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Fourth Sunday of Lent 
14 March 2010

 

• Josh 5:9a, 10-12  • Ps 34:2-7  • 2 Cor 5:17-21  • Luke 15:1-3, 11-32

Those listening to Jesus in today’s gospel are two very different groups: the tax collectors and sinners who are seeking the welcoming company of Jesus, and the Pharisees and scribes who grumble about him on the fringe. Jesus’ words are as disturbing to the latter as they are comforting to the former. The tax collectors and sinners believe that Jesus can restore to them some dignity and sense of self-worth; the Pharisees and scribes consider Jesus of no worth, just like the unsavoury company he keeps. Jesus wants to bridge the divisions of self-righteousness and scorn that keep one group unwilling to accept the other. So Jesus tells his audience a story that has become one of the best known and loved of his parables. And today we can change places with the tax collectors and sinners, the Pharisees and scribes, because we are his Lenten audience, gathered now around Jesus present in his word and sacrament.

“I wish you’d drop dead!” is, in first century Middle Eastern culture, the unspoken implication of the younger son’s request that his father give him a share of his inheritance, because the proper time for such an inheritance is when one’s father has died. As the first of his foolish acts of love, the father “divided his property between them.” The word used in the Greek text for “property” is bios, with the radical suggestion of ‘life’ or livelihood.’ Another little word that often escapes our notice is the last word in the father’s response: “them.” Without protest, the elder son also takes his share and, according to Deut 21:17-20, the listeners who were well-informed in the law, the Pharisees and scribes, would recognise that he may even have taken a double share. The elder brother certainly makes no attempt to meet the cultural expectations of being a reconciling ‘go-between’ in any family problems. Although he remains physically at home, this son is also in his own ‘far country’ of opportunism and intolerance of both his father and his brother, as will be revealed at the end of the parable.

The foolish love of the father respects the freedom of his younger son to reject his love. Love that is demanded and manipulated is not love. The son certainly did not leave home in order to end up in a pigsty, but that is where he eventually finds himself. Having squandered his inheritance, he is now starving and impoverished, enslaved to a Gentile boss, and given the task of looking after pigs, which makes him ritually unclean according to Jewish tradition. So he has also squandered another inheritance: his Jewish faith. At this crisis point, the son sits down and “comes to himself.” He works out his problem in the first person. Here am “I” dying of hunger, while my father’s paid workers have plenty to eat; so “I” will go home to my father and ask to be taken on as a hired wage-earning hand, so that “I” can pay back my debt. “I” will explain everything to my father and express regret at what “I” have dome. But he is hardly a model of repentance; the motivation for his return is quite self-serving.

Off he goes, and we can almost hear the son reciting his program that he thinks will earn him his father’s forgiveness.  But then comes the second response of the father’s foolish love. The father has been waiting, hoping for his son’s return. The parable’s original audience would not hear this as we might: as a private event. Many neighbours would have raised judgemental eyebrows at the culturally taboo action of the father’s undignified rush to meet the son that the village considered a wastrel. For the son, this was also an unexpected beginning to their meeting, but most surprising is the eager, compassionate embrace of his prodigally loving father.  In his father’s arms, all that the son manages to do is to stutter out a confession of his sinfulness and unworthy sonship – and this confession comes after, not before, the father’s demonstration of welcoming love. At the moment of the father’s embrace there is needed nothing more than letting go and being held. The son discovers that he is greeted for what he still is, a son, and not for what he has done. As Robert Frost once wrote: “Home is somewhere you don’t have to deserve.” A necessary aspect of reconciliation is to accept to be found and forgiven. From the father’s compassion – which is related to the Hebrew for ‘wombs’ – his son is newborn as his son, clothed with festal garments, shod with the shoes of a free man (slaves did not wear shoes), feasted and welcomed home, and raised to new life out of what the son thought was a dead relationship.

The elder son will not ‘come home’ into the celebration for his brother’s return, so for a third time the father shows his costly love by leaving the feast (and no doubt being criticised for this) in order to plead with him. This son, too, has to learn to allow himself to be found by his father’s love. But, without any evidence, he exaggerates his brother’s wrongdoing, refuses to speak of “my brother,” but only of “that son of yours.” His complete lack of understanding of what it means to be a son is revealed when he tells his father that what he has been all these years is a slave working for his father.

Abruptly, the parable leaves us on the threshold of choice with the elder son. In one week’s time we will stand on the threshold of the celebration of our Brother who was dead and has come to life; was lost and is found in risen glory; whose outstretched arms on the cross embrace us in the Father’s unimaginable love. Five weeks into Lent, are we putting enough effort into trudging back from any messy ‘pigsty’ or ‘fields’ of sinfulness where we are wasting our Christian heritage? Do we believe that forgiveness depends firstly on us, rather than on the our patient God who is waiting to love us if we only take the first hesitant steps towards that love? Are we fearful of the confession, the rehearsal of our sins, rather than trusting in the God for whom such a recitation on our lips is disregarded in favour of the sorrowful, stumbling love in out hearts?  Do we allow the grubby rags of our sinfulness to be stripped off so that our loving Father may clothe us anew in our baptismal commitment, give us a signet ring of his trust in us, and enable us to walk tall in the shoes of the free? (If we have RCIA in our parish community, this is the Sunday of the Second Scrutiny, and the gospel of Year A, the man born blind – John 9:1-41 is read.  With the elect we are also called to scrutinise our hearts, so the parable of the prodigal son might be a wonderful parable for our prayerful, reflective reading during the week.)

In the reading from the Book of Joshua, another crossing-over of the people into the provident love of God is proclaimed. The Israelites pitch camp at Gilgal, on the eastern border of the Promised Land. Now they can openly celebrate their first Passover freedom, harvest their own crops, feed on the produce of their own land rather than on the desert manna. Passover continues to be a celebration of God’s abiding graciousness to Israel, for the temptation is always there to forget the source of blessings when life becomes more comfortable and settled. God has “rolled away” from the people the shame of their Egyptian sojourn, and there is some word play between the Hebrew ‘gll’ meaning ‘to roll,’ the name Gilgal, and the cairn of twelve stones that the people rolled out of the river Jordan to build a cairn that would commemorate their crossing of the river and entry into the Land. Just as the Jewish Passover is a feast of freedom, so is our Christian Passover. We remember and celebrate our passing over from death to life in Christ when the stone of his tomb is rolled back and he rises to the glorious freedom which he shares with us, if we are his disciples who are willing to accept the demands of discipleship.

As humble people, we pray Ps 34 (33), realising that tasting and seeing the goodness of God is much more than eating the manna, or the Passover bread, or the produce of the Land, the entry into which is the backdrop of the first reading although they are symbolic of a deeper reality. To “taste” the goodness of God means to “find out by experience”; to dare to entrust our fears, our human poverty to the divine love; to acknowledge God as the liberator from our fears, our slavery to sin – and to speak out in both prayer and public so that others may come to know such a God.

In his Second Letter to the Corinthians, Paul proclaims the extent of the recreating and reconciling love of God: in Christ we are made a “new creation,” which is a continuous transformation. And this is all the initiative of God. Like the prodigal son, we cannot work out our reconciliation for ourselves; we can only accept it gratefully as God’s gracious gift in Christ. We are to become participants in the new and ongoing recreation of humanity and of the cosmos begun in Christ. For this to happen, alienation must give way to reconciliation in all spheres of life, personal and public. We rejoice that the Australian government has said ‘Sorry’ to the Stolen Generation of indigenous children and, more recently to the Lost Generation of the child migrants that came from England in the post-World War II years. Each one of us must become ambassadors of God’s reconciling love. It may be difficult to understand as part of the process of the ‘new creation’ our small efforts such as saying ‘Sorry’ to one another, our efforts to be a peacemaker in the family or workplace, our care for that part of the planet on which we try to walk with lighter carbon footprints – but this is the great vision that the church puts before us every Lent.

Benedict is a realist about the human failings that can tempt a monk or any Christian to settle down comfortably into a lifestyle where one’s own wilfulness rather than the will of God has priority. But although he understands this, Benedict knows the importance of being roused from the “inertia of disobedience” that can lead us, like the prodigal son, into a ‘far country’ away from God. To turn and return to God by the labour of obedience is part of the ongoing struggle to serve Christ (RB Prol 2-3), but it also demands that we turn to one another and forgive one another. “If you have a quarrel with someone, make peace before sundown” (RB 4.73), Benedict teaches. And this wisdom follows the hard gospel command to “Pray for your enemies for the love of Christ’ (RB 4.72). Sometimes it is only prayer and the Holy Spirit speaking within us, that can help us to make peace. Because to some extent we are all prodigal sons and daughters, Benedict tells his communities to frame each day with the recitation of the Lord’s Prayer at the community prayer of both morning and evening. Special attention, he says, should be given to the words: “Forgive…as we forgive.” If these words are prayed mindfully, they are a pledge to one another to do all that one can to prevent the “thorns of quarreling” springing up and choking the growth in holiness of the community (RB 13.12-13; 17.8). Not only in the monastery, but also outside it, this can be a very hard to do, but Benedict offers us all the consolation that we should “never despair of God’s mercy” (RB4.74), of trusting the eager forgiveness of a prodigally compassionate Father for his prodigal children.

 


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