Why gratitude is indispensable – and ingratitude cuts so deep

C28 | 12 OCTOBER 2025 | LUKE 17:11-19 THE GRATEFUL LEPER

This passage in Luke’s gospel about an overwhelmingly grateful, healed leper and his nine healed but ungrateful companions universally and timelessly resonates because of the profound significance that we instinctively attach to gratitude and, conversely, the universal opprobrium in which we hold its opposite.

Genuine gratitude – it has many counterfeits – is a self-evident good that decisively determines our character and shapes our outlook on everything, as does its opposite. Individually, the disparity between the grateful and the ungrateful is more deeply distinctive of us as persons than any other difference. Totally ingrained ingratitude is more symptomatic of a pathological condition than a moral failing. But collectively, gratitude, like truthfulness, courtesy, kindness and compassion, is an indispensable condition of a civilised and coherent social existence. A world without gratitude or one where ingratitude was valued over gratitude would be a terrifying and dangerous place to live, the nearest thing to a definition of Hell. No wonder that ingratitude cuts so deeply.

Lear’s lament, “How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is, to have a thankless child” makes any sane person shudder. The whole of King Lear could be read as a meditation on the catastrophic social and political impact of ingratitude, and how only gratitude counters the negative and ultimately demoralising effects of resentment, the most destructive of all human emotions. Gratitude touches us at such depth because every expression of thankfulness expresses implicitly our sense of thankfulness for existence itself, no less real for being so difficult to articulate. Gratitude for the given-ness of everything concerns not how things are but that they are; and, by extension, not how we are, but that we are. To see our life as a freely-given gift, as opposed to being the inevitable outcome of random, meaningless events, is to see it, again implicitly, as purposefully brought into and sustained in existence – created, in other words.

A world whose existence is not an a priori necessity is a world for which, despite its shadow side, it is impossible not to give thanks. And if gratitude implicitly affirms the gift of existence itself, it also implies the existence of a Giver. The Polish poet, Czeslaw Milosz (1911-2004), says of someone in a similar position to the grateful leper that “He felt gratitude: so, he couldn’t not believe in God.” That’s why gratitude, so closely allied to reverence and respect and wonder and awe, is a prime candidate for what an American sociologist of religion in the 1970s, Peter Berger, called, in his evocatively entitled A Rumour of Angels (1973), “a signal of transcendence”. He meant those aspects of ordinary life which, even if we find it near impossible to say how or why, constitute a source of meaning and value, written into and read off from our everyday experience of the world but pointing beyond: an inkling of something more.

All of this is why Jesus gives such extraordinary weight to the grateful response of the Samaritan leper. His gratitude is an expression of faith which is, even if unacknowledged, all the more remarkable in the context because, from a Jewish point of view, the detested Samaritan would have been the least likely person to exemplify faith. But it is precisely his faith, Jesus says, that has healed him. Both faith and gratitude see and savour the miracle and mystery of existence, seeing through ‘giftedness’ to a Giver. But gratitude also implies a sense of the even more precious gift of being loved. Why else do we give one another gifts, if not to give expression to our love for one another? Gifts, when genuinely given, are always tokens of ourselves, given in love, the ‘signal of transcendence’, par excellence. But if it is true that gratitude is written into our nature, it is written into human nature restored by grace and schooled by Christian sensibility. Until Christianity, gratitude wasn’t prized in anything like the same way. Aristotle, for instance, thought it was demeaning, rendering us inferior to the giver.

Cicero thought the purpose of exchanging gifts and gratitude served only the purpose of furthering one’s career. And, with his strong sense of Stoical self-sufficiency, Seneca felt that, since you must never be in anybody’s debt, you should always equal, if not exceed, a gift by a greater gift in return. Only with Christianity does gratitude comes to occupy such a central and self-evidently soul-sustaining part of the human flourishing essential to the good life. It is far from mere semantical happenstance that the ancient Greek name for the Mass, eucharist, means “gratitude”, the Mass being the supreme act of thanksgiving to God. It expresses the very essence of what it is to be created by Love Itself. How fitting that the very last words of the Mass should be: “Thanks be to God”.