A little girl was leaving for a birthday party when her mother told her to be good and to remember, when she was leaving, to thank her hostess. When she arrived home, the mother asked if she had thanked the hostess and the little girl replied, “No, the girl in front of me did and the lady said, ‘Don’t mention it,’ so I didn’t.”
Nor, as we heard in the gospel, did nine certain lepers. Namaan, a Syrian general afflicted with leprosy, and the Samaritan, the only one of the ten cured lepers to return and give thanks to Jesus for being healed, are both obviously very grateful.
The apparent ingratitude of the nine lepers is not so unusual. How often have we done the same thing? A fair number of us do not really go out of our way to express our gratitude; especially to God for all that we have been blessed with.
Most likely, the nine lepers who didn’t return to Jesus very much appreciated what he had done for them. Why they didn’t return to offer him thanks is anyone’s guess. Perhaps they felt obliged to first go and visit the priests to get their clean bill of health. In any case, what is evident to Jesus was the cure didn’t touch their hearts.
Why was the Samaritan so grateful? In ancient times, leprosy was an illness with a stigma, much like AIDS has been for our times. If you had leprosy, you were labeled a public health risk, thus ostracized from the village and cut off from your family. You were expected to warn others, “Unclean! Unclean!” should anyone come near you. In order to survive, all you could do was beg. Being a leper was a lonely and humiliating life. Being cured gave the Samaritan a new lease on life. No wonder, he profusely thanked Jesus.
What happened to lepers back then happens to us whenever we commit a grave sin, for any deliberate choice to sin distances us from God and from our faith community. Sin is an abuse of the freedom God gives us; it is not a weakness we can overcome by our own efforts, any more than a leper can cure himself. Sin is a condition from which we need to be saved and the only one who can do that is Jesus himself.
When we alienate ourselves from God by committing a grave sin, we cannot fully participate in the Mass in that we are not allowed to receive communion until we have been reconciled with God and the Church through the sacrament of reconciliation. Like the lepers, at times we feel the need to cry out, “Jesus, master, have pity on us!”
And if we did, he would tell us, “Go show yourselves to the priests.” In biblical times, by certifying that they been healed, priests gave the newly cured lepers permission to return home to their community. Likewise, for us today, going to a priest and receiving absolution through the sacrament of reconciliation restores us to full membership in the Church that is lost when we have sinned. Now forgiven, we are in full communion with the body of Christ, allowed once again to receive the graces of Holy Communion.
Our primary manner of worship as Catholics has always been the Mass, known also as the Eucharist. That name comes from the Greek for Thanksgiving. In other words, the Mass is our ideal opportunity to thank God for all that we have been given: life, love, forgiveness, compassion and mercy, along with the material goods that keep us alive.
Like the nine lepers who didn’t voice their gratitude for being healed, many Christians today do not appear to be so grateful for all that God has blessed them with. At our latest deanery meeting, we were shown statistics indicating the growing number of people who consider themselves Catholic but are opting more and more not to celebrate their faith. Parents choosing not to have their children baptized, young adults choosing not to get married, much less, married in the Church; people of all ages choosing not to go to Mass every weekend for any number of reasons. Taking time to thank God in worship is evidently not a priority for them.
Despite the caution voiced by Paul in his letter to Timothy that God will deny those who deny him, it seems that a fair number of Catholics don’t really think that their sinfulness will cause them to lose God’s gift of salvation. Instead, they presume that “God will understand.”
Maybe God will, but do we understand our need to be grateful? In his book, No Man is an Island, the late Thomas Merton says this about gratitude; “if we are not grateful to God, we cannot taste the joy of finding him in creation. To be ungrateful is to admit that we do not know him, and that we love his creatures not for his sake but for our own. Unless we are grateful for our own existence, we do not know who we are, and we have not yet discovered what it really means to be and to live…the only value of our life is that it is a gift of God. Gratitude shows reverence to God in the way it makes use of his gifts.”
Unlike the polite hostess, God does expect us to mention our gratitude and for good reason. Not only do we need to be grateful, we must continually express that gratitude through prayer, worship and good deeds if our faith is to remain vibrant and well. So long as we demonstrate our gratitude by living our faith through worship and the sacraments, we will never deny God nor will God ever deny us.