28th Sunday C 12 October 2025 Sermon

28^th Sunday C     12 October 2025 Gratitude

If we are rescued from a crisis our gratitude will be greater according to the size of the crisis.

An acute  need draws all our attention. Everything else seems unimportant at that moment.

For example being lost, wanting to find a reference point. Or in a struggling aeroplane – we are grateful if we can find solid land again. In difficult situations we might pray to God for help; and we might promise God that if He gets us out of this trouble, we will be especially good for the future!

Such promises may not be kept, once the focus shifts to other things.

But in essence that is what we are doing all the time in relation to God. We are grateful to Him for creating us, saving us, guiding us - all for our benefit and from His generosity.

We have received many  blessings from God, but we do not necessarily value those blessings.

In the spiritual world it is possible to miss the various snares we face and so think we have no particular problem, when really we have.

We need to cultivate gratitude and let that gratitude lead us to better understanding.

Take the story of the unforgiving debtor. Forgiven a large amount of money he then went out to throttle the other servant who owed him only a small amount (Mt 18,21-35). The first servant was not grateful enough to make him see anything differently.

We could thank God day and night and for a long time, and we would not get to the end of the blessings.

God does not need our thanks but we need to give thanks. He has made us to live in relationship with him. If we ignore Him we are losing part of ourselves, stunted in spiritual growth.

The primary way we can express thanks to God is to take part in the Mass.

In every Mass the Church speaks as one in thanksgiving, and benefits from the experience.  The Father and the Son are in constant exchange of offering, receiving, thanking, and they include us in the experience. We are taken up into their world, and we need to be grateful for that.

At each Mass we thank God the Son for His death and resurrection. These events lift us out of sin and death, a problem we may not have known we had. But as we discover the mercy of God and how much He has forgiven (first debtor) we become more grateful.

The prayers of the Mass make continuous references to God’s goodness to us. The psalms in particular express this response, which we need to make our own. We say lots of words with our voices; the next step is to say them in our hearts. For example: Forever I will sing the goodness of the Lord; praise the Lord, my soul. Praise the Lord who lifts up the poor.

Continuous praise and thanksgiving will melt hard hearts as we discover a new way of seeing things.

Finally, we will have a sense of gratitude proportionate for the magnitude of the occasion.

We realize what we could have lost, but we did not lose it; and here we are celebrating our union with God, and our hope of eternal life.

Each act of thanksgiving should make us more ready for the next one.

The one leper is immortalized because he came back to give thanks. We hope he stayed grateful. We hope we will ‘come back’ and stay grateful; it is a hope we can make certain.