Twenty-Eighth Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year C (2025) - Fr James Baxter, OP

Recently I heard a song playing in a shop. I vaguely registered that I hadn’t heard that song in over twenty years. That was my only thought about it, until I started to notice the refrain: “I just want to praise you, I just want to praise you.”

Was this a Christian song?

Very much so. Shackles (Praise You) was one of the biggest gospel hits ever, released by the duo Mary Mary on their debut album Thankful.

The song is about two things: what God has done, and what the singers are doing in response. He has taken the shackles off their feet and broken their chains, so now they can dance, lift up their hands, and praise him.

It is the kind of imagery, personal testimony, and joyful exuberance that is common through the psalms. Our psalm of this Sunday (Ps 97) is just one example from many: Sing a new song to the Lord … he has worked wonders … ring out your joy. Many reading those psalms, or hearing that song, find that these words of praise and thanksgiving give expression to their own experience.

The key word there is “many”. It is not everybody. There are many people who find joy in the good things of life.

There are fewer for whom that joy carries over into praise and thanksgiving to God, where they recognise that the good things they are joyful about come from God, and are signs of his goodness.

This Sunday we have two stories about how people respond to God’s goodness. Both involve healings from leprosy. Quite apart from the awful physical effects of leprosy, its social effects added to the suffering. Everything a leper loved about sharing in family and social life was gone. Their only companionship would be found in other lepers.

So when the ten lepers in the Gospel of Luke are healed of their infections – the growths gone, the skin back to its colour, their freedom to take part in society restored – they would surely have all been joyful. But in one of the lepers there is more happening. There is a movement in his heart where he remembers that this wonderful change in his life came from someone, and he must express to that person his loving memory. So he praises God at the top of his voice, throws himself at the feet of Jesus, and thanks him.

When Jesus draws attention to the contrast between this man with the others who have gone their way, he is not giving a lesson in good manners. It’s a lesson about how we relate to goodness and to God. This one leper has shown the right and complete response. It is not only to rejoice, but to give thanks and praise.

Just as they did for the leper, praise and thanksgiving often go together, but they are not quite the same thing. One way of understanding the difference is that thanksgiving is a response to the goodness of the gift, and praise is a response to the goodness of the giver. To say to someone, “Thank you, you’re very thoughtful”, is both thanksgiving and praise.

When we come to Mass we offer thanks and praise to God in the context of worship. That is how the story ends in our first reading from 2 Kings 5. What we hear at Mass this Sunday is just the tail end of a long story where many people help Naaman to be cured. They do this not by working the miracle themselves, but by sharing what they know, making introductions, pointing the way, and encouraging him. It’s a sort of supply chain of goodness, leading to Naaman’s cure through the ministry of the prophet Elisha.

Perhaps Naaman thanked everyone involved. We don’t hear about that. What we do hear is the exchange where Naaman offers a present to Elisha, which the prophet declines. If that was all there was, we might think it was merely a transactional response: you did something for me, I’ll do something for you. But Naaman next asks for a load of soil. The reason surely is that from now on he will worship the God of Israel, the God he now believes in, on the soil of holy land. Beyond all the gratitude he may have towards the different people who helped him, Naaman realises that ultimately his healing was a gift from God, and it is to God that he owes thanks and praise.

Our liturgical prayer is infused with words of thanks and praise. Among the first things we say together when we come to Mass is, We praise you, we bless you, we adore you, we glorify you, we give you thanks for your great glory. The theme continues through to the last words of the Mass we say together: Thanks be to God.

We say these words not because God has any need to hear them from us. It is so that whatever we love and take joy in, we will recognise as a gift from the one who is perfect good, and so find ever further joy in God and his goodness.

Fr James Baxter, OP is the Parish Priest of Broadway, Glebe, and Pyrmont, New South Wales.