24th.
Sunday Year (C)
(Exodus 32:7-11,
13-14; 1Timothy 1:12-17; Luke 15:1-10)
People
of God, you may have felt today's first Gospel parable to be rather difficult
to appreciate and perhaps even somewhat unfair:
I say
to you that there will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than
over ninety-nine just persons who need no repentance.
However,
the second word-picture Jesus went on to paint for us was much easier to
understand. In it, we learned of a woman
who had lost a notable part of the little wealth she had, one of her ten coins,
and we were told that:
Why
therefore did Jesus deliberately choose to make His first, and therefore more important
little parable, more difficult to understand
and perhaps even seem somewhat unfair?
There
will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine
just persons who need no repentance.
Was he
trying to shock us, to jolt us? And if
so, why?
Jesus
spoke of what He knew, “joy in heaven"; what, however, does ‘joy in heaven’
mean for us who have no such heavenly experience?
Catholic
theology tells us that heaven is where God is, as the All in all; and
where the Holy Spirit of love -- proceeding from the Father to embrace
the Son, and, flowing back from the Son in acknowledgment of His Father -- is
the bond of unity whereby the three Divine Persons are one God. The Father's love for the Son in the
Spirit is the originating source of all joy in heaven and life on earth.
Behold!
My Servant (My Son) in whom My soul
delights! I have put My Spirit upon
Him; He will bring forth justice to the Gentiles. (Isaiah
42:1)
Now,
the Father willed to make manifest that love for that His Son now become
incarnate when, at Jesus' baptism in the Jordan, He declared in the hearing of
John the Baptist:
This
is My beloved Son, in whom I am well-pleased; (Matthew
3:7)
and then
again once more – this time on the Mount of Transfiguration – the Father’s voice
rang out from an overshadowing cloud and said to Peter, James, and John:
This
is My beloved Son, listen to Him! (Mark 9:7)
For
His part, Jesus -- speaking to the intimate circle of His Apostles -- several
times mentioned the bond of love uniting Himself to the Father:
The
Father loves the Son and has given all things into His hand.
The
Father and I are One. (John 3:35; 10:30)
So,
People of God, there is only one Holy Spirit of love, one joy, one rejoicing,
in Heaven, it is the love of the Father, rejoicing, delighting, in His Son; it
is the love of the Son responding wholeheartedly to the Father, by the Spirit.
Therefore,
when we hear Jesus say:
There
will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine
just persons who need no repentance,
He is
speaking of the Father's rejoicing because one sinner has come to repentance through
Jesus; that is, because one sinner, by acknowledging and repenting of his
own sin and turning to Jesus, has rejected his own self-righteousness and has
become – by the Spirit -- clothed in the righteousness of Jesus. The Father rejoices in heaven over one such sinner
who has thus been reformed into the likeness of Christ and has become, thereby,
a son in the beloved Son.
St. Peter
made this very clear in his address to the rulers, elders, and scribes gathered
in Jerusalem, as did St. Paul in his letter to the Philippians:
Let it
be known to you all, and to all the people of Israel, that by the name of Jesus
Christ of Nazareth, whom you crucified, whom God raised from the dead, by Him
this man stands here before you whole.
This is the 'stone which was rejected by you builders, which has become
the chief cornerstone.' Nor is there
salvation in any other, for there is no other name under heaven given among men
by which we must be saved. (Acts
4:10-12)
Indeed,
I also count all things loss for the excellence of the knowledge of Christ
Jesus my Lord, for whom I have suffered the loss of all things, and count them
as rubbish, that I may gain Christ and be found in Him, not having my own
righteousness, which is from the law, but that which is through faith in
Christ, the righteousness which is from God by faith.
(Philippians 3:8-9)
Jesus
gave us two parables: the first being most relevant to His Public Mission as Incarnate
Lord and Saviour; and the second, more suited to the continuing mission of holy
Mother Church. In the first parable, one sheep, led astray by the devil, wandered
off from the flock; in the second, one coin was lost by a woman who should have
kept it more carefully.
The one
sheep, led astray by the devil’s hatred and cunning, could not have lived long in
the desert. Jesus -- the very Son-of-God-made-flesh
– came, was sent, to save mankind from spiritual disaster: for they were sheep
intended for divine pasturing, sheep so very, very, dear to God the Father,
made – as they were -- in God’s own image and likeness.
I say
to you that there will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents,
than over ninety-nine just persons who need no repentance.
Being
found by Jesus, means repentance for the sheep thus lost through sin.
The
woman who had lost one of her coins, did her utmost to find what was lost, as Mother Church also – grieving souls lost through scandals of all sorts -- does
her very best, by the grace of her worship and sacraments, by the prayers of
her faithful, by the guidance and help of her saints and doctors and the
fellowship of our guardian angels … to find what she should not have lost.
When
she has found it, she calls her friends and neighbours together, saying,
'Rejoice with me, for I have found the piece which I lost!' Likewise, Jesus said, there is joy in the
presence of the angels of God over one sinner who repents."
The
first parable tells us of the repentance of a sinner on seeing the face of,
hearing the voice of, Jesus, the Saviour sent by His Father for this very
purpose; the repentance of one humbly obeying the Holy Spirit of Jesus and
learning from Him our Helper to recognize, rejoice in, yield himself to, Jesus,
our Saviour indeed, but also my very own, Lord and Saviour.
The
second speaks of repentance in the Church, sinners turning back as sorrowful children
to the embrace of their loving Mother, pictured most truly by her who suffered
a sword’s thrust in her own soul, Mary of Nazareth, Mother of Jesus, our dear
Lady, our most loving Mother.
Dear
Brothers and Sisters in Christ, John the Baptist, prepared the way for Jesus by
preaching in the wilderness of Judea:
Repent,
for the kingdom of heaven is at hand. (Matthew
3:1-2)
And
Jesus Himself began His public ministry in a like manner:
From
that time Jesus began to preach and say, "Repent, for the kingdom of
heaven is at hand." (Matthew
4:17)
And
this call to repentance by Jesus was so urgent and so essential that He once
declared in Jerusalem:
Unless
you repent, you will all perish. (Luke 13:5)
Repentance
means much more than just sorrow for the past; it requires a change for the
future, as John the Baptist had told those who came to him:
Bear
fruits worthy of repentance. (Luke 3:8)
Jesus
took up from John and advanced to where John could not go. He showed clearly what John's vague words
"fruits for repentance" really meant, for the theme of Jesus' public
ministry was: “Repent and believe the Good News” (Mark 1:15). God gives us the grace of repentance for our
pride-tainted, sin-scarred, lives, by bestowing on us the supreme gift of
faith, whereby we aspire to live our future in loving witness and obedience to
the Person and teaching of Jesus Christ, Our Lord and Saviour, as sons in the
Son, by the Spirit, for the Father.
People
of God, all this is implied by, and contained in, those "shocking"
words of Jesus:
There
will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine
just persons who need no repentance.
We
have rightly gathered here today to praise and glorify our God for His wondrous
goodness to us in Jesus. And, having
begun to appreciate the beauty of His wisdom, we must also seek to learn from
His truth; for the fact is that Jesus came, as He Himself said, to call not
those self-styled, so-called, virtuous ones, approved and accepted by worldly
standards, but those who were -- in their own eyes and before God -- sinful and
desperately sick.
People
of God, we are not holy, none of us; let us therefore learn from divine wisdom
and accept that God rejoices not in our holiness so much as in our spirit of
repentance; and that the only holiness that rejoices the Father is likeness to
His Son, Jesus: a holiness which comes as a gift from the Spirit of Holiness
Himself, and in which we can only share (not earn!) by means of true faith and
loving commitment to Jesus.
Our
first Catholic and Christian duty is to come before God in a spirit of
repentance and to offer Him the only acceptable worship, the worship Jesus
first offered on our behalf and for our salvation on Calvary, the worship He
continues to offer -- Personally in heaven and sacramentally at every Mass here
on earth -- the worship of His own self-sacrifice of love. We should never come to Mass in order to get
for ourselves, even though we hope to receive Holy Communion. We must always come to Mass to offer:
Jesus, in the first place, for our sins and the sins of the world, and then
ourselves -- in and with Jesus -- to the Father, for His glory. Only then can we fittingly come forward to receive
Holy Communion in
order that we might have grace to live out the offering we have just made.
People
of God, if we allow the wisdom and truth of God to lead us to repentance and
faith, then -- through the sacraments, above all through the Mass and the
Eucharist -- God’s power and majesty can be effective in, and even through, our
lives.
Therefore,
let us praise our God today, let us admire and acknowledge the wisdom of
His words and the beauty of His truth as contained in the Good News of Jesus;
let us proclaim and give expression to the power and majesty of His
saving grace; let us then finally thank Him for His goodness, putting
all our hope and trust in the power of His Spirit at work in our lives. Such worship is the wedding garment that
will give us the right to take our seat at the heavenly banquet; it is the
token of all those who belong to the flock of which Jesus is the true and only Shepherd
of God’s chosen flock
