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In the Name of the Father, the Son and
the Holy Ghost.
The Gospel - all the Gospel is a gift of
God to us, and although we are not continuously reminded of the need to
be grateful, how can we not respond with gratitude to what the Gospel
brings to us? God has so loved the world that He has given His only
begotten Son that the world may be saved; and the Son has given Himself
freely, in the sovereign freedom of His Divinity to us; no-one has taken
His life from Him - these are His own words; He gave His life willingly,
freely, that we may live.
And today we have in the Gospel a short
example of the way in which we, most of the time, receive the gifts of
God. Ten men came, covered with leprosy, condemned to a cruel death by
illness, but also rejected ritually by their own people for the impurity
of this infectious disease. They came to Him, stood at a distance,
because they knew that according to the Jewish Law they had no right
even to come near Him to touch Him. And they asked for mercy. And God
send them to the priests to bring forth the sign of their gratitude for
the healing which they had not received; and they believed, and they
went, and they were healed before they reached their goal... We might
have expected that they rushed back to fall to the feet of Christ, to
touch Him in gratitude - no... Nine of them went their way; it was
enough for them to have been healed: it’s all they needed of God. One of
them, however, turned round, and came to thank the Lord.
Isn’t it an image of the way in which so
often we also behave? We pray; we ask the Lord for something that
matters to us: it may not be live and death, it may just be that we need
so much, one thing or another; or that we don’t even need it so much,
but that we long so much for it. And then it is given us; and we receive
the gift, and we rush into life with this gift in our hearts, this gift
in our hands, we rush to life because it is enough for us that our
prayer was fulfilled. How seldom it is that we come back, leaving our
gift to be used later, but first of all turning to God and saying: What
wonder! What is Your love! How great, how compassionate, how humble -
that You have responded to my prayer... One out of ten came back to the
Lord Jesus Christ: how many of us have ever come immediately, before
they took advantage of the gift, to turn to God with a smile, like a
child turns and say 'Thank you!’, even with a smile, without words,
before taking advantage of what is given. And we loose so much at not
being grateful; because if we learned to be grateful for the obvious
gifts of God, we would gradually discover that we can be grateful for a
great deal more, for everything that Providence puts in our way: not
only things we rejoice in, not only the wanders of life, but even the
challenges of life, the things that claims from us courage, greatness,
nobility, the things which we are afraid of. And how often we could
overcome vanity by gratitude! Because vanity consists in looking at
ourselves, and think: how wonderful we are, forgetting that all that we
are, all that we have is a gift of God. If we only, every time we have
said the right thing, done the right thing, been worthy of our human
quality, human greatness and nobility, and also of the name of the
disciples of Christ - if every time we turned to God and said, ‘Yes! How
wonderful are the words I have spoken, how good is the action I have
performed - and everything was of You: the occasion was given by You, o
Lord! I was able to perceive the need because You whispered in my heart:
Look!... I could understand because I had my mind enlightened by the
Gospel! My heart responded because You touched it, and from the heart of
stone which I carry in my bosom most of the time it became a heart of
flesh full of compassion and of understanding! And You gave me the means
of meeting the need, and the joy of meeting this need!..
If we could respond to everything this
way, we would discover that life is made into an act of worship and of
gratitude.
Let us reflect on this because we are
coming within a few weeks, a few days now to a day when our heart should
be aflame with gratitude: God has loved us so much as to become one of
us; while we were strangers, alien to Him, often inimical to Him, He
came, and He gave His life for us that we may live!.. We must prepare
for it: joy, gratitude, faith, openness to God does not happen of a
sudden; we must prepare for it. Let us reflect on what is going to
happen; the thing that happened nearly 2000 years ago that we shall
remember as an actual event now, in a few weeks; and be ready, with a
heart tilled, deeply furrowed by faith, by reflection, having thought
out all our life, ready to receive the Lord like a shepherd, in the
simplicity and purity of our hearts, or like the Wise Men in the deep
understanding of wisdom. Amen! |
