Today as we celebrate our family life and our many blessings on this day of Thanksgiving, the Church has us ponder in the Gospel the story of the ten lepers. Only one of the ten returned to thank the Lord Jesus. Jesus poignantly asks, “Ten were cleansed, were they not? Where are the other nine?” But while all ten were cured of the physical leprosy, nine retained a leprosy of the soul, an ingratitude that took for granted the greatest gift they had received in life until then. There’s a lot that we all have to learn from this scene to help us understand and celebrate better Thanksgiving, because this attitude of the grateful leper was the attitude that marked the pilgrims who celebrated the first day of Thanksgiving. I like to think of today, Thanksgiving Day, as a moment which clearly puts life into perspective. Do we have that same spirit of Thanksgiving that marked the grateful leper and the Pilgrims who had survived? May we approach this day with hearts and souls bursting with thanks to God and to others for all of the blessings we have received, including the crosses and hardships? Lord God, give us grateful hearts. To give God thanks always and everywhere is the right thing to do, whether we’re perfectly healthy or have leprosy, AIDS, cancer or any other suffering. To give God thanks always and everywhere is the just thing to do even when whether we win or lose the lottery, whether we get a promotion or a pink-slip, whether we are celebrating a wedding or a funeral. To give God thanks always and everywhere is our duty and our salvation. We are saved through thanksgiving! The grateful leper received salvation by faith precisely through his gratitude, not because God makes salvation conditioned on our saying thanks but because if we’re not grateful, if our hearts are hardened, we can’t receive that grace. o enter into Jesus’ prayer is to become filled with a spirit of Thanksgiving. His prayers were always marked by gratitude. He thanked the Father before the multiplication of the loaves and fish. He thanked the Father for revealing his wisdom to the merest of children instead of to the clever and proud of the world. He thanked the Father before raising Lazarus from the dead. During the Mass, he thanked the Father profusely even before he was to give his own body and blood during the Last Supper. He thanked the Father before he would be crucified because through that sacrifice he would be able to save us all out of love. The Mass is the school in which we enter into Jesus’ own thanksgiving, always and everywhere, to the Father. The Mass is our continual thanksgiving from the rising of the sun to its setting. It is a school that transforms us to be fully Christian and to be Christian is to be grateful. The Lord has done far more for us than he ever did for the ten lepers or the Pilgrims. Here at Mass he gives us in a concrete way even more than what he gave to the one grateful leper when he said: “your faith has saved you.” This is where we receive salvation-in-the-flesh. No matter what we have experienced in this past year, no matter what hardships we’re still enduring, God comes into our world, to accompany us, to strengthen us, to heal us, to help us. Our best response is always gratitude. Thanks be to God. And so, we gather to give thanks to the Lord our God.
God the Father would not send his only begotten Son, Jesus, Christ the King, if we are a lost cause. He wouldn’t let his son die a miserable death on the cross for us if he didn’t know that some of us would call out to him, as did the good thief --“Jesus, remember me, when you come into your kingdom”. Many people, unfortunately, only see the negative in their lives. They have given up. But Jesus hasn’t given up on us. He refuses to ever give up on us. He is Christ the King who loves us. He loves us to death. The goal and dream of Jesus is to have us live with him forever. Our goal and dream should be the same too. Every other goal and dream is transitory and of very little importance, no matter how important that they may seem at the moment. They will pass away. Only eternity and eternal dreams and hopes will remain. Many of us struggle with the basic fear, “Will I be remembered after I’m gone”. We try to leave our ‘mark’ while we’re still here. If we are followers of Christ, we don’t have to worry about being remembered, do we? Jesus, our Lord and King, will remember us and love us for eternity. That is the great hope of today’s gospel for us. This unnamed man, known only to us as the ‘good thief’, is dying for crimes which he committed. Here he was, very close to Jesus on that darkest of days -- Good Friday. This ‘good thief’ knew somehow that his eternal future hung on his faith that Jesus was exactly who he said he was -- the Son of God. In that faith, he asked simply to be remembered. He didn’t ask for some mansion in heaven -- just to be remembered. It is mercy in its purest form that he seeks. This last Sunday of the Church year challenges us to decide -- who is our king? What are the goals and dreams that we should really be working and sacrificing for? May we pray for each other that we are all centered in our faith that Jesus is the Lord and King of our lives. We believe that nothing, not even death, can steal the dream of his kingdom from us. This day Christ the King isn’t just the conclusion of the Church year. It’s a sign of our hope. We are one prayer away from being immersed in the mercy of Jesus. “Jesus remember me when you come into your kingdom.” Have a blessed day.
Ever since the 13th Sunday of Ordinary Time, we have witnessed, through the eyes of Luke, Jesus steadfastly making his way to Jerusalem. In today’s Gospel, Luke places Jesus in the Temple area where he taught daily. With each passing day, Jesus’ teachings were gaining popularity. With each passing day, the Pharisees and the Sadducees were getting more and more concerned about a Roman intervention. The Pharisees and Sadducees had limited options in silencing the voice of Jesus for fear of creating an uprising among the people. So the Sadducees tried to discredit his teachings and thereby undermine his authority.They approached Jesus and asked him to solve a riddle based on the levirate law of marriage. Jesus knew the Torah. He understood that it was the sole source of divine authority for the Sadducees. So brushing aside the trick question of how marriage operates in heaven, Jesus instead addressed the real question: Is there an afterlife? Does heaven exist? Although Jesus did not describe in detail what heaven looks like, He did say that heaven does exist but will not be a continuation of what we know here on earth. Our Gospel question for this week asks us to focus on what we imagine heaven to be like. Isaiah 11:6 I expect that heaven will be a place where the wolf shall be a guest of the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the young goat; the calf and the young lion shall browse together with a little child to guide them. St Paul wrote in the Book of Romans;” Listen and I will tell you a mystery. We will not die, but we will be changed. Our mortal body must put on immortality! Then the saying that is written will be fulfilled, death has been swallowed up in victory. Where O death is your victory? Where O death is your sting?” It is only by faith that we can imagine being embraced by God and invited to live in his heavenly kingdom. It is by faith that we can imagine being reunited with parents, relatives, and other loved ones and it is by faith that we can imagine spending eternity in the company of Jesus, and his angels, and his saints.