Homily for the twenty-eighth Sunday of Ordinary Time (C).
One of the lessons I remember being drilled into me as a child was the importance of saying “thank you.” As with so many of the lessons we learn in childhood, I may not have appreciated its importance at the time, but now I’m grateful for it. The next time I see my mom and dad, I’ll have to remember to thank them.
Today’s readings are all about remembering—and forgetting—to give thanks. The attention that Sacred Scripture dedicates to the theme suggests that we are dealing with something much deeper than polite social convention. Gratitude does make for more pleasant social interactions, but it is also necessary for us to see the world truthfully. And it is something we easily forget.
Today’s Gospel passage, in fact, hints that perhaps we are more inclined to forget to give thanks than to remember. Ten lepers were cleansed, Jesus points out, but only one returned to thank him. Busyness can distract us from gratitude—we need to move on to the next thing, we don’t have time. When we get what we want, often our tendency, instead of saying thank you, is to try to get more. This is part of what theologians call “concupiscence,” the habit of selfishness burned into human nature by original sin. Today we can add a sense of entitlement to concupiscence. We like to speak of our rights—and politicians like to promise more rights—but while the rights we claim for ourselves multiply exponentially, our sense of responsibility never quite seems to keep pace. We forget that we would have no rights whatsoever if these hadn’t been granted to us by our Creator. To this forgetfulness we can add advertising that pushes us to buy more, to watch more, to scroll more, to consume more, and not to waste time remembering where we came from. My parents did well to drill saying “thank you” into me because there are so many other voices saying, “Don’t worry—just give me your credit card.”
The loss of a sense of gratitude makes a truly Christian life impossible. It’s no accident that the word that describes the central action in the life of the Church—“Eucharist”—comes from the Greek word for thanksgiving. In some ways, this might seem surprising because in the celebration of the Eucharist, God’s action, and not ours, is central. It is Jesus who gives himself to us; it is his power that transforms bread and wine into his Body and Blood, his living presence among us. What we do in this sacrament we do only because he gave us the instructions. The initiative is always God’s. The same can be said of all of creation. Everything that is is an unmerited gift.
If we don’t recognize that fact, then we’ve misunderstood reality. What we do in the Eucharist is gratefully say “yes” to what God does. In some ways, the purest expression of this eucharistic sensibility is the single word that the people say at the end of the Eucharistic Prayer—the Great Amen. In the Eucharistic Prayer, the priest says to God, in essence, “We are doing what you told us to do.” And in a single word that says as much as all the others, the Church affirms: “Amen.” It is a kind of “trialogue,” if you will, God-priest-people, that expresses the whole structure of creation. And what should be our fundamental response to that structure? In a word, gratitude.
Gratitude is necessary to see the world truthfully, and if we let our sight be changed by gratitude—like the one leper who returns to Jesus—we see God and ourselves in a new and wonderful light. Our relationships change. Think about the first reading. Naaman, the Syrian king, even though he is not an Israelite, out of desperation has turned to the God of Israel looking for a cure to his leprosy. And he is cured. A cure that proves much simpler than he imagined—bathing in the Jordan River. Naaman, to his great credit, is grateful for his cure, and he tries to give the prophet Elisha a gift, but the prophet refuses. Soon we see why. Naaman’s gratitude is just slightly misdirected. The cure came from God; Elisha was just his instrument. Naaman’s second request gets it right. He asks to take two mule-loads of dirt with him. At first this might seem odd, but it’s his way of showing that he wants to worship the God of Israel. To do this, he will build his altar literally on the land of Israel. His gratitude leads him to see the world differently, to see the truth, and it leads him into true worship, a new and right relationship with God.
While both of these healings are joyful events, I want to add that gratitude is not just an emotion. It has to do with our understanding as well, with our orientation toward the world, with the kind of relationships we form. And I say this because gratitude can coexist even with feelings of grief and suffering. Paul writes to Timothy of his suffering, of being held in chains for the Gospel. And one of the most striking things to me about the letters that St. Paul writes from prison is that they are filled with a sense of peace. Paul is suffering, but that suffering has not quenched his gratitude. His suffering is real; he doesn’t pretend it isn’t there; but his grateful vision reveals that it is not the only thing that is real.
Over the past few weeks, I have been reading a book about grieving, written by a faith-filled Catholic mother, who lost a baby boy unexpectedly to sudden infant death syndrome. It is called A Thousand Pounds, a reference to the weight of grief. And it seems to me that what the author is getting at is that this weight doesn’t so much lessen but that, with grace, we grow to bear it. And it’s possible to feel sadness and gratitude at the same time. Perhaps that has been your experience with loss as well, because I realize it has been that way with mine. When losing someone dear, I have often felt this strange mix of sadness and gratitude. After all, we had that person in our lives to begin with. Sometimes one feeling is stronger than the other, depending on the circumstances. But when we realize that both are real—and perhaps inseparable from one another—we are touching what is most fundamental in this great unearned gift, this life of ours.
I imagine that the Samaritan who was healed of his disease and returned to Jesus shed a few tears of gratitude that day. When we see at last this gift for what it is—the gift of our creation, the gift of our redemption—what more can we do? There is nothing more to do, really, than to give thanks, nothing more to say than a great “Amen.”
Readings: 2 Kings 5:14-17; 2 Tim 2:8-13; Lk 17:11-91
October 12, 2025
Oratorio San Francesco Saverio del Caravita
Rome
Tony Lusvardi, S.J. 