Preachers are sometimes fond of a grammatical claim or two in the context of a sermon. “Love is a verb.” “Worship is a verb.” That sort of thing. I don’t think anyone ever makes the point that something is a noun—even in cases like these where it could be.
There’s a place for this sort of claim, identifying a part of speech toward an edifying exhortation. And, having taught grammar to seminarians for several decades—intentionally to students of Greek, unintentionally and too often in marking papers—it is somewhat heartening to hear grammar from the pulpit.
There is another, only slightly more advanced, grammatical insight that could make its way into the pulpit, namely, the way the New Testament loves the “adverb.” Adverb is in scare quotes because the Greek of the New Testament is not especially rife with adverbs per se, while it is chock-full of adverbial expressions. The point, of course, is that as important as it is what we do (love, worship, and so on), the grammar (literal and metaphorical) of the New Testament also wants to impress upon us that it matters much how we do what we do—what motives, dispositions, and spirit accompany what we do.
This grammar digression comes to mind as we celebrate our Thanksgiving holiday. Giving thanks, feeling and expressing gratitude, is an activity more fundamental to our human existence under God than perhaps we acknowledge often enough. It is notable that a chief indictment of recalcitrant humanity in Romans 1 is that, knowing something of God’s power and beneficence, we failed to give thanks.
“So they are without excuse, for though they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their senseless hearts were darkened” (Rom. 1:20b–21).
We might say that the remedy to this thanklessness, this ingratitude, this intractable obliviousness, is paying attention and giving thanks. But perhaps we should say that the sign of the Remedy received and applied is the heart turned toward the Creator and Giver in acts of thanksgiving punctuating a habitus of gratitude. It may come as a surprise to English Bible readers that one way the New Testament describes the giving of thanks is with the simple word normally translated “grace” (charis), that is, when it is bestowed by God. But when it is the human exercising charis to God, it surely cannot be offering him forgiveness or enriching him with some sort of beneficence. It can only be returning our gift for his—paltry though it may be—in words, hearts, and lives of gratitude (e.g., Luke 17:9; Rom. 6:17; 7:25; 1 Cor. 15:57; 2 Cor. 2:14; Col. 3:16; Heb. 12:28).
This is why a better way to describe thanksgiving is the almost now archaic “return thanks”—as in “let us return thanks for our food.” It is a “return” of “grace” for “grace,” in which the inestimable and unrepayable gift of God’s charis is retuned to him with the best that we have to offer, our gratitude, our humble indebtedness, the fitting offering of which can only be made with a consecration of our whole selves.
Now from lexicography back to grammar. It is interesting to observe not only how often we are enjoined to return thanksgiving but how often it is the background disposition that accompanies other actions—the adverb, that is. In classic fashion, St. Paul dots his exhortations with the staccato imperatives: “And be thankful” (Col. 3:15); “Give thanks in everything” (1 Thess. 5:18). But thanksgiving also accompanies all sorts of other actions as the conditioning backdrop:
As you therefore have received Christ Jesus the Lord, continue to walk in him, rooted and built up in him and established in the faith, just as you were taught, abounding in thanksgiving. (Col. 2:6–7)
And whatever you do, in word or deed, do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him. (Col. 3:17)
Devote yourselves to prayer, keeping alert in it with thanksgiving. (Col. 4:2)
Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God. (Phil. 4:6)
Thus, returning thanks is the settled disposition of the redeemed heart before God, “from whom all holy desires, all good counsels, and all just works do proceed.”
By traditional measures, Thanksgiving is not a “holy day,” having no authentic claim for a place on the Church’s Kalendar. Yet, as it happens, it has succeeded above the others in resisting secular and materialist co-option—participating in but only one of the Seven Deadly Sins, which is pretty good for an American holiday. Whatever its history and status, may it be a goad and reminder that whatever grace we offer at table on this set-aside day could be a grace we live on all the others.
Garwood Anderson is the Donald J. Parsons Distinguished Professor of Biblical Interpretation at Nashotah House Theological Seminary and, beginning September 1, 2024, the Distinguished Fellow, Biblical Studies and Theology, at the Lumen Center of the Steve and Laurel Brown Foundation, Madison, Wisconsin.
