Thanksgiving

The Christian acknowledges God as the gracious source of all good things, in the creation and in redemption, and receives them with thanksgiving.

1. Another impossibility in the Christian life?
How could we ever thank him who made us and redeemed us? It seems presumptive that our thanks could ever be an adequate response to that we have received in Christ. But that is because we tend to lapse back into thinking of divine-human relations a operating according to an exchange economy. Human gratitude could never be the response which triggers the acceptance of God, or which forms a return of grace in some way. Properly understood, thanksgiving in prayer is the appropriate response to grace. Since faith is merely a taking hold of the promises of God, thanksgiving could never be more than this. Faith and thanksgiving are linked in just this way in the story of the tenth, Samaritan leper who alone returns to Jesus in thanks and to whom Jesus says ‘your faith has healed you’. (Luke 17:12-18). The story is as much an indictment on the nine, Israelite lepers who were ungrateful as it is a celebration of the gratitude of the Samaritan.

2. The antitype of gratitude: Israel in the desert
The experience of Israel in the desert illustrates for us the very reverse of the right response to the redemption wrought by Yhwh. If they are condemned for anything, it is for the sin of ingratitude. They forgot the blessings that they had received at his hand. They grumbled about his provision for them of food and drink. They complained about his invisibility and lack of immediacy. From this sin we may perhaps learn its opposite. We too live between Egypt and the promised land – and much we experience challenges the goodness of God. Like praise, the acts of thanksgiving remembers and rehearses the great deeds of God, appreciative of the blessings that he showers upon us and turning us to him in hope. In thanksgiving, the pray-er not only retells the great deeds of God: she recalls receiving the benefits of them for herself. As it turns out, Paul identifies a lack of thanks as crucial to the spiritual blindness of the human race as a whole in Romans 1:20-21. 20 Ever since the creation of the world his eternal power and divine nature, invisible though they are, have been understood and seen through the things he has made. So they are without excuse; 21 for though they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their senseless minds were darkened.

3. The Psalms and thanksgiving
The thank offerings commanded as part of the sacrificial system (Lev 7:11-16) are, it could be suggested, designed to ensure that Israel did not forget to give thanks again. Whatever the case, the Psalms are overflowing with thankfulness to God. Some twenty or so Psalms enjoin Israel to thank the Lord: O give thanks to the LORD, for he is good; for his steadfast love endures forever. 2 Let the redeemed of the LORD say so, those he redeemed from trouble 3 and gathered in from the lands, from the east and from the west, from the north and from the south.(Psalm 107:1-3). Once again we need to ponder the relevance of the Psalms for the Christian life – they articulate the pattern of prayerful response to the grace of God.

4. Jesus gives thanks
At several moments in Jesus’ life he gave thanks to his Father. Most often he did this over food – at the feeding of the five thousand, and at the Last Supper. Once again, there is in this receiving of food a counter to the ungratefulness of the Exodus generation for God’s provision for food. There is also a pointer to the significance of food as a symbol of God’s gift of the body of the substitute. Jesus also thanks the Father for having heard him (John 11:41) and for the paradoxical miracle of the revelation of the divine mysteries (Matt 11:25). That the Son thanks the Father shows grace and thanksgiving to be a part of the divine life
Thanking God and glorifying him belong together. This is why doxology and the closely related hymns have remained basic in Christian prayer. But in content the original Christian hymn is through and through Christological. Christian doxology extols God’s action in sending the Son and the glorifying of the Son by the Spirit. It is thus Trinitarian doxology in which thanking God for his redeeming work is taken up into the adoration of his manifested deity that now already anticipates the eschatological praising of God by the community that is brought to fulfilment in the new creation.
Wolfhart Pannenberg (Systematic Theology III.208)itself. Jesus’ prayer life, as the exemplary human worshipper, features thanksgiving, even though the model prayer he offers his disciple does not.

5. Early Christian prayer
Despite this lack of thanks in the Lord’s prayer, the motif of thanksgiving is ubiquitous in the prayers of the early church. Paul especially cannot pray without giving thanks. Paul wants all requests to God to be made with thanksgiving (Phil 4:6) and that unceasing prayer redound with thanks (1 Thess 5:18). As Pannenberg explains, gratitude for God’s saving action in Christ gives Christian prayer its context. Already as creatures we owe thanks to God (Rom 1:21); now in the power of the Spirit of Sonship we are able to thank the Father as we truly ought. Further, Paul’s prayers of thanks repeatedly mention the work of God in other Christians as God’s grace to him.