The thanks is in the giving of it

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To the Old Testament Jewish culture, the idea of setting aside one day - actually, one meal - per year to demonstrate a thankful spirit to God would have been as strange as doing so in a quiet and discreet manner.

Thanksgiving was an intense matter in the days when the temple still stood in Jerusalem (in fact, even while they used the portable tabernacle) and the various sacrifices and sabbaths were observed. The leaders of the people not only insisted on this, but led the celebrants.

It would be hard to say what might cross the mind of, say, King Josiah were he to look upon the American brand of Thanksgiving: a turkey, some pie and, just maybe, a prayer about 30 seconds long, if that. He might wonder if or when the party is going to start.

The Old Testament uses three Hebrew words that translate to the activity of thanksgiving in the English versions of the Bible. All three indicate action and enthusiasm at least a great deal more vigorous than finishing off a heaping plate and loosening the belt a notch or two.

The words carry distinct connotations of shouts, acclamations and extensions - more correctly, thrusting forward - of the hands in the act of thanks toward God. The significance cannot be missed: For all that he has given to the thankful, their thanks is the greatest response they can return. Their hands are empty; they cannot reciprocate.

And, if we follow the ordinances of Jewish law, there is no restriction of this activity to once a year on a nationally recognized day. Of course, there were the high holy days that required all of Israel to participate. Thanksgiving was in order then and the feasts on those holy days would make the biggest Thanksgiving Day spread you've yet seen - or will ever see - look like a Happy Meal.

But any Israelite was able to give a thanksgiving offering on any non-sabbath day. The nature of this offering may have been personal, just between the Israelite and God. But the context, as given in the Old Testament, made it clear that the giving of thanks was to be heartfelt.

This kind of offering clearly followed a benefit that made the offerer feel very grateful, indeed.

But before we imagine what might compel someone to be so grateful as to offer thanks so enthusiastically, let us take a moment to consider the culture of the people involved.

In his book, "The Jesus I Never Knew," author and journalist Philip Yancey talks about the necessity of understanding a basic cultural fact about Jesus: He was a Jew, first and last.

That meant more than sharing a cultural background and a national identity. It meant being partaker of a certain character.

Among the traits of that character, as Yancey put it, was "the ability to link arms and dance and sing and laugh even when the world offers scant reason for celebration."

Job, after having lost almost everything in his life, still was not unthankful: "The Lord gave and the Lord has taken away; may the name of the Lord be praised." A Westerner may look at Job's response as the exercise of religious duty. A Middle Eastern Jew sees a philosophy in which thanks never is muttered or begrudged and originates from a place much deeper than circumstance.

It is true that in some homes, there will be humble surroundings and meager dinners that hardly match what we would consider a fit holiday feast. That fact should arouse our compassion, but Jesus - again, remember, a Jew - added a dimension to the regard for the those who either had lost much or never had much to begin with. "Blessed," he called them, another way of saying, "qualified for thankfulness."

As he described them in the Beatitudes, they are a class or classes of people at the end of life's tether and, strangely enough, to him closer to the spirit of thanksgiving than the ones who he described in chilling terms as having "received their reward in full."

These "blessed," he indicated - the spiritually exhausted, the oppressed, the powerless, the desperate for truth and purity, the gracious despite circumstances, the bringers of peace and the victims of persecution yet to be - might know and understand the idea behind a thanksgiving that combined enthusiasm with empty, outstretched hands.

Our world since then has persisted in supplying the inverse of the message given along with these descriptions. Jesus saw thanksgiving as a personal, yet public matter - "Let your light so shine," he said, at one point - and regard of the less fortunate as better done out of sight: "Be careful not to do your acts of righteousness before men to be seen by them."

In a culture many insist is still basically Christian, we tend to do the inverse, and do so in his name. The Thanksgiving turkey primarily is shared within the family while politicians don aprons to serve before television cameras in homeless shelters.

We know all this, but, if we turn in our reflections to the question of how we should be thankful, a good place to get clues would be where the notion may have begun.

For Christians, it began with sacrifice, shouts and outstretched, empty hands.

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