As Lent is the time for greater love, listen to Jesus’ thirst…’Repent and believe’ Jesus tells us. What are we to repent? Our indifference, our hardness of heart. What are we to believe? Jesus thirsts even now, in your heart and in the poor — He knows your weakness. He wants only your love, wants only the chance to love you.
ST. MOTHER TERESA OF CALCUTTA
Friendship is the source of the greatest pleasures, and without friends even the most agreeable pursuits become tedious.
ST. THOMAS AQUINAS
“This man welcomes sinners and eats with them.”
Jesus responds to this charge of the Pharisees and scribes with three parables: first, the Parable of the Lost Sheep, in which the shepherd leaves the ninety-nine in order to bring back the one lost sheep; and then the Parable of the lost coin, in which a woman with ten silver coins loses one and searches diligently until she finds it. Both cases are causes for calling together friends and neighbors to rejoice and celebrate, for what they once had lost but has been found and restored to them. Jesus concludes the parable of the lost sheep by saying, “Just so, I tell you, there will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous persons who need no repentance.” And at the end of the Parable of the Lost Coin: “Just so, I tell you, there is joy before the angels of God over one sinner who repents. He concludes with the Parable of the Prodigal Son, which we have just heard.
Today, Laetare Sunday, the Church asks us to take a pause in this penitential season and rejoice, Laetare. As we sang in today’s Introit from Isaiah: “Rejoice, Jerusalem, you who have known sorrow. Soon shall Zion be found filled with consolation.” Today, the liturgy calls us to anticipate the Easter joy that we will celebrate in a few weeks. The parable of the prodigal son has much to say to us about genuine joy, festivity and celebration, as well as its false forms and the obstacles we place in its way.
Earlier in Luke’s Gospel, when Jesus says of John the Baptist, “I tell you among those born of women none is greater than John; yet he who is least in the kingdom of God is greater than he”, Luke comments: “When they heard this all the people and the tax collectors justified God, having been baptized with the baptism of John; but the Pharisees and the lawyers rejected to purpose of God for themselves, not having been baptized by him.” Here, too, the tax collectors and sinners who have drawn near to hear Jesus are open to the purposes of God, whereas the Pharisees are not, because their focus on ritual purity and , therefore, on who is therefore worthy to be a table companion with the righteous has rendered them incapable of rejoicing and celebrating the restoration of the lost.
Jesus wants to bring them around, so let us look at how he does so through the three main characters of this parable.
First, the Father. The first trait of the father that I see is that he lets go. The younger of the sons said to his father, “Father, give me the share of the property that falls to me.” Followed immediately by, “And [the father] divided his living between them.” No discussion, no argument, no sign of displeasure or shock on the side of the father, only the laconic statement, “And he divided his living among them.” Request for the patrimony, gift of the patrimony, no more is said. The father is one who lets go.
The father loves his two sons. He loves by letting go. His letting go is not neglect, but an expression of love and intimacy within the familial bonds of paternal and filial love. As he says later to the elder son, “You are always with me. And all that is mine is yours.”
The younger son senses the radical generosity of the father and the freedom that accompanies it. It had been part of his relationship with his father for his entire life; but now he disregards the laws of kinship and the familial bonds in which the letting go has its origin and becomes fruitful.
The freedom he has already is not sufficient for him and is not of the right kind. It’s too tied to the restrictions of familial bonds. The younger son longs for a freedom of his own making, of which he may regard himself as the origin, not his father. He also longs for a different kind of “letting go”, also of his own making, in which he can make use of his father’s wealth as he sees fit, without reference to the father. In this way, separate from his family, he believes he will find the happiness that the longs for, in an autonomous life of self-gratification. And so he makes the presumptuous request, outrageous in the culture of his time, that the father hand over to him now the patrimony that is to come to him. It is given to him, and he goes off to pursue his ideal life.
The elder son also senses this “letting go” that is so characteristic of his father. But to him, all this letting go is too much: too messy, too unpredictable, too many unknowns, too much uncertainty. So he reconfigures this disposition of his father into a life of discipline, hard work, duty and obligation. A self-made, well-ordered life which appears to him much more responsible and directed to a better outcome. He sets boundaries and limits where there were none.
But in doing so, he too shows himself to have chosen a life of autonomy from the father and his ways. He, too, has separated himself from familial bonds. He, too, is estranged from the father.
The second trait of the love of the father I would like to call “letting be.” He leaves the sons to their choice. He does not abandon them, he accompanies them with his love, but he does not compel them either. They remain free in their choices.
Meanwhile, the younger son, humiliated by the results of his choices, comes to his senses, and, ready to repent, returns home.
The father, consistent with his understanding of love as letting go, without any concern for his honor as a man of his position in society, or how outlandish his behavior might appear to his fellow first century Jews, upon seeing his son, while he was still at a distance (this detail tells us that he always on the watch for his son’s return), consistent with tendency to excess, ran to meet him, embraced him, kissed him, clothed him in a robe, gave him a ring for his finger and sandals for his feet, restored him to his place in the family he had snubbed and abandoned, and ordered the killing of a fatted calf and threw a big feast.
Here we see the third character trait of the father: compassion.
The response of the elder son, on the other hand was anger. He had long ago distanced himself from his father’s way, which was the order of Charity, love as agape. The elder son’s order of duty and obligation made no room for such surprises as the return of the wayward younger son and the father’s joyful celebration at the restoration of the lost.
We could say that both sons needed to learn true festivity, one that should have undergirded every aspect of their lives as they had been given, as they had received it from the start. A spirit of joyful celebration, at the most primal level, at the sheer givenness of their own existence and that of one another as other. As a fitting response of gratitude to the father’s fundamental affirmation in love: “It is good that you exist.”
A readiness to celebrate at the signs of the father’s goodness that had manifested itself again and again in their lives. Signs of this father who, from his abundance, is shamelessly prodigal in his generosity, who is ready to let go of his substance on behalf of his sons, who is ready to let be and accompany them amidst all the vicissitudes of life, with all their strengths and weakness, ups and downs and so on. Who even when they have rejected him is ready to receive them with joyful compassion when they return to him. What he asks of them is that they accept the familial bond in which all of this is nurtured and becomes fruitful, to accept the intimacy that is offered.
If they had done this, they would have been more likely to pass by any temptation to the paltry substitutes they had contrived. Choices that reduced one son to the precarious existence of a day laborer and the other to a kind of slave.
As Christians, we know that we have such a father. We know that he is always with us and that everything he has is ours. Let us be open today to the inbreaking of his love that is going on all around us. Let us rejoice because, although we were lost, we have been found and restored to life as sons and daughters in Christ.
The Church lives Christ’s redemptive sacrifice throughout the liturgical year. However, in the season of Lent we would like to immerse ourselves in it in a particularly intense way, as the Apostle urges us: "Behold, now is the acceptable time; behold, now is the day of salvation!” (2 Corinthians 6:2). In this important season, the treasures of Redemption, merited for us by Christ crucified and risen, are dispensed to us in a most particular way. Thus the Psalmist’s exclamation: "Create in me a clean heart… and put a new and right spirit within me" becomes during Lent a strong call to conversion.
ST. POPE JOHN PAUL II Homily, Ash Wed., 12 Feb. 1997
The New Testament uses the language of the Body of Christ so as to drum in a message about unity not simply as cooperation but as a sort of mutual creation: we constitute each other… In the central act of worship, the Eucharist, we come together to be fed—fed buy a reality wholly other to us yet made wholly accessible to us; fed so that we can feed one another. The Eucharist isn't an occasion when we set out to celebrate our togetherness and to encourage each other by the degree of our warm fellowship and close agreement. It is as we meet that we are fed by Christ, and because we are fed by him that we become able to feed each other. Somehow, no account of unity that doesn't bring us to this place is going to be adequate.
ROWAN WILLIAMS The Tablet, 18 Jan. 2008
Two unavoidable things about fire: it both gives light and burns. In 1955 Flannery O’Connor said the following to one of her correspondents on her difficulties in being a Catholic writer: “One of the awful things about writing when you are a Christian is that for you the ultimate reality is the Incarnation, the present reality is the Incarnation, the whole reality is the Incarnation, and nobody believes in the Incarnation: that is, nobody in your audience.” Now, why would she refer to the central mystery of our faith as awful in its effects? Well, for one thing, I wouldn’t put it past her to be playing on the two meanings of the word “awful”: at the same time the everyday one of “terrible, off-putting” and then the other more exalted one: “full of awe”. Indeed, the fact that God at a certain point decided to become a human being is at the same time the most comforting and the most problematic of events, if we take it with all the earnestness of a believer like Flannery O’Con-nor, or of Our Lady herself. After all, Mary’s first reaction to Gabriel’s announcement was not delight but fear, and she was “greatly troubled” at God’s proposal to her—a truly honest and realistic reaction, hinting that she quite suspected all the hardships the Incarnation would bring in its wake.
When we say that the Mother of the Lord presents to us the perfect model of faith, we often forget that this means not only accepting the will of God wholeheartedly as a source of joy but also wrestling mightily and bravely with the difficult contradictions that God’s will almost always introduces into our lives. It seems that God never comes to us only to console us and make us feel better about whatever situation we find ourselves in. Because God’s will always involves a plan for the salvation for the whole world and everyone in it, God’s consolation to us always comes accompanied with the expectation that we will become partners with him in the redemption of the world: that is, his grace in us must always become fruitful for the good of others, exactly as in Mary’s case: not for nothing do we call her the “Mother of the Redemption”; and this demand on God’s part can be an intense trial for our quintessentially lazy human nature.
But let’s take a look at these two aspects of the central Christian mystery which we are celebrating today in the middle of Lent: the aspects that make the In-carnation to be at once awesome to hear and terrible to bear.
What could ever equal the marvel of God’s intense desire not only to be with us but to do so not in any external, superficial manner but indeed by becoming one of us? This extraordinary wonder should never cease to resonate in all the fibers of our being, every day of our lives. In fact, our awareness of this unheard-of marvel should be the habitual center of our faith, the place of refuge to which we flee in every temptation and in every suffering. It is a secret we want to shout out into the stars out of all the nights of our soul: the Creator of the universe has wanted to be at home in us, in me, sharing who we are from the inside out, not as a superior Being coming down upon us from above but, rather, as a devoted and active presence more intimate to my heart than I am to myself, and this every minute of my life!
How magnificent for us to feel wanted, desired, understood, and supported by the very Source of our being! Is there any difficulty then that we cannot face, when the Creator has made himself at home in the dwelling of the creature, because he is so ravished by the beauty and goodness of what he has created, despite its myriad flaws? And the way in which all this occurs is so surprising and reassuring precisely because it is so ordinary. To effect Our Lord’s Incarnation the Holy Spirit comes, not only into our world, our habitat, but to the land of Israel, to the town of Nazareth, to the humble house of Mary and Joseph, and to the very room where Mary happens at that moment to be sewing, or cooking, or cleaning, or perhaps simply praying. (I doubt very much whether she was actually reading Scripture at that moment, as some pious authors and artists want to represent her. Because at that time poor Jews did not have scrolls of the Bible lying around the house. One magnificent icon shows Mary weaving, but weaving the red thread of her Son’s flesh!) She in whom the Scripture’s greatest promise was about to be fulfilled did not need to be reading Scripture. She herself was the living book of flesh in which the Holy Spirit was about to inscribe the Word of Life! It must have been a consolation beyond any imagining for Mary’s faith suddenly to become inhabited by the presence of the God who was already her all as her Creator.
However, all is not consolation. When Our Lady gives her unconditional fiat to God through the angel, she must already suspect that the Almighty cannot come into our lives in that absolute, irreversible manner without certain fundamental challenges emerging, challenges that would prove terrible to an ordinary human heart. The initial trembling of her soul at Gabriel’s approach was not a misunderstanding or an excess of humility. Her human nature quaked at what she sensed was in store for her as Mother of the Messiah. The glorious fact that her son Jesus “will be called Son of the Most High…, and he will rule over the house of Jacob forever” could not conceal the other fact that this Messiah was coming to deliver his people from their sins, and that he would do it by the offering of his own life as an atoning sacrifice. Her Son would be the King of Love who reigns from a cross. She was being invited to become the mother of a crucified King.
Mary had intimate knowledge of the prophecies of Isaiah and of the ways of a God who is love; and so she must have already suspected what Simeon would eventually tell her explicitly in the temple at the Presentation: namely, that “this Child is to be a sign that is contradicted, and your own soul a sword shall pierce”—surely the sword of her compassion at the foot of the Cross. One doesn’t become intimately involved in the life of a redeeming God, one doesn’t admit the transforming presence of God into one’s house and soul, without joining God in the massive project of the world’s redemption. After admitting God and all God’s ways into the sanctuary of one’s life, one will never be able to go back to one’s previous, private, self-determined life. From the moment of the Annunciation on, neither Our Lady nor any of us can fail to find the Lord Jesus, the eternal God of the ages, alive and present and suffering in all human flesh we encounter, especially in the least of God’s children.
Once human flesh has been touched by divinity, the whole world lights up with the burning presence of God. As at the burning bush, God present in human flesh through Mary’s unconsumed virginity makes us take off the sandals of our self-protection, the sandals of our arrogance, of our separateness, of our sham autonomy, in order to touch the Godhead with the skin of our feet and hands, with the sensitive skin of our hearts, in order to adore and serve the living God as he encounters us continually both in our own suffering and in the suffering of all who share our very same flesh.
Let us ask for the grace to believe that with God things really do change, that he will banish our fears, heal our wounds, turn our arid places into springs of water. Let us ask for the grace of hope, since hope revives our faith and rekindles our charity. It is for this hope that the deserts of today's world are thirsting.
POPE FRANCIS Custodians of Wonder: Daily Pope Francis