• Deuteronomy 8: 7-18

The Book of Deuteronomy was compiled and edited as the farewell sermon/address by Moses to God’s people in which he reviews all that God had done for God’s people with a recurring admonition– Keep all the Lord’s teachings and God’s people will be sustained.  After forty years of brutal wandering in the wilderness, God’s people now stand on the cusp of entering the land of God’s covenant.  This land is staggeringly bountiful and fertile; “you will lack nothing….”  However, be warned, do not allow this abundance to make “your heart haughty and, forget that the Lord your God” is the One who provided.  Do not “say in your heart,” ‘My power and the might of my hand made me this wealth.’ ” Rather, always “remember the Lord your God,” for God is the source of the “power to make wealth….”

• Psalm 65

Although there are no words to adequately praise the Lord, the psalmist cannot resist.  She must first confess her “mischief” and “crimes,” before continuing with a crucial petition:  “May we be sated with the Lord’s bounty.”  She acknowledges the Lord’s “awesome acts” and “rescuing” deeds as the traits of the same One whose “power” and “might” are manifest throughout creation.  It is the Lord, she avers, who “soaks” the earth to “enrich” so it produces “grain.”  “Your bountiful year” is capped with luxuriant meadows and hills that sustain “flocks” and “grain.”  She discovers that creation is not mute:  “they shout for joy and even sing.”

• II Corinthians 9: 6-15

Paul is certain that the person who “sows sparingly will also reap sparingly and the one who sows bountifully will also reap bountifully.”  Therefore, give, give “cheerfully, not reluctantly or under compulsion….”  If we assume/accept that “God is able to provide… every blessing in abundance” then we can/should just as easily assume/accept that “by always having enough of everything, you may share abundantly….”  “You will be enriched in every way for your great generosity…”  “Thanks be to God for this indescribable gift.”

• Luke 17: 11-19

In a revelatory encounter unique to Luke’s narrative, Jesus was on the road “to Jerusalem,” skirting the boarder between “Samaria and Galilee” when “ten lepers approached him.”  Although they kept a cautionary distance, they were still within shouting distance: “Jesus, Master, have mercy on us,” they cried out.  Responding, Jesus gave them one simple instruction: “Go and show yourselves to the priests.”  As soon as they started to follow his instruction, they were “made clean.”  Of the ten, only one returned to give thanks, and that one was a “Samaritan.”  Jesus asked, Where are the other nine?  “Was none… to return and give praise to God except this foreigner?”  He told the man, who bowed before him, get up and go, “Your faith has made you well.”  Once again, Luke privileges the least expected, the alien, who did the right thing, which was to give “thanks” to God.  And Jesus identifies giving thanks as the beginning of faith.

Biblical texts never get over their awe at the sheer abundance of creation.  The psalmist ‘sees’ that the earth is “soaked” with the elements that “enrich” the earth “so that it produces all we will ever need.”  She ‘hears’ creation “sing.”  Standing on the cusp of fulfillment, looking out over the spectacular fertility of the land the Lord has given, Moses ‘sees’ so much abundance, he can announce, “you will lack for nothing.”

‘Seeing’ and ‘hearing’ the abundance of creation is a decision to be made.  In Luke’s story, ten experienced God’s generosity, but only one made the decision to turn around and say ‘thank you’.

Jean-Luc Marion inserts his notion of “saturated phenomenon” into the habitual way we perceive the world.  By this notion, Marion means that the world overwhelms our senses and, therefore, we must rely on hermeneutics/interpretation to make sense of it. 

In an important collection of essays in response to Marion’s work, Counter-Experiences:  Reading Jean-Luc Marion,  Emmanuel Falque quotes Marion and then comments: “In an essay by Marion we read: ‘By saturating phenomenon I understand here one where the manifest given goes beyond not only what a human look can bear without being blinded and dying, but what the world in its essential finitude can receive and contain.”  (“The Saturated Phenomenon.” trans. Thomas A. Carlson, Philosophy Today 40, nos 1-4 [1996]: 103-124)  Falque also quotes Marion from the same essay: “the miracle will no longer bear on a physical event, but on my consciousness itself.”  (p. 49)  Falque now adds: “the true miracle, according to Marion, is in this way a ‘miracle of my consciousness’,  a lived experience in the conversion of my way of looking at things rather than in the things themselves.”  

One day, the psalmist looked at the grandeur, beauty and abundance of creation and ‘saw’ and ‘heard’ evidence of an infinite goodness and generosity.  Creation did not change that day (not the “things themselves”) but the poet was changed by allowing herself to wonder about/believe in a a Source of unimaginable generosity for what she had taken granted.  

If one “wills” to ‘see’ and to ‘hear’ the extravagance of creation as a promise that “you will lack for nothing” two reactions follow: 1) gratitude and 2) generosity.  The clear and really only point of that story unique to Luke’s gospel is that the act of thanking God was not only the first step for making those in need whole, thanksgiving was the beginning of faith.  Paul writes that if one makes the intentional decision to ‘see’ that God is able to provide you with every blessing in abundance, then “by always having enough of everything, you may share abundantly!”

In her own response to Marion’s work in the same collection of essays, Kathryn Tanner believes  that, “One receives gifts only in giving them back to the giver in the same way that one has been given them.”  (p. 222)