The celebration of Thanksgiving Day is valuable to our American Culture. If we celebrate this day well, it allows us to live out our Christianity and values and push back against the encroaching secularism of our time. Thanksgiving, when we pause to consider its meaning, and when we decide to open our hearts and be thankful, is a natural pathway to God. As important as the history lesson of the “first Thanksgiving” might be – and as useful as it is to firmly ground our traditional celebration – it has to be about more than Pilgrims, Indians, planting corn and eating a big meal.
Christ the King
Today we celebrate the culmination of time, and the final manifestation of the glory of Jesus Christ. Throughout our lives we catch glimpses of how God is guiding the course of the world, how He intervenes sometimes in very subtle ways. At the end of time, we will see clearly how intimately involved Jesus was in every movement of every human heart. Jesus is the King of hearts, the shepherd of souls, the new head of humanity – raising us who had fallen in Adam. He is the just judge who will decide if we will rise to share in His glory – fully divinized by His grace – or rise only to plunge deeper into death in hell. He is the merciful judge who draws even closer when we stray. As our head, he proceeds us into heaven – He is a shepherd whose body is composed of sheep. When one is lost or stolen, it is a wound in His flesh that he seeks to heal and recover.
Wednesday of the Thirty-Third Week in Ordinary Time
Today’s Gospel is Luke’s slightly different account of the Parable of the Talents we heard on Sunday from St. Matthew. The differences between these two parables isn’t particularly important, though they are interesting. In Luke’s story, the amount given to each servant is much smaller than a talent. This reinforces the important spiritual teaching that we aren’t to worry about how much we have received, but that we are to invest what we’ve been given as wisely as we can. God has given us a great gift in Jesus: the grace to live a life liberated from the snares of sin and bound for resurrection. We are expected to use the Gospel we’ve been given to increase the fruitfulness of the Gospel around us.