Vigils Reading – Thanksgiving

THE FULLNESS

OF THANKSGIVING

By Xavier Leon-Dufour5

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The first reality of biblical history is the gift of God, gratuitous,

superabundant, without return. The encounter with God does not put human

beings simply in the presence of the absolute; it completes them and transforms

their lives.

Thanksgiving appears as the response to this progressive and continual

grace which one day should blossom in Christ. At the same time there is an

intense awareness of the gifts of God, a spirit of soul permeated with wonder

because of God’s generosity, a joyous recognition before the divine greatness;

thus thanksgiving is essential in the Bible because it is a fundamental religious

reaction of creatures when they discover, in a tremor of joy and veneration,

something of God’s greatness and glory. The capital sin of pagans, according to

Paul, is “not to have rendered to God either glory or thanksgiving”. And, in fact,

in the mass of hymns created by the piety of Mesopotamia, the sentiment of

thanksgiving is rare; while it is very frequent in the Bible and brings out

powerful outpourings of the soul.

At the time of the New Covenant thanksgiving truly breaks forth,

becoming present everywhere in the prayer and the life of the Christians as it

had never existed before among the just of the past. Biblical thanksgiving is

truly and essentially Christian. It is not exclusively Christian, however, to the

extent that, as was written in the Old Testament, “Israelites praise without

giving thanks.” If the Old Testament does not yet know the fullness of

thanksgiving, it is because it has not yet tasted the fullness of grace. If praise,

more spontaneous, more exteriorized, holds therein perhaps a greater place

than thanksgiving properly so called, more reflective, more attentive to God’s

actions and self revelation, it is because the most holy God is revealed only

progressively, unveiling little by little the amplitude of the action and the depth

of the gifts of God.

Because it is the revelation and the gift of perfect grace, in the person of

the Lord, it is also the revelation of the perfect thanksgiving rendered to the

Father in the Holy Spirit. The supreme act of the Lord is thanksgiving; the

sacrifice which Jesus made of His life in consecrating it to the Father in order

that He may sanctify His own is our Eucharist. At the last supper and on the

cross, Jesus reveals the drive of all His life and that of His death: thanksgiving

from the heart of the Son. The passion and death of Jesus were necessary that

He might fully glorify the Father, but all His life was an incessant thanksgiving,

which sometimes was made explicit and solemn, to draw all to believe and

return thanks to God with Jesus.

The essential object of this thanksgiving is the work of God, the Messianic

realization, notably manifested by miracles, the gift of His word which God has

made to everyone. The gift of the Eucharist to the church expresses an essential

truth: only Jesus Christ is our thanksgiving, just as He alone is our praise. It is

He first of all who gives thanks to the Father, and Christians afterwards in

Him. In Christian thanksgiving, Christ is the sole model and sole mediator. In

the heavenly Jerusalem, with the Messianic work fulfilled, thanksgiving

becomes pure praise of glory, dazzling contemplation of God and the eternal

marvels.