Thanksgiving Day 2025

 Lectionary: 943-947

Where are the other nine? 
Has none but this foreigner returned to give thanks to God?” 
Then he said to him, “Stand up and go;
your faith has saved you.”

In today's Gospel, we can suppose the other nine were very happy to be healed. Perhaps they immediately returned to their villages and families to celebrate their good fortune, and surely they and their families thanked God for what had happened. 

But this Samaritan was the only one who went the extra mile to personally thank the prophet Messiah who had healed him. Meaning, he sacrificed time and effort to speak to the God made Man, whom he could touch with his own healed, purified, sanctified hands. 

Many people will go to Church on Thanksgiving Day. Some have already done so the night before. They take the time and make the sacrifice to say thank you to God, in accordance with the President's proclamation: 

It has seemed to me fit and proper that they should be solemnly, reverently and gratefully acknowledged as with one heart and one voice by the whole American People. I do therefore invite my fellow citizens in every part of the United States, and also those who are at sea and those who are sojourning in foreign lands, to set apart and observe the last Thursday of November next, as a day of Thanksgiving and Praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the Heavens.

And while we're at it, we might notice the President's further admonition: 

And I recommend to them that while offering up the ascriptions justly due to Him for such singular deliverances and blessings, they do also, with humble penitence for our national perverseness and disobedience, commend to His tender care all those who have become widows, orphans, mourners or sufferers in the lamentable civil strife in which we are unavoidably engaged, and fervently implore the interposition of the Almighty Hand to heal the wounds of the nation and to restore it as soon as may be consistent with the Divine purposes to the full enjoyment of peace, harmony, tranquillity and Union.

Penance and thanksgiving go hand in hand. The latter means nothing without the former; and given today's polarization and the imminent possibility of civil war, we must heed the prophetic president's warning.