True Gratitude Towards God Can’t End With “Thank You”
Every year when we sit down for Thanksgiving, my family, like so many others, partakes in a yearly tradition of saying what we’re thankful for: our health, our homes, each other. It’s important that we regularly take stock of all of the many good things God has blessed us with.
But we’re making a grave mistake if we think true gratitude begins and ends with only a feeling of thanksgiving. True gratitude — the kind Jesus modeled — requires that we work to ensure others can share in the blessings we have too.
That of course includes giving what we can of our money and time to help the less fortunate. But it must be more than charity. As true followers of Jesus, people who want to follow the religion of Jesus rather than the religion about Jesus, we must work to overturn systems of oppression that keep our brothers and sisters economically enslaved.
The crisis we are in
After dinner Thursday, I did an internet “quiz” that made me more than a little upset. Thinking about all I was thankful for, I became curious. Just how wealthy am I?
To be fair, my fiancé and I are pretty well off — but we’re not what I would call “rich.” We have food, housing, and healthcare, but if we stopped working, we wouldn’t be able to survive. We are probably far from what anyone in the United States would call rich (no one would mistake us for the Roy family). But how do we compare globally?
Being a glutton for punishment, I went to GivingWhatWeCan.org, and typed my annual post-tax salary into their calculator, “How Rich Am I?”
I was stunned. I’m in the richest 1% globally. I make more money per year than 99% of humanity. I was flooded with guilt. My fiancé, Anthony and I took a drive to try and calm me down.
But the truth is, we (probably most of you reading this) are incredibly wealthy. In fact, according to that calculator, if you make more than $65,000 a year post-tax, you’re in the top 1% of wage earners globally.
Compare that to how the other “half” lives. According to the World Bank, approximately 44% of the global population — around 3.5 billion people — live on less than $6.85 per day, or $2,500 a year. That’s less than a lot of us pay a month for rent in New York City. (1)
Going even further, 8.5% of the global population — almost 700 million people — live today on less than $2.15 per day. Most of those people live in Sub-Saharan Africa or in fragile and conflict-affected countries. (2) That comes to just over $784 a year. It should go without saying that no one can afford to live a healthy life on that income.
Meanwhile, the world’s 26 richest individuals held as much wealth as the poorest 50% of the global population combined, approximately 3.8 billion people. (3) And they’re getting even richer: CNN reports that the world’s 10 richest people got a record $64 billion richer — just from Trump’s reelection. (4)
This isn’t just wrong. It’s evil.
Jesus taught a different way.
Those of us who follow Jesus — the actual Jesus who fought to reform the world, not the made-up “Christian” Jesus who preached about heaven and hell — know this can’t continue.
We know that truly following Jesus means working to end the system of oppression that keeps a very small percentage of us rich, and a very large percentage of everyone else poor — is our number one mission.
Overcoming this system — late stage capitalism — is the very essence of loving both God and our neighbor. (5) The greatest commandment was the center of Jesus’s message, and it must be the center of our faith. Because our faith is not about saving souls, it’s about saving lives.
Imagine a Thanksgiving where our gratitude propels us into action, where being thankful means working for transformation, and where appreciation for what we have fuels our work for saving the world. Because that is exactly what Jesus did.
When Jesus encountered the hungry, he didn’t just offer prayers, he shared food. When he saw exploitation in the temple, he confronted it directly. When people were excluded and marginalized, he welcomed them into community. (6) All of this is love in action, and it is what we are called to do too. It is the coming of the Kingdom of God of which Jesus spoke.
As we move from Thanksgiving into the season that celebrates the birth of Jesus, let’s do more than count our blessings. Let’s make our blessings count. Let’s turn our gratitude into action, our thanksgiving into justice-making, and appreciation into transformation.
Because in the end, true gratitude isn’t just about saying thank you — it’s about creating a world where everyone has enough to be thankful for. That’s what Jesus taught, and that’s what we’re called to do.
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Footnotes:
- “Poverty: Overview” from The World Bank, accessed 11/30/24.
- Ibid.
- Larry Elliott, “World’s 26 richest people own as much as poorest 50%, says Oxfam,” from The Guardian, 1/20/19.
- Jordan Valinsky, “The world’s 10 richest people got a record $64 billion richer from Trump’s reelection,” from CNN.com, 1/7/24.
- Late-stage capitalism is often used to describe the contradictions and consequences of advanced capitalist systems, marked by concentrated wealth, the commodification of everyday life, economic instability, social alienation, and environmental degradation. This critique highlights the systemic prioritization of profit over human dignity and community, the exact opposite of what Jesus taught.
- See feeding accounts (Mt 14:13–21; 15:32–39; Mk 6:30–44; 8:1–10; Lk 9:10–17), temple cleansing (Mt 21:12–13; Mk 11:15–17; Lk 19:45–46), and Jesus’s ministry to the marginalized (Mt 9:10–13, 19:13–15; Mk 2:15–17, 10:13–16; Lk 5:29–32, 18:15–17, 19:1–10).
