Vigils Reading – Thanksgiving

THE FULLNESS

OF THANKSGIVING

By Xavier Léon-Dufour

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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…

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.