THANKSGIVING DAY

Thursday, November 24, 2022

Christ Church, Woodbury, N. J.

 

 

As we begin the celebration of our national Thanksgiving holiday, it seems appropriate to reflect on the act of giving thanks itself, and the role it plays in our individual and community lives.

 

Giving thanks is the outward expression of the inward disposition of thankfulness or gratitude. And gratitude is one of the classical Christian virtues. Its opposite, ingratitude, is one of the classical vices. To say, for example, that someone has a grateful heart or a thankful spirit is to pay them a high moral compliment. Conversely, to say that someone is habitually ungrateful is to call attention to a perceived moral flaw or defect in their character.

 

The thirteenth century theologian Saint Thomas Aquinas classified gratitude as a subcategory of the cardinal virtue of justice, by which we render to each their due. Traditionally, there are four cardinal virtues: prudence, justice, temperance, and fortitude. As one of the cardinal virtues, justice comprises dozens of subvirtues—such as truthtelling, prompt payment of debts, restitution of injuries, and so forth. So, the question is: under what circumstances is gratitude and thanksgiving something we owe somebody in order to render them their due and so fulfill the obligations of justice?

 

Well, according to Aquinas, gratitude is what we owe our benefactors for favors received. Let’s unpack that a bit. In medieval language, a benefactor is someone who gives us something over and above anything they owe us. A favor received from such a benefactor is a freely-given gift or good deed that we really had no right to expect. When we receive such a free gift, then, the morally appropriate response is one of inward gratitude expressed in outward praise and thanksgiving.

 

A prosaic example will illustrate the point. When I’m driving along the street in my car and I come to an intersection where I have the right of way, and another car comes to the stop sign and lets me pass before proceeding themselves, I don’t normally feel any sense of gratitude towards the other driver. Nor should I. They’ve simply obeyed the law and yielded me the right of way that was mine. No thanks are called for. (I may feel relief if it looked as though they weren’t going to stop and they slammed on the brakes at the last minute, but not gratitude. And I might thank God that they stopped, but that’s another matter.)

 

But if I’m the one coming to the stop sign at a busy intersection where I’m likely to be stuck waiting a long time for a break in the traffic—which seems to happen a lot around here—and a driver who does have the right of way takes pity on me, slows down, and waves me on in front of them, then I do feel gratitude, and wave them a thank-you and flash them a smile. And so I should, because they’ve performed a generous deed that I had no right to expect. The virtue of gratitude, expressed in a word or gesture of thanks, involves precisely acknowledging that someone didn’t have to do whatever they did for us, but they did so anyway.

 

This disposition of gratitude is what St. Thomas Aquinas calls a natural moral virtue. That is, there’s nothing particularly Christian about it. It’s capable of being exercised by Christians and non-Christians, believers and unbelievers, alike. Aquinas argues that God has written into creation and implanted in the human conscience a natural moral law, which we all have some ability to follow, even though our awareness of it has become obscured and distorted by the Fall and Original Sin. 

 

To my mind, one of the unique blessings of our national Thanksgiving holiday is that it’s something we can all share with our family, friends, and neighbors, no matter what their religious convictions or lack thereof. Very few among us object to the idea of setting aside a day to express our gratitude for all the gifts we’ve received in our life as a nation—and indeed to recommit ourselves to working for a more equitable distribution of those gifts among all members of our communities.

 

Now, I might have some excuse for stopping there, but I don’t think I can—because I’m a Christian. And I suspect that most of us here are too, or else we wouldn’t be attending this service of Christian worship. And from a theistic and a Christian perspective, much more needs to be said. But I will try to say it briefly.

 

We begin with creation itself. A basic tenet of the theistic religions—especially Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—is that our very existence is a free gift. God was under no constraint or compulsion to create us; but he chose to do so anyway. Every time we wake up in the morning, we can thank God simply that we’re alive. Then, beyond our very life, we owe him our thanks for his providence: supplying us with the necessities of our survival, beginning with food, shelter, and clothing, but certainly not ending there.

 

Most specifically, as Christians we owe our thanksgiving to Jesus Christ, for the redemption that he’s won for us by his life, death, and resurrection. And for which we offer our thanks to God every time we celebrate the Eucharist, which word in Greek simply means thanksgiving.

 

As Christians, also, we owe thanks for the gifts of the Holy Spirit, who stirs our hearts to gratitude for all God’s blessings. Here, in a curious way, we come full circle. For the virtue of gratitude not only disposes us to be thankful for gifts freely received from all our benefactors, beginning with God himself, but it also moves us to exercise the further virtues of generosity and kindness, by which, as the saying goes, we “pass it forward.” 

 

So, even after the stresses and strains of the past couple of years—and it’s been rough for all of us—this Thanksgiving holiday affords us the opportunity to consider how by God’s grace we may further cultivate the virtues of gratitude and generosity in our own lives. May God grant us the grace to be a truly thankful people. Amen.