On Thanksgiving Day in the United States, we are perhaps more united than on any other religious day in our mutual acknowledgement of God's blessings. This continues in our society an ancient autumn tradition of offering thanks for, among other things, a bountiful harvest.

Harvest festivals go back before the dawn of history, and a harvest festival was one of the three annual pilgrimage feasts in Israel during the lifetime of Jesus. Like Passover in the spring, from which our Eucharist evolved, the fall harvest festival was a national holiday of thanksgiving. And like our Eucharist, which means thanksgiving, harvest festivals reflect some of the most ancient patterns of worship.

Among the alternative readings for the liturgy are those for celebrations "After the Harvest." The first reading is from the book of Deuteronomy (8:7-18). Composed during the sixth century B.C. in the form of three farewell sermons of Moses to the people of Israel, this book is a liturgical piece calling the people to bring to a more conscious level of awareness and to apply to themselves the saving events of their history.

In this passage the author pictures Moses telling the people to realize that their God brought them – and not just their ancestors– into a land with streams of water, a land of wheat and barley, a land flowing with milk and honey where they will lack nothing. He enjoins them to bless their God always for the good country he has given them and never to think that they have acquired their prosperity by the work of their own hands.

We ourselves live in a land where there is incomparably more abundance than in ancient Palestine, more indeed than in most other lands today. A friend of mine told me how he took a couple who had just arrived in the United States from a Third World country to a supermarket for the first time. They cried and cried when they saw the tremendous quantities of food – food that most people in their own country would never see in a lifetime.

But there are also many, many people in our midst who for various reasons cannot afford what most of us take for granted. We must all do what we can to help alleviate the poverty and homelessness around us as we gather together to acknowledge with profound gratitude the abundant blessings God has given us and traditionally remember those in our society who are less fortunate.

This is also the message of the second reading from a late Pastoral Letter (1 Tim. 6:6-11,17-19). It reminds us that just as we brought nothing into the world, we shall not be able to take anything out of it. So if we are blessed with sufficient food and clothing, we should be content with what we have. Those who want to be rich fall into a trap. Money, the writer says, is "the root of all evils." He exhorts his Christians not to rely on wealth but rather on God, and to strive to be rich in good works, to be generous, ready to share.

Finally, our gospel reading is an illustration of gratitude taken from Luke (17:11-19). Jesus is pictured as healing 10 lepers, with only one coming back to thank him. This is indeed an example of gratitude; but the man's gratitude is not the only point of this story. The other nine had to go to Jerusalem to fulfill their religious obligation of being certified as clean by a priest, but the 10^th couldn't go because he was a Samaritan!

This gospel writer, with his view of Jesus as savior of the whole world, pictures a foreigner as the first person to return to acknowledge God's saving power operative in Jesus. Perhaps there is a lesson for us in this, too. We who grew up in this country, this land of comparative abundance, may be inclined to take a lot of this for granted; whereas immigrants, as in past generations, tend to appreciate far more the blessings God has given us.

May we all take the opportunity today to renew within ourselves our consciousness of the great and manifold blessings we have received, to thank God sincerely and devoutly for them, and to commit ourselves to helping the disadvantaged, those in our midst who are most in need.

The Rev. Francis T. Gignac, S.J., is a professor and chairperson of the Department of Biblical Studies at The Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C. A photo is available.

Revised: November 3, 1998