Thirteenth Sunday after Pentecost
Today’s Gospel offers us a poignant lesson in the importance of gratitude. The ten lepers in their faith beg the Lord to cleanse them from their deadly disease which forced them to live on the margins of society. The Lord mercifully complies and sends them off to the priest. This was a requirement of the Mosaic Law that a leper who was cured must go to the priest, for he alone could officially declare him no longer a leper and therefore no longer impure. When Our Lord sends them, they were not healed yet, which shows us that they all had faith in the Lord’s command. As they are on their way, they are cleansed, all of them, but only one has the thought of going back without delay to thank Our Lord.
Upon his return, as he is giving glory to God for his healing, Jesus asks: Were not the ten healed? And where are the nine? It’s one of those many instances in the Gospel where we see Our Lord’s human heart ache. He clearly is offended by the lack of gratitude of the nine. His final words to the leper: Thy faith has saved thee, has led some commentators to think that the nine others, because of their lack of gratitude, were ultimately lost.
What does this story tell us if not the gravity of the sin of ingratitude? St Thomas with his customary insight informs us that the debt of gratitude flows from the debt of love, meaning that we should love our benefactors and show our love to them by, at the very least, thanking them for the good they do to us. If this is so with regard to the human beings who are our benefactors, how much more with God, who is our supreme benefactor, giving us everything starting with life itself?
This is one of the reasons St Ignatius, at the very end of the Spiritual Exercises, has us spend an hour contemplating the many benefits we have received from God, so as to arouse within us a deeper, more ardent love, for their Author. If the reason we exist and are alive is that God has loved us, it makes sense that when a soul is so senseless as to not give thanks for what it has received, it can only mean that it has little love for God. And that hurts the heart of God.
Interestingly, the one who comes back is a Samaritan. Just as last week, it was a Samaritan who showed mercy, this week, it is a Samaritan who comes to acknowledge the mercy shown to him. Precisely the one we would not expect, the one whom the Jews considered to be an outsider. So it is that the correspondence of souls with the grace of God is a secret that will only be revealed on the last day. The first will be last, and the last first.
Ingratitude in this life is often the cause of our losing something precious. A spouse can be lost for failing to give thanks to God for having found him/her. A priestly or religious vocation can be lost when a soul fails to given frequent thanks to God for having been called. Gratitude is therefore the best way not only to preserve God’s gifts but also to receive more.
Today’s Mass opened with a passionate plea to the Lord to not abandon His covenant, to not forget those who seek Him, theme repeated in the Gradual. In the offertory verse, we give voice to an immense act of confidence, certain that every single moment of our lives is in His hands, which cannot fail to remind us of those sweet words from the discourse on the Good Shepherd: No one can snatch them from me. In the communion, a verse from the book of Wisdom about the manna is applied to the Eucharist which it prefigured. Thou hast given them bread from Heaven, having all sweetness and delight. And thank God He did, for how could we possibly persevere in this dark valley of tears in this new dark age of humanity without that sweet nourishment for our souls?
Those of us who have the grace of the true faith and the traditional Latin Mass have an extra motive for deep gratitude. In a world so dark that the darkness has penetrated into the sanctuary, when so many Catholics are clueless about fundamental aspects of the faith due to bad or no formation, let’s make sure we give frequent thanks to God for this gift, lest it be taken away from us, like a parent will sometimes be obliged to take away something from a child lest they become haughty and forget how much they are indebted to their parents.
Let us ask Our Blessed Saviour for the grace to truly relish the sweetness, not only of Holy Communion, but of the liturgy itself, the countless details of diving worship handed down through the centuries, and which are part of Sacred Tradition. Nothing is left to chance in the Church’s formal worship of God. How could it be? We are blessed to appear in His presence, unworthy though we be.
A few weeks ago, we saw how in certain times of crisis of the faith, help came from an unexpected place, that is to say from the simple faithful. This is true today as well. Guidance is often lacking and when given very unhelpful. But the faith and true morals remain in the simple faithful, in good Catholic families who are rearing all the children God gives them, in simple priests feeding their flock with the eternal truths and with the Bread from Heaven. If the centre is to hold, it will be due to the simple and integral faith of the laity.
So let us be evermore grateful for the precious gift of the true faith and the true liturgy, let us hold to it with all our strength, and may Our Blessed Lord never has reason to be saddened by our lack of gratitude for so much love.
