Sunday the 12th of October 2025 - The Twenty-Eighth Sunday in Ordinary Time

2 Kings 5:14-17/Ps 98(97)/ 2 Timothy 2:8-13/ Luke 17:11-19

It can become easy to take things for granted, and especially so when we have more than we need and things are going well. We do well to remember that everything we have is a gift to us from God and we have a duty to acknowledge that and be grateful for all the good things we receive from God through his grace poured out to us and through his creation. When life is relatively easy and things are going well, we can forget to give thanks and be grateful. We need to develop an attitude of gratitude, always giving thanks for the good things we enjoy.

In the first reading and the gospel passage for today we hear of the gratefulness of those considered to be outcasts and foreigners. The Israelites are the chosen people of God but the salvation that is their gift is a gift that has no racial, religious, or political boundaries. The gift of salvation comes to all through the chosen people but includes foreigners and those that society consider to be outcast, including the despised Samaritans and lepers. Notably it is the pagan leper in the Old Testament passage and the Samaritan leper in the Gospel who show their gratitude to God for their healing. Where were the other nine who were cured by Jesus? Was it that they thought that they were entitled to be cured and had no need to feel grateful.

Are we grateful, returning to give thanks, or are we all too keen to call out to God with our lists of wants and needs with a feeling of entitlement, expecting God to respond to us because we are his chosen people, chosen through baptism? From this position of privilege or because things are generally going well, we can forget to return and give thanks, gratitude can become a casualty of our easy lives. The readings today challenge us to see that those we might think of as the furthest away from being chosen by God show us what true faith and gratitude should look like.

In the first reading the Syrian, Naaman, a pagan military commander who is stricken with leprosy, seeks out the foreign prophet Elisha in Israel and, after initial doubts, follows the instruction given to him and is healed. Naaman returned to Elisha to give thanks and his faith and gratitude transformed his understanding of God and thereby his life. There is a similar reaction in the Gospel account of the ten lepers. They are deemed ritually unclean and outcasts from society. They cried out to Jesus and all ten were healed but only one, the most outcast of all, the despised Samaritan, returned to give thanks. He is the only one who showed gratitude and give thanks and glory to God. The response from Jesus to the one grateful leper gives us the deeper meaning of his healing, “Rise and go your way; your faith has made you well”. It is his faith that made the man well. As master of creation Jesus can do anything but it is through our faith, the belief that Jesus can heal us, that we can receive his healing power. The other nine received physical healing but only the one grateful leper received the complete saving health that Jesus gives. The others were healed and could take their place back in society but the Samaritan, through his faith and gratitude had a profound encounter with Jesus that changed his life. He encountered Jesus not just as a miracle worker but the source of all grace and eternal life, leading him into a relationship with the living God.

We are called to this radical type of gratitude, the gratitude displayed in the second reading by Paul. A prisoner in chains but far from complaining Paul remembers that Jesus has been raised from the dead and gives thanksgiving for all God has done. He knows that no prison bars or chains can restrict the grace poured out to us from God. It is this attitude of gratitude that we are called to develop. Not a superficial nod of thanks when things go well but a deep recognition that all we have, all we are, our very being, comes to us as a gift from God.

The outcasts we meet in the readings today, Naaman the pagan Syrian and the Samaritan leper, teach us something that as privileged chosen baptised Christians we may have forgotten, that the Gifts we receive from God are not and cannot ever be earned or deserved, they are never owed to us. They are pure grace, and we need to show gratitude for them to become fully effective within us. What is important about the message in the readings today is that gratitude for God’s gifts is not just good manners but the way to salvation. When we come to an understanding that everything comes from God we will return and give him thanks like the Samaritan, leading us to be ready to receive and appreciate the ever-deeper gifts that God wants to give us. Not just remedies for our sicknesses or life problems but a transformation of ourselves opening us up to a deep relationship with God.

By our participation at Mass, we take part in the Eucharist, which means thanksgiving. This is the source and summit of our Christian life and is the best act of thanksgiving we can show towards God. This is where we receive the greatest gift God can give, he gives us himself but this great gift can only become active in us if we approach it with an attitude of gratitude, with open and grateful hearts. Today let us consider if we are one of the nine or the one. When we are blessed with so much from God do we rush off to enjoy life forgetting where it all comes from or do we return, as the Samaritan did, falling at the feet of Jesus in love and gratitude? Let us not approach the Lord in Holy Communion with a feeling of entitlement, not as though we deserve this great gift, but with profound gratitude. God is giving himself to us in the body. blood, soul, and divinity of Jesus. Let the ‘Amen’ we pronounce at Communion not simply be an acknowledgement, a thank you, but an act of thanksgiving believing that it can transform our life.

Jesus asks the same question of us as he asked about the nine lepers who did not return. Will we be counted among the grateful few? Will our thanksgiving lead us not just to healing but to salvation? May we overflow with gratitude that our faith has made us well.

God Bless Brendan.