Ten Lepers, however, is not a fable.  It is not a parable.  And it’s not just a simple moral that we’re left with at the end to make everything neat and tidy.  Instead we’re dealing with an actual, historical event that actually occurred during our Lord’s apostolate of healing and teaching.  And we need to take more from this event than just a superficial encouragement to show gratitude.

The gratitude element certainly has its part.  The thanksgiving that the one single leper gave to our Lord, who had just healed ten of them, so one in ten, or ten percent, can be construed as a measurement of what goes on among the world’s population, each of whom makes a choice between giving thanks to God or neglecting him.  In these days we hardly to dare to think of it as an accurate statistic.  Surely, there are far fewer men and women today than one out of ten who are truly thankful, or even slightly thankful to our Lord for redeeming us through his Crucifixion.   Every one of them were redeemed by him, and yet, how many has he actually saved?  One in ten?  We must fear this is an optimistic assessment, especially in this day and age when the vast majority of the population seems to have succumbed to the wiles of the Devil.  The message we should take from the Gospel today is not just that we should say “thank you” to God—thank you for creating me, for redeeming me, for giving me all the good things in my life—but that we should be impelled to live our lives in accordance with that gratitude, repaying God’s goodness with our own best attempts to do his will, in reparation for the tens of millions who show not the slightest interest in doing so.

Our Lord does not condemn the ingratitude of the nine lepers who go their merry way as soon as they get what they wanted.   Similarly, it is not for us to despise our neighbor who has rejected all God has done for him and is hell-bent on doing what he wants with his life instead of what God has in store for him.  Our Lord merely asks questions: “Were there not ten cleansed? But where are the nine?”  It’s a rhetorical question to which we must respond.  Were there not tens of millions of Catholics before Vatican II who believed everything the Church taught, who attended the true Mass weekly, and who strived, no matter how imperfectly, to abide by God’s laws and those of the Church?  But how many are left who still remain faithful to the truths of the faith?  How many attend the true Mass?  In this teeming metropolis of Urbana, our bulletin gives you the answer: last week there were 28.  And a good number of them are for from out of town.  Where are the rest?  Wherever they may be, these others are not to be condemned by us, any more than the nine ungrateful lepers were condemned by our Lord.  All we know about them is that they, like us, successfully received the answer to their prayers of “Jesus, Master, have mercy on us!”  Just as the lepers were all healed, we have all been healed of our sins, we have all been redeemed.  Very nice, but how are they doing now that they have been given this greatest of gifts?  How are they showing their gratitude for this merciful intervention by the Son of God in their lives?  How many of them will save their souls?  Only God knows.

That temptation contained in the reading of today’s Gospel goes further.  There can easily be a tendency to congratulate ourselves for being one of those 28, comparing ourselves with the one grateful leper.  But let’s not go there either.  Because even we, we who have gone so far as to attend Mass today, who have avoided the complete negligence of the nine ungrateful lepers, nevertheless, are we living our lives in perfect accordance with the Redemption God bestowed on us through absolutely no merit of our own?  Are our own souls safe?  Are we saved?  The answer is, of course, that we will not be saved until the moment our souls return to God in the state of sanctifying grace.  And keeping that grace takes work and a lot of sacrifice of our own will and desires.

You see, it’s not the act of saying thank you to God that will alone be enough to save our souls.  It’s not enough to call out ‘Lord, Lord’, to enter into the kingdom of heaven.  We must base our whole lives on the spirit of God’s laws, otherwise our faith is for nought.  And this is never easy.  The Church does provide us with a few easy penances to help us practice for those times bigger penances come.  And the time will surely come when some involuntary cross is placed upon our shoulders and we are tempted to give way beneath the weight of its heavy burden.  We might be able to follow these simple penances quite easily, even willingly, not eating meat on Fridays, not shopping on Sundays, and so on.  But what happens when those penances aren’t so easy, when something turns our lives completely upside down?  Hopefully, practicing those little penances has given us a few good instincts to turn away from the things that are denied to us.  The big penances, the ones we don’t ask for, they may be harder to deal with, but we are reassured by the knowledge that God always gives us the grace to deal with them.  That doesn’t mean he sends us a chill pill so it doesn’t hurt any more.  He gives us the strength to endure the hurt, to get through the pain, to recognize, in our love of the Sacred Heart that first loved us, that our yoke is actually possible to bear, even easy, that our burden is light.

In short, saying thank you to God isn’t enough.  We have to live our thank you.  Gratitude to God is something we must show with our actions, our willingness to do his will, to endure burdens that, without our faith in God would be intolerable.  The good leper teaches us this lesson—he went out of his way to give glory to God, and we must do likewise.  We must go out of our way, holding on to our faith as we walk down a path that might be poorly lit or that has dangers round every turn.  But this narrow path is the way to God, and if we have the kind of faith our Lord asks us to have, our faith shall make us whole.