It is enough

At some point, every parent faces a certain challenge – teaching their children to say the “magic words.”  Please and thank you.  “Please” isn’t too hard.  After all, there is immediate positive reinforcement; you say please, you get what you want.  Thank you is another story.  Kids don’t see that thank you’s get them much of anything. 

My brother had a strategy for the dreaded thank you notes.  His birthday was at the end of June, almost exactly six months from Christmas.  He would say that he was waiting until Christmas and would thank everyone once for both gifts.  Of course, when Christmas rolled around, it was only six months until his birthday.  No sense with thank you notes then, he’d just wait and kill two – or was that three? – birds with one stone.

Grandparents make the challenge even more difficult.  My mother-in-law, Pat, would send things to the kids all year long!  We’d say, “send a thank you to Grandma or she’ll stop sending you these goodies.”  Of course the thanks were few and far between but did that stop Pat?  No, the presents kept coming!  What’s a parent to do?

Of course, Pat and other grandparents aren’t the only ones whose generosity is unstopped by lack of thanks.  They are on God’s side.  In today’s Gospel reading, Jesus offers a gift beyond our wildest imaginings.  As lepers in the ancient world, the ten supplicants weren’t simply sick; they were cast out from any contact with society.  So Jesus doesn’t simply cure their disease, he reunites them with the community, makes them one with humanity.  And yet only one comes back to thank Jesus for this great gift.  Jesus praises this man, but, as the kids might be quick to point out, despite their ingratitude, the other nine lepers are not “uncured.” 

What’s the deal?  Why should I have to thank God for his grace if, as its very name implies, God freely and unconditionally gives it to me?  Why does Jesus make a connection between gratitude and salvation if the other lepers are still cured despite their ingratitude?

Perhaps my model of God is wrong.  I imply to my children that in giving thanks, they will continue to receive gifts.  After all, that’s the way I look the world.  I expect thanks when I give a gift.  If I give a wedding gift and don’t receive the obligatory note of thanks, I feel slighted.  I may look at that couple in a different light.  Far be it for me to remember their anniversary.  

I presume that God acts like I do.  If I remember to thank God, then He will continue to remember me in my need.  Unfortunately, I have now reduced God to a vending machine – put in the right coins and hit the right buttons and I receive grace.  Most fortunately for all of us, God is much greater than a heavenly vending machine.

God loves us and graces us not for what we do, but for who we are.  He created us out of love, he created us in his very image and likeness, and he created us to be with him in love for all eternity.  We are for God.  Yet sometimes I live as if I don’t believe this at all.

Instead, I take life and all that God has given me for granted.  My goal then becomes to work hard to make life as good as it can be for my family and me.  And yet this hard work never completely satisfies.  We never seem to have enough.  There is always something that seems just beyond our reach, but if I work just a little bit harder, it can be ours.  Of course, if we get that, there is something else just beyond that, and the cycle continues.  We can never work hard enough, we can never satisfy ourselves, and on our worse days, we feel that we are simply not good enough.

In fact, this constant level of dissatisfaction drives our economy.  Without our constant yearning for the newer car, the bigger house, the latest fashions, etc., we spend less, the economy falters, jobs are lost, and our material wealth and our self-worth shrinks.  We live not for God, but for ourselves. 

Jesus praises the grateful leper for he has broken this cycle of dissatisfaction.  The man has recognized the source of his life, the source of all that he is, and it is enough.  When we come together here to celebrate the Eucharist – the root word for Eucharist is the same word that Luke uses to describe the man’s thanks and praise to God – we recognize that God has given us our very lives as a gift, that God loves us with a love that knows no bounds, that He gave us his only Son to die for us that we might have eternal life with Him.  This attitude of gratitude does not change God, it changes us.  For with gratitude as the center of our lives, our eyes open to see that whoever we are, whatever we have, it is enough, for it is the fruit of God’s infinite and everlasting love.

It is enough.  Thank God.