The Mystery of Thanksgiving

This morning, we read in our Church the Gospel of the healing of the ten lepers (Luke 17:12-19). The story of this Gospel is well known. Ten lepers, Jesus comes to them and commands them to show their healing to the priests. Only one of these men returns to Him, and thanks Him for having healed him. This is the story, in a nutshell. The story is explicit in its demonstrating that God, since the feasts of His Theophany, insists on revealing that He has come to give us His healing love for free. This reveals that thanksgiving, as a mystery, is Man’s response to this gratuitousness. Last Sunday, I had told you that the Church is calling us these days to grow more and more in seeking repentance. This is the basis of repentance that God has demonstrated that He loves us first. There are two things that cannot yield about thanks and which we must repent of, namely, heedlessness, and then the feeling that we are entitled to what God has come to bestow. Today, this thankful leper extends for us the feast, the feast of Theophany or the feast of repentance, by teaching us that those who live out of God’s generosity, do not grow weary of repenting to thanking Him.