Thanksgiving: The Message of Christ (Colossians 3:15-17)

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Let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts, for to this you were called as members of one body. And be thankful. Let the word of Christ richly dwell within you as you teach and admonish one another with all wisdom, and as you sing psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs with gratitude in your hearts to God. And whatever you do, in word or deed, do it all in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through Him. (Colossians 3:15-17, BSB)

    Paul really closely connects these ideas of Jesus and thankfulness.  He reminds us in this passage that it's important for us to look towards Jesus as our example. This is something that comes back again and again in scripture: that Jesus is our example. 

• Jesus said, “Carry your cross as I carried my cross.” 
• He says, “Love each other as I have loved you.” 
• He says, “Speak my words in the world, teaching everything that I have taught you.” 
• On the evening when he washed his disciples’ feet in that act of service, he says, “Follow my example.” 

    And when the apostles asked Jesus, “Teach us to pray like you pray. Whatever that is, we want to know how do we do that? How do we pray like you pray?” Jesus taught them an example—a prayer. We in our congregation speak those words of prayer and scripture together every single week: 

Our Father, who art in heaven, holy is your name. May your kingdom come, may your will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Give us today our daily bread and forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors. Lead us—not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. For yours is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever and ever. 

That is an example that we follow when we pray.

 

    But I recently noticed something kind of curious about that prayer. Maybe you've picked up on it already, and maybe I'm late to the party. But I find it really interesting that in Jesus’ framework for prayer he does not say ‘thank you.’ There's nowhere in the Lord's Prayer that Jesus sets for us the example of saying ‘thank you.’ 

• We acknowledge who God is: You are holy and we rightly honour you for that. 
• We ask God to make his kingdom manifest on earth through us. 
• We ask God to provide a daily provision of our needs. 
• We request forgiveness and the capacity to forgive.  
• We request guidance and deliverance.  

But in this particular prayer, Jesus does not set an example for us to say ‘thank you.’

    In Psalm 138 the psalmist says, “I will give you thanks with all my heart. I will sing praise before the heavenly beings. I will bow down towards your holy temple and give thanks to your name for your constant love.” So given that, and given Paul's connections between gratitude and Jesus, I thought it was a really interesting absence, and I wanted to find out—where does Jesus set for us the example of being thankful? Because it's not in the Lord's Prayer, so it's got to be somewhere else... 

    There's a word in the New Testament that most often gets translated as ‘thanks.’ Eucharistos means ‘thanks.’ It means ‘gratitude.’ We're going to look at three examples that are very, very different from each other—in different kinds of settings, in different company, and for different reasons each time, and each time he sets for us an example of giving thanks. 

        

    The first example is before the feeding of the 4,000. You may be familiar with the story where Jesus finds himself out in the middle of this big field with thousands of people, and they're too far from the local McDonald's, and there's nothing to eat. The disciples asked him, ‘OK, what are we going to do? These people are all hungry. We need to do something about this.’  

    So Jesus performs an amazing miracle; he is handed a few loaves of bread and a few fishes. The scripture says, ‘When he had given eucharistos he broke them and gave them to the disciples and they in turn gave the food to the people’ (Matthew 15:36). 

    

    What Jesus probably did there was and is customary in Jewish households: the giving of thanks at the beginning of the meal: “Blessed be thou, O Lord, our God, the king of the world who produced bread out of the earth.” This was a custom in Jesus’ time. This was a tradition. This was something that happened at every meal when Jesus was growing up. I don't know if Jesus had a great aunt Maggie, who every year would knit him an ugly Passover sweater that he really didn't want to wear in public. But Jesus saw gratitude modeled, and the seed of thankfulness was planted in him as he sat at meals with his family hearing his dad, Joseph, as the head of the household every single meal, say “Blessed be thou O Lord, our God, the king of the world who produced bread out of the earth.” I would suggest that the seeds of gratitude planted in that child, who would grow to be the saviour of the world, cultivated in him a sense of on-going gratitude. So that when it was his turn, when he was the head of this sort of strange, nebulous household, and when they were in the middle of this field and there was a meal to be served and he stood there with that bread in his hands... He was modeling an expression of that on-going customary sense of gratitude that had been deeply planted in him as a child. All throughout his life he had learned to be thankful.

 

    The second situation in which Jesus gave eucharistos was at the raising of Lazarus from the dead. 

You would expect that in a situation like that, you would say ‘thank you’ after the miracle had been performed and after Lazarus had come out—talking to people and having his first meal in probably a very long time. That's when you would say ‘thank you.’

 

    But Jesus said his eucharistos before the raising of Lazarus from the dead. In John chapter 11 the writer says:

“So they took away the stone (that was blocking the door to the tomb where Lazarus had been laid). And then Jesus looked up and said, “Father I thank you that you have heard me. I knew that you always hear me, but I'm saying this for the benefit of the people standing here so that they may know that you sent me.” 

    Jesus didn't just learn to be in that state of ongoing thankfulness throughout his life, just privately cherishing the fact that he knew that God always heard him. He wasn't hoarding in his heart the wonderfulness of his relationship with the Father. Jesus spoke his thanks out loud in community so that people could hear and so that people could be pointed towards the Father. Jesus was testifying his thankfulness. He was testifying to God's faithfulness and presence. He was teaching, he was admonishing. He was taking ownership of his gratitude and testifying his thankfulness to point people towards the Father.

 

    The third situation where Jesus models for us this giving of eucharistos is the Passover meal. In Luke Chapter 22, the writer says,

“After taking the cup he gave thanks and said, “Take this and divide it among you for I tell you I will not drink again of the fruit of the vine until the kingdom of God comes.”” 

    At the beginning of the Passover meal, it would again have been the traditional prayer of thanks: ‘Blessed are you, Lord God, king of the universe, who creates the fruit of the vine.’

 

    Jesus was the head of this household, perpetuating that ongoing sense of gratitude. 

    This was a meal that Jesus himself said that he desperately needed. He desperately needed to spend this time with his new family and even though he was looking ahead to what he knew was going to happen next--how hard this was going to be for him as he walked towards the cross and towards his death on our behalf—he didn't focus on his own need. He didn't focus on his own fear. He didn't focus on his own suffering. He focused instead on providing resources for his apostles: the hope and understanding that they would need as they moved forward through and beyond his death and resurrection. 

    

    Because for Jesus, everything he did, he did in the name of the Father. Everything he said, he said in the name of the Father.

 

    That night, that meal was God's gift to Jesus. And it was God's gift to us. 

    In that moment, Jesus modeled for us what it was like to give thanks, to pay back and to pay forward all of the good that he had received in relationship with the Father.  

Throughout Jesus’ lifetime,  

• he learned an ongoing condition of thankfulness. 
• he lived his life testifying his thanks. 
• he seized every opportunity that came along to give thanks. 

    I would suggest that when Jesus prayed that model prayer for his apostles without including the words ‘thank you’ it was because everything he did and said was an act of thanks.  

    When he prayed that Lord's Prayer he was praying:

 

    Our Father in heaven--thank you that you are our Father in heaven. Thank you that you have shared your holy name with us and thank you that we can call you Father. 

    Thank you that your kingdom is good and that everything that happens in your kingdom is good. Thank you that we have the opportunity to be a part of building that kingdom on earth as it is in heaven. 

    Thank you for all the times in the past that you have given us our everyday needs, whether material or emotional or family or whatever. We thank you for all the times that you have provided, and we thank you for all the times that you will provide. 

    We thank you that you will forgive us. We thank you that you forgive us our debts. We thank you that you forgive us our trespasses.  

    We thank you that we have the opportunity, and that you give us the capacity, to forgive others and to live a life free of grudge and bitterness. 

    We thank you that you lead us. We thank you that when you lead us you don't lead us into temptation. We thank you that you deliver us from the evil one. 

    And because we are thankful we say “Yours is the kingdom, yours is the power, and yours is the glory forever.” 

Amen. 

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