By Protopresbyter Dr Georgios Lekkas is a priest of the Holy Orthodox Metropolis of Belgium
It requires faith to plead with God, greater faith to remember to return and thank Him, and still greater faith to praise His Holy Name and, indeed, to praise Him unceasingly.
The faith that saves is not the faith that prompts us to entreat God when we face a trial such as the illness of the Ten Lepers; rather it is the faith that causes us to turn to the Lord to thank Him and still more to praise His Holy Name when the miracle has been accomplished for us.
For while the pressure of the difficulty we face may prompt us to turn to the Lord, when our faith is lacking we tend to attribute the miracle done for us to natural causes rather than to God’s supernatural intervention. So often even if we ask for a miracle and it is given to us, we then lack the faith that is required to accept it with humility and give thanks to the Lord.
The difficulties we face and the miracles that are performed for us exist solely for the purpose of restoring our relationship with God. And yes, our entreaty to Him in our hour of difficulty opens the channel of communication with Him that often brings about the miracle, but if out of a lack of faith we do not return after the miracle has taken place to thank Him, the channel of communication with Him is severed and our salvation is put in danger – as it was for the nine lepers who, after the miracle the Lord performed for them, did not return to thank Him.
Because thanksgiving implies greater faith than is implied by entreaty, thanksgiving puts us in a deeper relationship with the Lord than entreaty. In fact, when thanksgiving is deep and sincere, it leads us to an even higher form of prayer, that of praise. Thanksgiving is thus the explicit or implicit link that ensures the smooth passage of our prayer from ‘Lord have mercy’ to ‘Praise God’.
Faith and prayer are both gifts of the Most Holy God, but the kind of prayer we pray usually depends on the degree of our faith. Our spiritual life moves like a pendulum between ‘Lord have mercy’ and ‘Glory to God’, always passing through thanksgiving. If ‘Lord have mercy’ is our movement downward, where our Hades is, thanksgiving and even more so praise is the movement of our soul upward, where Heaven is. The contemplative tradition of our Church insists, however, that the joy of ascent depends on the pain of descent into the Hades of penance.
A soul that begins to be sweetened by this movement of the pendulum from one extreme to the other is already on the road to salvation. Indeed, when its relationship with the living God grows ever deeper through supplication, thanksgiving and praise, there comes a moment when its entreaty to the Lord is not FOR the removal of the difficulties it faces, but how to make it so that every moment it loves, thanks and praises the Lord even more. This life is Paradise.
12th SUNDAY OF LUKE, OF THE TEN LEPERS, 21.1.24.