4th. SUNDAY OF LENT (C)
(Joshua 5:9-12; 2
Corinthians 5:17-21; St. Luke 15:1-3, 11-32)
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My dear Brothers and Sisters in Christ, today we are encouraged to
rejoice on this Sunday called ‘Laetare Sunday’, and so it is up to me now to
show you something worth rejoicing about; indeed, something we should be
continually bringing to our minds and cherishing most gratefully in our
hearts. That ‘something’ is encapsulated in those words of the father to
his elder son:
My son, you are here with me always; everything I have is
yours.
Because human beings are sinful there are situations or questions
which can only be understood through suffering. Sin is in the world --
whether it be known or unknown, acknowledged or unacknowledged -- and because
it necessarily brings suffering and death into human life, it cannot long
remain totally undiscovered or unsuspected. That is at the root of the
old adage that one never truly appreciates something or someone until you have
lost it, which is the guiding principle of our Gospel parable today, which
begins with the words:
Then Jesus said, ‘A man had two sons’.
Immediately its
hearers are put under a slight tension of anticipation as to what might
distinguish these two sons; one is older the other younger, that is just a
physical fact of itself, but our Lord uses it to explain why He received
sinners and ate with them to the displeasure of the Pharisees and their Scribes,
and that is why we have before us two sinners being reconciled by their loving
father.
It would appear that the younger son did not fully appreciate his
home experience as a privilege because we are told that he said to his father:
Father, give me the share of your estate that should come to me.
No doubt the
father asked him why he was unsettled, but he got no answer so far as we know;
perhaps the boy was jealous of his elder brother as the privileged first son,
and, ashamed of such sin in his own heart, said nothing, but felt he just had
to leave.
The father went along with his son’s request and divided his
property accordingly.
After a few days the younger son collected all his belongings and
set off to a distant country where he squandered his inheritance on a life of
dissipation.
The elder son, on the other hand, does seem to have had greater
appreciation of his father and awareness of his own responsibility as the
first-born, elder, son. He seems to have understood something of the
worthiness of his father and his own duty to reverence and serve him. He
lived in that respect unselfishly and, duty-well-done had certainly given a measure
of dignity to his life thus far, which his younger brother most certainly did
not have.
However, he too had some sin hidden in his heart waiting to
manifest itself at the first opportunity, and it raised its head when his
younger brother came back to a ‘right royal’ welcome from his father. We are told that the older son on hearing the
rejoicing:
Became angry, and when he refused to enter the house, his father
came out and pleaded with him.
His filial
obedience and dutiful service had been, it would seem, not so much a response
of humble love for his father, as a very deep awareness of and careful
solicitude for his own future freedoms: and now he was jealous of the
whole-hearted welcome – witness the fattened calf – given to his brother’s
return. Perhaps he himself, despite his
years of faithful service, had never been able to evoke anything wholehearted
in response to his own careful exactitude in compliancy with his father, an
exactitude totally resistant to any overflow of generosity.
Whatever it
might have been, it caused him to forget his customary respect for his father:
He said to his father, ‘Look, all these years I served you and not
once did I disobey your orders; yet you never gave me even a young goat to
feast on with my friends. But when your son returns who swallowed up your
property with prostitutes, for him you slaughtered the fattened calf!’
Notice immediately, however, that the old man was very
understanding, and responded in such a way as to make it quite clear that his
elder son should have an awareness of the special appreciation in which he
himself was held, and where his ultimate fulfilment and happiness were to be
found. His father said to him:
My son, you are here with me always; everything I have is
yours. But now we (you and I as
one, as we most truly are) must celebrate and rejoice, because your brother was dead and has
come to life again; he was lost and has been found.
He calls the elder ‘My son’, while in the same breath referring to
the younger, despite being the cause for such heartfelt rejoicing, simply as
‘your brother’.
This parable of Jesus is unique in that it speaks directly and
intimately of a father’s personal relationship with two very different sons,
and I have no doubt that speaking of the father in this parable Jesus was
irresistibly drawn to portray something of His own love for, and appreciation
of, His heavenly Father; for it is truly a parable not about a Prodigal Son,
for there are two sons; but a parable about of His own Father’s love for sinful
men.
My dear People of God, there is nothing whatsoever in life that
can compare with the dignity and glory which is already ours as disciples of
Jesus -- the only-begotten and eternally beloved Son of God – disciples called,
in Him, to become members of the heavenly Father’s family, His adopted and
beloved children, for all eternity. Correspondingly, there could be no greater
tragedy in our lives than that we should lose such an incomparable privilege
and destiny: Esau sold his birthright as first-born to his younger brother
Jacob for some bread and a quickly consumed stew of lentils; and, despite a
subsequent heart-rending plea of to his father Isaac, forfeited all:
“Father, bless me too! Have you only one blessing,
father? Bless me too, father!” And Esau wept aloud. (Genesis
25:31-34)
Dear brothers and sisters in Christ, the Father’s love for us, is
His love for-us-in-Jesus:
The Father Himself loves you because you have loved Me and have
come to believe that I came from God (John 16:27).
That is the essential constituent of our being as God’s adopted
children, just as Jesus describes His own earthly being and experience within
the same framework of a relationship with the Father:
I came from the Father and have come into the world. Now I
am leaving the world and going back to My Father (John 16:28).
Originally opening up the possibility of such a relationship for
the Chosen People we were told in our first reading that:
The Lord said to Joshua, ‘Today, I have removed the reproach of
Egypt (the servitude in Egypt) from you.’
The reproach of our modern world is yet more virulent than that of
Egypt, therefore keep in the front of your minds and close to your hearts those
words of St. Paul in our second reading:
Whoever is in Christ is a new creation: the old things have passed
away; behold new things have come. And all this is
from God (the Father) Who has reconciled us to Himself through
Christ.
Being reconciled to God means that we have become, in
Jesus, children of God, called to heavenly life, eternal life. However, just as the Israelites, after long
years of slavery in Egypt, found the prospect of freedom somewhat alien and
unattractive, so too, those who today live in the world, surrounded by the
world’s pleasures, cannot readily imagine the freedom of the children of God
which Christ is offering; the joy, hope, and peace of those called to become,
as Paul said, the goodness of God, can seem totally unreal.
St. Paul in our second reading told us that:
God was reconciling the world to
himself in Christ, not counting their trespasses against them and entrusting to
us the message of reconciliation. So, we
are ambassadors for Christ, as if God were appealing through us. We implore you
on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God.
The elder son in the parable had had a somewhat similar
office of reconciliation to fulfil with regard to his younger brother, and he
seems to have failed in that duty; therefore, perhaps we can learn from his
mistakes something that will be of help to us, and through us, of help to those
who, lapsed or lapsing from the faith, are on the way to becoming slaves,
captivated by the promises and pleasures of this world.
According to Middle East culture and Jewish traditional
values, such an elder son would hold the position of mediator in a family
crisis. When the younger son asked for
his inheritance the responsibility and obligation of the elder one was clear to
the first-century listener: the old father should have been asked to leave the
matter in the hands of his elder son, because the younger boy did not really
mean what he had said; the elder should then have demanded that his younger
brother apologize to their father.
However, the elder son had –over the years -- shown too little personal
appreciation of and love for, his father as to be able, now, to
influence his brother’s youthful selfishness; nor was it enough to help the
older brother himself rise to the occasion and give positive help when his
brother first began thinking of leaving home with his patrimony. Ultimately the elder brother, like his
younger sibling, regarded his father impersonally: not indeed so coarsely as
his brother, for whom his father was primarily the one in charge of the money;
but nevertheless, as we learn from his own words, as little more than a distant
and authoritative figurehead, and he seems to have been quite content to see
his younger brother go off with his share of the inheritance.
Of course, the fact that he was not pleased when his
brother returned home is understandable, I suppose very few brothers would have
been pleased to see such a wastrel back home again. The elder brother would only have been able
to embrace his brother’s return out of deep love for his father … and he seems
to have had difficulty in accepting his father’s extreme joy at his younger
son’s return home. Again, that is
understandable, for this father’s joy, being the expression of the unique love of a truly exemplary father for his
lost-and-returning child, was almost unimaginable, due to Jesus’ love for His
heavenly Father overflowing into His portrayal of this earthly father.
We see this yet more clearly in the father’s somewhat
pathetic attempt to promote a special bond of mutual concern with his elder
son:
My son, you are here with me
always; everything I have is yours. But
now we (that is, you and I together) must celebrate and rejoice
because your brother was dead and has come to life again.
Ultimately, however, the elder son had shown too little
personal appreciation of, and love for, his father, to have been able to
influence his brother’s selfishness; he was, consequently, also quite unable now
to appreciate and respond to his father’s one, self-revealing, word of appeal:
we -- both of us together, you and I -- must celebrate, because
your brother has come to life again.
In this, the elder brother is like many Catholics today who
will obey the commandments of God and Mother Church consistently enough, but
who can never stir up enough zeal to give open and personal witness to Jesus
and the heavenly Father, by their joy and delight, their peace and their hope,
in the Faith; and thereby they fail Jesus, themselves, and their neighbour.
Many, especially young people, find such passionless
obedience -- given, they think, more out of fear than zeal -- unattractive; if
they have intelligence and some understanding of life, they might admit that --
though faulty -- such obedience is both reasonable and wise; but, finding it
unattractive, they are prepared to totally ignore it. Failure to delight in the Lord is a fault in
the believer. Such a failure is not
simply due to being undemonstrative by nature, but also to an insufficiently
committed, perhaps lazy, spiritual attitude.
For delighting in the Lord is not a matter of blind emotion or natural
excitability; rather true delighting in Jesus flows from a habit of faithfully
remembering, deeply appreciating, and gratefully acknowledging one’s blessings.
The Psalmist applies this human, psychological, fact to
religion when he tells us:
Let the hearts of those rejoice
who seek the Lord! Seek the Lord and
His strength; seek His face evermore!
Remember His marvellous works which He has done. (105:3-5)
People of God, I suggest to you, on this ‘Laetare Sunday’,
dedicated to spiritual rejoicing, that you would do much to avoid repeating the
elder son’s failure, if you learned to truly rejoice in our faith. By that I mean that we all should try, first
of all, to look honestly at ourselves and learn to recognize the many blessings
we have received over the years; and then also begin to look forward to the
promises given us concerning our future in Jesus; after all, can it be that
ill-educated, grossly miss-led young fanatics, are the only ones who can commit
themselves totally to a heavenly future they believe in because their 'god' encourages
them to do the thing they most enjoy, expressing hatred, and exacting revenge?
Finally, having, in that way, become prepared, ready, and
willing, to speak more freely and sincerely of the sure delight we have in the
faith, of the comfort and strength it affords us in the present life, and of
the joyful and confident hope it inspires in us for the life to come, we all
will -- in accordance with St. Paul’s words -- be graced to transfigure our
old, private, obedience into public confession and praise, since:
Whoever is in Christ is a new
creation: the old things have passed away; behold, new things have come! And all this is from God (the Father) Who has reconciled us to
Himself through Christ.
(2022)
