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Commentary of the Gospell
Gratitude
Read:
Filled with gratitude for the healing, Naaman pledges allegiance to Yahweh. Paul vouches for the eternal fidelity of God. Of the ten leprosy patients healed, only a Samaritan returns to thank Jesus.
Reflect:
“If the only prayer you ever make in your life is ‘thank you, Lord’, that is enough!” (Julian of Norwich). Behavioral scientists are now discovering the benefits of many virtues that have been traditionally part of Christian praxis. One such virtue is gratitude. In the famous “Nun Study”, David Snowdon and team of the University of Kentucky analyzed one-page autobiographical essays written by 180 nuns of the American School Sisters of Notre Dame before their final profession (average age 22). They found that 70 nuns whose writings displayed positive emotions, with gratitude being one of them, lived beyond age 90 – which was 2.5 to 3 times more than the number of nuns whose writings were low on positivity. Further, with 85% accuracy, the researchers predicted the possibility of Alzheimer’s disease: those happy, grateful nuns had a significantly lower probability of developing the disease. Gratitude and its derivatives are beneficial not only for the soul, but for the body and the mind as well.
Pray:
Make a prayer of thanksgiving to God.
Act:
Today, thank your parents/siblings for the good things they have done for you.
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“By your faith you have been healed”.
Pope Francis says: How important it is to know how to thank the Lord, to know how to praise him for all that he does for us. How often do we say thank you to those who help us, to those who are close to us, to those who accompany us in our lives? It is easy to go to the Lord to ask him for something, but not so easy to return to thank him… That is why Jesus strongly remarks on the negligence of the nine ungrateful lepers: “Did not more than this stranger return to give glory to God?
This Sunday’s biblical stories converge in thanksgiving. Naaman of Syria and the Samaritan in the Gospel give thanks to Elisha and Jesus, and the Apostle Paul’s letter to Timothy reminds us of the gratitude due to God for the benefits of redemption.
Thankfulness is a profoundly Christian and human feeling. Those who are not thankful are extremely poor, both in their human evaluation and in their evaluation before God. Pope Benedict XVI, when he was a cardinal, wrote: “Whoever loses the sense of gratitude has his heart blocked”.
Each one of us is what we are thanks to God and to others. Perhaps we have often failed to appreciate the simple things until we have lost them. How often we remember God only to complain to him or to ask for help in times of need.
The ten lepers in the gospel are cured of their terrible disease, but only one comes back “glorified to God”. And only he hears the words of Jesus: “Get up and go, your faith has saved you”.
We Christians have largely lost the spirit of thankfulness. Jesus’ complaint, lamenting the lack of thankfulness of the lepers healed by him, could be addressed to many of us.
We go through the world burdened with worries, absorbed by multiple tasks, which prevent us from hearing Jesus’ call to thankfulness, which we all need to hear. There is no better way to thank God for his gifts than to know how to share them. Because giving thanks, in the human aspect, is an elementary form of courtesy. And in the religious aspect it is one of the most elegant and necessary ways of loving God.
Prayer: Thank you Lord for your compassion towards our illnesses: envy, greed, anger, selfishness. Help us to heal.
(Psalm 97). The Lord reveals his salvation to the nations.
“HAPPY SUNDAY TO ALL”.