To the one who returned with gratitude, Jesus said: "Stand up and go, your faith has made you well."
Gospel of Luke
Before he began any discussion on marriage and family, he spoke to us at length on faith. What is faith, he asked. Then he went on to explain that faith is a response from the heart. It is an expression of gratitude, an expression of amazement -- an amazement at the unconditional love offered us by God through our connection with the person of Christ. Through faith, we have the experience of being loved because we are accepted, we are forgiven. He said that with faith, there is a "wow" factor which is really one of awe and amazement. With God, everything changes for us. Faith changes how we treat others. It changes how we deal with the circumstances of our lives. It changes who we are. It shifts our priorities as to what is important. With God, everything changes.
What is gratitude? The ordinary definition is a feeling of appreciation and thankfulness. It is something we normally feel when someone does something good for us, or it can be a general feeling that we have about life in general.
In the Gospel quote above, Jesus, in His travels, has encountered ten lepers. We are told that this group is made up of both Jews and Samaritans. At a respectable distance away, the ten lepers begin to cry out: "Jesus, master! Have mercy on us!" And Jesus sees them, and responds with compassion as to their plight. He tells them to go show themselves to the priest.
On their way to see the priest, they all discover that they are healed of their disease. As the story goes, only one returns to give thanks and praise for the healing. And we hear that the one who returned is a Samaritan. It was not the ones who were steeped in their Jewish faith tradition who returned, but the one who would be considered by the people of his day as an outsider.
What did this one person have that the others seemed to lack. I think we would all agree that he possessed the gift of gratitude, an appreciation and love for God's goodness to him. He had a quality of the heart that resulted in gratitude and praise. To this one who returned with gratitude, Jesus said: "Stand up and go, your faith has made you well."
As the story goes, the faith of all the lepers led to a physical healing, but to the one with gratitude in his heart, this healing brought salvation through wholeness and a proper relationship with God.
So what do we have to learn from this?
To practice one's faith is a good thing. We need to know things like our creed, our catechism, the teachings of the church, the rules. We cannot discount the importance of these things. However, it is equally as important and maybe even more important to have gratitude as the disposition of our heart. Are you filled with gratitude for God's abundant love for you? Are you overflowing with an appreciation and thankfulness for the abundance of God's blessings poured into your life; an abundance, though undeserved, is freely given? Is your heart transformed by Jesus' personal love for you that finds its expression in many thousands of different ways each day? Does your gratitude overflow to others that you encounter in your daily walk?
St Paul says to Titus: "When the kindness and love of God for us was revealed, it was not because he was concerned with any righteous actions we might have done. It was for no reason except His own compassion that He saves us and makes us whole.
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