Greatest Gift, Greatest Gratitude

Consider the question of how grateful we should be for things. Consider 4 events for which I’d be grateful: 

A)    A chap walking in front of me holds the door open a little longer so I can get through.

B)    A neighbour lends me his wood splitter so I can cut my biggest logs.

C)    A neighbour gifts me his wood splitter so I can continue to cut my biggest logs.

D)    A friend saves my life by rescuing me from a burning building.

Clearly, if I should be more grateful for D than B, or C than A, then as a rule, how grateful x should be to y for z depends on the relationship between the intentions of both agents, the expected and actual benefits to the recipient, and the expected and actual costs of the giver. This holds that the costlier the gift to the giver, the more gratitude is appropriate from the beneficiary, providing both individuals partake in a mutually willing exchange. A neighbour who gifts me his wood splitter purely to bless me more than him incurs more costs than a neighbour who has bought a better wood splitter, and just wants to get rid of his old one.

Given the foregoing equation, then, the greatest debt of gratitude in the world is one of such abundance that it’s astonishing how many people alive today pay little or no regard to it. I’m talking, of course, about Christ’s sacrifice on the cross. If a neighbour gave you his wood splitter and you showed no gratitude, that would be bad - and most people would feel uncomfortable in withholding their thanks and gratitude. But even such a generous act is almost nothing compared to the cross, which stands as the greatest act of self-giving in all history. It’s the greatest Being doing the absolute most with the greatest gift at the greatest cost for the greatest good for the greatest number of people.

God becoming human and giving His life on the cross is the not just the greatest act, necessitating the greatest gratitude, it is the ultimate benchmark for all human gratitude - not merely because the benefit to us is eternal life, peace with God, and adoption as His children, but because the cost to Christ was beyond human measure. He bore the wrath of sin, the shame of crucifixion, and the abandonment of the Father - all willingly, because of His love for us. Therefore, whether we are aware of it or not, the greatest Being doing the absolute most with the greatest gift at the greatest cost for the greatest good for the greatest number of people underpins all good acts we bestow upon each other, because all good acts are reflections of the greatest of all good acts.

Gratitude For Good & Bad Things

Back when I wasn’t a Christian, in the late 1990s, I made the following kind of argument to Christians who said that God had healed them of condition x and illness y:

“It’s all very well saying God healed you from x or y - but through, at best, the universe’s laws or, at worst, God’s unwillingness to intervene pre-emptively, He still enabled these things to happen in the first place. If Jill has painful cancer for 2 years, then gets miraculously healed, it’s strange how God gets thanked for the healing, but not dismissed or condemned for the 2 years of painful cancer in the first place. If Jack breaks my leg by kicking me, I should not praise him for handing me a crutch."

Even then, I could accept the proposition that God doesn’t directly cause the suffering, and that there may be good reasons why He allows suffering for character-building, perseverance and growth.

But when I became a Christian, He showed me through Christ that He’s the one who comes into the wreckage, binds the wounds, and then teaches me to walk again. I also learned as a Christian that even when it seems He’s not noticeably coming into the wreckage, binding the wounds, and then teaching me to walk again, He’s still present - sustaining me, shaping me, holding me up when I can’t feel it, quietly, patiently, weaving grace into the cracks, and writing a story deeper than my immediate relief.

Understanding this helps make sense of Paul’s instruction for us to “Give thanks in all circumstances” (1 Thessalonians 5:18) and “Give thanks always and for everything” (Ephesians 5:20), even the really hard times. But it was only when I spent several years watching my dad suffer and slowly die with dementia that I began to understand more intimately what it means to give thanks in all things – even the very hardest things - because God is always good and always present and working in and through them.

This wisdom also applies to when we give thanks to God for everything that others might see as trivial. Before becoming a Christian, I used to find it strange that Christians would give thanks to God for food they’d just cooked, the weather, a car running well, and so forth. But after becoming a Christian, I began to understand why. It’s beneficial for us to be grateful for all things that we know are, in the long run, for our own good – and the kind of God who loves us enough to suffer and die for us as Christ did is bound to be doing immeasurable good in all kinds of ways that we can’t yet see or understand.