Strange Giver, Strange Gifts

Published: December 20, 2024

Author: Kent Dunnington and Ben Wayman

Gratitude is all the rage these days. There are books that exhort us to be grateful, journals to help us record our gratitude, and podcasts that remind us to “practice gratitude daily.” The trend traces primarily to the psychologist Robert A. Emmons of the positive psychology movement, whose extensive empirical studies on the life benefits of gratitude have turned it into a strategy for flourishing.[1] It would seem that Christians should welcome all of this uncritically. We are, after all, supposed to be a grateful people, perhaps the most grateful of all people. But in what follows we suggest that gratitude to God, at least of the sort that the Bible enjoins, cannot be comfortably assimilated into the program. The positive psychology movement assumes we know what to be grateful for, but merely lack the discipline or strategy consistently to notice the gifts that surround us. Christian gratitude, by contrast, does not come naturally, for it requires a transformed mind and heart capable of seeing gifts that the world would ignore or even reject.

I. The Nature of Gratitude

Gratitude is a kind of benevolence detector. In general, gratitude is triggered whenever you perceive some undeserved kindness that another has intentionally bestowed upon you. And in general, the more extravagant that kindness is, the more intense your experience of gratitude. Compare, for instance, the gratitude you would feel towards someone who held the door open for you at the supermarket with the gratitude you would feel towards someone who intervened to defend you when you were being attacked. Your gratitude will likely be more intense and durable in the latter case.

Given this, it is puzzling that many Christians—and we include ourselves here—do not experience gratitude to God with the kind of frequency, intensity, and durability that would seem appropriate given how extraordinary God’s benefits really are. We suspect most Christians will affirm that God has bestowed incomparably more undeserved kindness on them than has any other benefactor. So why do we struggle to be consistently grateful to God even when we believe, or at least say we believe, that God is our benefactor beyond compare? Is there something wrong with us?

There are a couple of insightful solutions to this puzzle that we want to set aside before offering a third. The first solution is that our problem is inattention. In this account, we may know in an abstract sense that God is our benefactor, but until we start paying attention to where God’s gifts show up, we’re not likely to experience gratitude. The second solution is that our problem is resentment. In this account, we know that God is often good to us, but we’re also mad at God for not giving us what we want, so we withhold our gratitude. Both are good solutions and undoubtedly play some constitutive role. Paying more attention to God and dealing with our resentment toward God are crucial to growth in gratitude to God, and there’s plenty that could be said about how to do those things. But we want to set those solutions to the side because even when we are trying to pay attention and even when we are not angry at God, it can still be difficult to live in a posture of consistent gratitude to God. The puzzle remains.

We offer a third solution to the puzzle, namely, that it is hard to be grateful to God, despite acknowledging God as our benefactor beyond compare, because God is a strange giver who gives strange gifts in strange ways. Consider an example of the stereotypical gratitude scenario. A husband comes home from work and his wife has a gift for him—a beautiful sweater in his favorite color. This gift is given randomly—it is not his birthday or Christmas, and it is not given as a ‘thank you’ for something he did. Instead, it is just given because she adores him and wanted to show it. How would he feel in response? More than likely, he would feel a sense of gratitude.

In this stereotypical gratitude scenario, a benefactor (the wife) gave the beneficiary (the husband) a benefit (the gift). This three-part event triggers a response in the beneficiary: gratitude. The nature of this response—gratitude—can be understood as having four dimensions. First, there is a cognitive part—he believed that a kindness had been done to him. Second, there is an affective part—he felt something, something we might call the emotion of gratitude. Third, there is a communicative part—he probably said something, such as, “Thank you!” And fourth, there is a volitional part—he likely formed an intention to somehow, at the right time and in the right way, return the favor.

But the situation could be tweaked in such a way that a response of gratitude would be less certain. Suppose, for example, that what the husband is given is not a sweater but a book about how to deal with anger problems. Or suppose the wife gave him a nice set of Bluetooth earphones but said she hoped he wouldn’t mind if she used them on her daily commute to work. These little tweaks are enough to put gratitude into question, and even if one could still be grateful in these scenarios, the spontaneity, intensity, and durability of gratitude would likely be compromised—no more tears of joy, for example.

II. Gratitude for God’s Strange Gifts?

Gratitude is experienced most spontaneously and intensely when a giver unpredictably and at cost to him or herself transfers to our possession a benefit that quenches some desire we had. Consider God’s gifts in this light. As for the feature of unpredictability, God is constantly, unwaveringly benevolent to us, unlike our friends and spouses; there is of course some unpredictability in the form of God’s kindness to us, but given that God is definitionally omnibenevolent, how can we be surprised when God is kind to us? Moreover, God is also all-powerful, so in what sense can it really cost God to benefit us? Unlike our friends and spouses, God is not limited by time, energy, money, or knowledge. God is omnipotent, so in a real sense it costs God nothing to treat us well.

As for the third feature, God never transfers some benefit into our possession! “The Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away,” is the way Job puts it.[2] [LG1] God may cure the cancer tomorrow only to permit it to return in six months. We tend to be critical of the kind of giver that God is, one who gives but always maintains a claim over the gift.

And finally, so much that God gives us is not something we desired or even could have desired. For instance, God gives us our very selves, but by definition we are not around to desire ourselves! According to St. Paul, God gives us trials and tribulations to grow our faith,[3] but no one longs for those. God gives us the gift of his Holy Spirit, but that is often the last thing we really want since it demands that we release our claim over our own lives.

To be sure, God also gives blessings like nice weather on the day of the big game, a secure job, a beautiful family, and good health. However, “counting blessings” like these is not the heart of gratitude to God, at least if we trust the grammar of Scripture. When we think gratitude to God will closely mirror our more stereotypical interpersonal gratitude experiences, we end up focusing on “daily blessings”—good health, good job, beautiful family—and that risks turning God into a cosmic vending machine whose primary role is giving us what we want.

The Bible is ambivalent about daily blessings. Of course, we are to thank God for our daily bread, but, first, we’re often mistaken about whether something is a blessing or not, and second, even when we’re right, we’ve no guarantee the blessing is ours to keep. As the book of Job illustrates, even the blessings God gives may at any moment turn to tragedies, which means that if our gratitude to God is only of the “count your blessings” variety, we are sure, like Job’s wife, to end up cursing God.[4]

Instead, gratitude to God in the Bible is about a way of being in the world. When Paul says “do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks,” he is pointing to much more than count-your-blessings gratitude.[5] Paul’s constant gratitude is grounded mainly by his awareness of three gifts: the gift of creation, the gift of a new self in Jesus Christ, and the gift of friendship with God through the Holy Spirit.[6] Each of these gifts destabilizes us, revealing our basic fragility, emptiness, neediness, and waywardness.

It therefore takes work to learn to be grateful to God, and we can expect that gratitude to God will not always mirror more stereotypical experiences of gratitude. Growth in gratitude to God is reflected not primarily by having more and more spontaneous feelings of gratitude to God when life goes well, but rather by greater and greater ability to live non-resentfully as a creature even when it does not. Show us someone who can receive the terminal diagnosis with sadness but without a trace of bitterness, without demanding that they deserved more, and we will show you someone who has learned gratitude to God.

III. Learning to Desire Strange Gifts

If we are correct that gratitude toward God is difficult because God is a strange giver who gives strange gifts in strange ways, then it follows that gratitude toward God will require that we become people with strange desires that delight in the strange gifts God gives. If common experiences of gratitude quench some desire we had, like for a soft sweater, or our very own Bluetooth earphones, then gratitude toward God is about developing strange desires that extend from transformed lives. Paul describes such lives as being “in Christ,” and such lives display a different kind of gratitude than what is commonly showcased on Christmas morning.[7]

Theologian Samuel Wells once preached a Christmas sermon in which he argued that God was the ultimate materialist. The main move of his sermon was to surprise the congregation by reversing our petty desires for toys and trinkets into a holy desire for God-with-us in the embodied, material Jesus. In so doing, Wells underlined the way in which Christian gratitude is shaped by a new set of desires stemming from a new disposition and a new life in Christ.

For Karl Barth, “Gratitude is to be understood not only as a quality and an activity but as the very being and essence of [the Christian].”[8] Christian gratitude to God is not first and foremost about counting your blessings or having a consistently positive attitude, however good those things might be. Christian gratitude to God is first and foremost learning to receive ourselves from God—a task that is much more difficult than counting your blessings. Christianity is extended training in gratitude for what we are: needy creatures who live by grace. What a gift. But a hard one to learn how to gratefully receive.

The strangeness of St. Paul giving thanks to God for suffering, trials, and tribulations raises important questions. What kind of strange gifts should Christians desire? What worldview creates this grammar, and should such challenging experiences comprise the whole of Christian gratitude?

Paul’s letter to the Christians in Philippi is a great help for answering these questions. Paul writes to his friends, calling them “saints”[9] and “partners” or fellow-participants in the gospel.[10] Paul uses the Greek term koinonia here, which is his word for fellowship, communion, and deep friendship.[11] In this letter to his friends, Paul displays the strange gratitude of a Christian who is grateful “in all circumstances”[12] and states his gratitude for both belief in and suffering for Christ.[13] That Paul is grateful for such strange things as belief and suffering reveals a striking difference between the goods of the kingdom and those of this world, and this difference lays the groundwork for the peculiar Christian desire he then describes in Philippians 3. Paul here distinguishes the desires attached to this world from those of heaven as he suggests that transformation names the process by which we become citizens of heaven with heavenly desires and gratitude.[14]

In Philippians 4, Paul offers his blueprint for gratitude as he encourages the Christians in Philippi to nurture a worldview and disposition of gratitude by thinking on certain objects as gifts. He writes, “whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is gracious, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things.”[15] Those things that are true, honorable, just, and pure are not the most common objects of everyday gratitude, , but for Paul and the Christians in Philippi, such are the gifts that should shape and stimulate Christian gratitude. As Barth reminds us, it is by receiving our lives as gifts from God that we learn to see more clearly what is commendable, appreciate a new way of being pleased, and so identify both excellent and praiseworthy items in a whole new light.[16] Such things will appear strange to the world.

St. Laurence, a minister of the church in Rome during the third-century persecution of Christians under the Emperor Decius, offers one such example. When ordered by the Romans to gather into the church all its riches, Laurence set to work for two days doing just that. “On the third day he invited the [Roman] magistrate back to see the church filled with the poor, the lame, the orphan, and the widow. ‘These,’ he said, pointing to the destitute people in front of him, ‘are the riches of the Church’”.[17]

It is not only that Christians are grateful for strange things, like lives dispossessed of the world or the need to be in control. It is also that such strange gifts are attached to a strange Giver who bestows them in strange ways. That God gifts God’s self as a newborn baby to an unwed and impoverished couple, that God shines the sun and sends the rain on the righteous and unrighteous alike, that God rejoices more “over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous persons who need no repentance,” [18] that God saves the world by being executed as a political criminal, that God is determined not to be without being with us, reveals the strange character and ways of God. It is fitting then, that this strange God with strange ways would offer strange gifts and it requires a strange people to receive such strange gifts. Christians need training and transformation to become such people.

The earlier example of the person who can receive a cancer diagnosis without resentment or bitterness and even with a sense of gratitude for God’s unfailing loving kindness, presents us with a strange person indeed, and a person that we suspect bears the marks of a Christian. Such a person might receive the diagnosis as an occasion for God’s glory to be shown. Such a person might feel gratitude for God’s presence in the suffering and so give witness to that loving kindness. And such a person might be inclined to receive their new circumstance as an opportunity for loving God and neighbor in a new way.

Christian gratitude is not merely a kind of oppositional gratitude for the things this world would deem undesirable, but rather, it is a gratitude shaped by what is lovable, true, pure, and honorable. And so we celebrate, with a caveat, John Chrysostom’s insight on this matter in his sermon on Philippians. Chrysostom explains, “Whatever is lovable refers to what is lovable to the faithful, lovable to God. Whatever is true refers to that which is virtuous. For what is really true is virtue. Vice is falsehood—its pleasure is false, its glory is false, and everything in it is false. Whatever is pure is the contrary of thinking earthly thoughts. Whatever is honorable is the contrary of those whose god is their belly.”[19] Here Chrysostom rightly shows how the kingdom of God is the qualifier or adjudicator for what counts as lovable, true, honorable, and so on. But he is more inclined than we are to suggest that such goods are oppositional—contrary—to those of this world. Instead, we prefer to think of such goods as of an altogether different kind. To describe the kingdom as contrary or opposite the world underestimates the strange character of God, the Christian life, and Christian gratitude.

Jesus displays such strange gratitude when he praises God the Father for hiding the kingdom of heaven from “the wise and understanding” and revealing it to “babes.”[20] Origen understands Jesus’s gratitude here as stemming from the way in which God hid “this mystery [of the Incarnation] from Israel, which might be expected to be wise, and to reveal it to the Gentiles, who were until now without understanding.”[21] [LG2] The gifts of the kingdom engender intimacy with the Creator who has given us everything we need to be God’s friends forever, and such gifts may indeed be very different from the kinds of blessings the world counts, even if they are not contrary.

In a similar vein, Irenaeus of Lyon uses the example of Jonah’s being swallowed by a whale to underscore how strange such blessings can be. He writes, “For as [God] patiently suffered Jonah to be swallowed by the whale, not that he should be swallowed up and perish altogether, but that, having been cast out again, he might be the more subject to God, and might glorify Him the more who had conferred on him such an unhoped-for deliverance.”[22] Here the strange blessing of being swallowed by a whale exceeds Jonah’s wildest dream and helps him become a person of gratitude for God’s goodness, not only in growing bushes that bring shade, but even for saving the Ninevites.

Gratitude, good as it may be, takes new shape for Christians. The difference between Christian and non-Christian gratitude is not that the Christians are more grateful than the average person. Rather, the difference is that following Jesus produces a people who are grateful for the strange gifts of God. Acknowledging this Christian difference readies us for a different life indeed, one that is grateful for God, whose strange gifts surprise, upset, and confound the fleeting and thin gratitude of an unbelieving world. The positive psychology movement often presupposes that we already know what to be grateful for; all that is lacking is the attention and effort. But gratitude to God, of the sort we see embodied in the passages and stories above, is not the sort of thing that springs naturally from the human heart. Rather, Christian gratitude is a mark of a new life enlivened by the Spirit to celebrate our strange God who transforms us—sometimes painfully—into people capable of seeing gifts that we could not have otherwise seen.