Second of Easter, Sunday April 22, 2001

St Andrew's, Croydon

On Easter morning it's our custom at St Stephen's Lewisham to give each child a chocolate Easter Egg after the Mass.

Over the years I've noticed that the children receive their gift in a number of different ways.

A few of them, very few, simply take their egg and walk away without saying anything.

Slightly more respond to their gift with a look of puzzlement mingled with suspicion; as if they were saying to themselves "Hm! This is unusual –I bet there's a catch to it somewhere!"

A third group, the majority, just say "thank you" in what's more of a grunt than anything else, without looking me in the face.

Fourthly, some children really look you in the eye, and smile as they said "thank you!".

What lies behind these four responses: the gracious smile, the perfunctory grunt, the puzzled-and-suspicious and the take-it-and-run?

The reason is that feeling grateful, let alone expressing that feeling doesn't come naturally to any of us, child or grown-up. It's something which, like reading or writing or swimming or bicycling has to be learnt.

Humans aren't born with the ability to say "thank you". Remember how often you had to prompt your children with such words as "What do you say, dear?" before they learn to do it spontaneously for themselves?

Christians, in particular, need to grasp this fact because our relationship with God depends on our giving of thanks: the Eucharist means The Thanksgiving. As the Gloria puts it: "We give thanks to thee for thy great glory."

If we find it difficult, and most people do, to give thanks to God for our "creation, preservation and all the blessings of this life; but above all for [his] inestimable love in the redemption of the world by our Lord Jesus Christ", then it's sensible to examine our attitude to thanksgiving to find out why it's difficult for us. If people find something difficult that they know they should be doing, it's sensible to start by asking why they find it difficult in the first place.

The first reason, then, is that saying "Thank You" doesn't come naturally; it has to be learnt. So it's hardly surprising that people who've never been taught to do so should find it more difficult than those who have learnt. Like people who've never learnt to read or write, those who simply took their Easter Eggs and walked off without a word have never learnt to say Thank You. Such deserve our pity rather than our censure.

Those who respond with puzzlement or suspicion are rather easier to help. Their hesitancy is due to one of two things, the first quite sensible; the other rather silly.

The more sensible reason is the truth which some children grasp very early on in their lives, that there's no such thing as a free lunch. Behind every attempt to "reach out to us" there lies an ulterior motive. God gives us the Eucharist, not as an end in itself, but as the means of grace by which we may bring to fruition the hope of glory and achieve the end for which he created us: to glorify and enjoy him for ever. But God's initiative requires a response on our part: otherwise it simply can't work.

So the suspicion which some people have that there's something which "lies behind" God's approaches to us is perfectly well-founded one. There is! God will never leave us alone until we have surrendered ourselves, our souls and bodies to him to be a reasonable, holy and lively sacrifice, wholly acceptable to him", and in order to persuade us to make such a surrender he will take whatever steps he knows to be necessary.

But it's a silly idea to suppose that there's something inherently unworthy about responding to God's motivation of us. You'll sometimes hear people say that we shouldn't need motivating and that all such motivation is a sort of bribe. They are seriously mistaken.

If it were a bribe, then the whole Bible would a story of bribery and corruption. But of course it's not. A bribe is an incentive to do wrong. God's intention for us is to fulfil in us the purpose for which he created us. To call this a bribe would be like saying that the thought of winning a race is a bribe to run faster, or getting a first class academic degree is a bribe to make us study harder. It's no bribe, but the fulfilment of our purpose in running or studying hard in the first place. An incentive, yes; a bribe, emphatically not.

Let's now take a look those children who did say "Thank You". Some, you will remember, did so in the form of a perfunctory grunt; others look you in the eye, and hold that look as they smiled.

It's natural to compare the Grunters unfavourably with the Smilers. But God, unlike us, doesn't primarily look at the outward man but at the inward one. He knows that giving thanks is more difficult for some people than it is for others.

Those people who have confident, cheerful and even-tempered natures find that showing gratitude is "as easy as kissing"; but the less confident, more sensitive person finds it's more difficult. Someone who feels inadequate finds that being on the receiving-end of charity, even if it's the charity of God himself, quite hard to take. It awakens inside them those selfsame feelings of inferiority or resentment from which they habitually suffer.

But in God's eyes, the soul of someone like that, someone who only manages with difficulty grunt of gratitude is just as precious as that of someone who finds it "as easy as kissing". In fact he may be achieving something far more valuable than the person who "really doesn't see what their difficulty is".

Most of us, from time to time, find that a grunt of gratitude to God is the best we can manage. "Never mind", St Paul says "the Spirit will intercedes for us with gruntings that cannot be uttered". God is less interested by how we feel as by how we behave.

So when we find our feelings of gratitude to God are at a bit of a low ebb, don't let's despair. We're in good company and a grunt of gratitude is far better than nothing. Even if we can't bring ourselves to smile spontaneously at God's benevolence towards us, we can at least work on practising our smiling.

As someone once said: When we smile it increases our face value.