Please listen with me to this snippet of a conversation: “If you hadn’t given him all that money, he would still be here with me. How could you have done it? His full share of the inheritance? You’ve become the laughingstock of the entire district. God only knows where he’s gone to. And still every day you sit on that front porch waiting, watching. I see you there, and it breaks my heart.” “Don’t worry, my dear, he’ll be back. He’s a good boy. He asked me, and I gave him what he wanted; I couldn’t hold him. But I know him. Trust me, he’ll be back.” And so, he waits; he will not stop loving, longing, and waiting, always waiting.
You see a younger son has gone off with his share - in Hebrew law, one-third of the estate. It’s an incredibly hefty sum of money. And asking for his inheritance while his father’s still alive amounts to wishing him dead. And then, Jesus tells us, he wastes it all. What’s worse, there’s a famine. And he hires himself out to a Gentile to feed pigs, pigs; so now he’s even lost his religious identity. No faithful Jew would ever conceive of such a thing. And all the while he is so hungry. And finally, the Gospel says, “he comes to himself,” as if to say he has been delusional, out of touch with reality.
Desperation and hunger bring him back to his senses. And he remembers, “Even my father’s hired hands have more than enough. I’m going home.” This change of heart is surely fired by the remembrance of how much he has always been loved. He hurries home, all the while rehearsing a speech, “Father, I have sinned against heaven and against you, I don’t deserve to be called a son…I do not deserve anything.”
From afar his father sees him and runs out, panting, heedless of his dignity; he embraces and kisses this lost son, burying his dear old face in the boy’s unwashed neck. And a speech, so carefully rehearsed, is interrupted. His father won’t hear of it, he wants only to love and forgive, and he responds with unheard-of, even ridiculous extravagance. This son wanted only to be treated as a hired hand but will instead be indulged as most honored one – with ring, robe, sandals, and a banquet in his honor – loved back to life as the son he never ever ceased to be, for he was thought to be dead but is alive.
Soon the older son, the reliable guy is back from work. Ever since his brother left, he’s been nursing a grudge as big as Gibraltar. He wipes his brow on the back of his sleeve, wipes his sweaty face and neck with his bandana. And he listens. Music and dancing? And what, our best fatted calf? Clearly, his father has gone overboard, he’s making a fool of himself, and he doesn’t want any part of it. “Look, I’ve been slaving for you for years; you never even gave me a kid goat so I could celebrate with my friends.” The father might have answered, “You never asked me. I’ll give you anything you want. Just ask. You are always with me.” And then finally, this most beautiful phrase: “All that is mine is yours.” The phrase sums up the entire parable. “All that is mine is yours.”
This is what my Father and your Father is like, Jesus tells us in this parable. And even more, the parable amounts to Jesus’ self-disclosure, “an extension of the mystery of his own person,” Donald Senior for he himself is the foolish, immeasurable extravagant excess of divine compassion enfleshed for us. In him, through him, the Father says categorically: “All that is mine is yours.” In Jesus, everything we want; everything is given to us.
And this is, in fact, what the ministry of Jesus discloses. Water is changed into galloons and gallons of wine, so that a party may continue for days; a boy’s few loaves are transformed into a banquet of bread for five thousand with heaps of leftovers. Numberless desperate individuals are healed by his touch, even the dead raised up at his word.
And this excess of God’s self-gift to us in Christ will be most perfectly revealed in his passion. There, Jesus, the Father’s beloved Son loses himself in love for our sake. On the cross, he squanders himself for us even unto the shedding of his last drop of blood in order to rescue us. But he will rise and return to his Father and take us with him. We must rejoice for we were lost and have been found by God in Christ forever. God wastes himself for us, God has given himself away to us.
Worthiness does not figure in the calculus of such love. In Jesus, the reign of God has arrived; the day of salvation is here and now. And this lavish gift of God in Christ begs only our openness to receive its exuberant abundance. It's all there for us, our work then is ceaseless receptivity and availability along with the responsibility to become conduits for this incessant overflow of divine compassion.
Which one of us is worthy of such ceaseless loving regard? It’s never been about worthiness. Still, the extravagance of mercy and compassion that always awaits us is worth the self-examination that will lead us to desperation and real hunger, as we realize we have nothing to recommend us but our need for God which is a faint echo of his burning desire to fill us with himself. At best this will not lead us to complacency but hearts rent with the desire to go and do likewise, to give and not to count the cost, to pump out mercy wherever we can in this place and trust its overflow to the entire world in hidden mystery.
I think of so many friends and family who have left the Church out of boredom, anger, or because they think the institution hypocritical, too legalistic, and ultimately irrelevant. And we must admit that we deserve to be critiqued. But still, my heart breaks because a flood, a banquet of joy, the fullness of consolation, and even exhilarating challenge is waiting for them, Jesus the Lord of love waiting and waiting for them. And in the end, aren’t we all like those two sons learning that we are loved more than we can know or imagine?
Here again, at this Table, we will consume this humility and immeasurable love that God is. Let us hold back nothing of ourselves for ourselves, so that he who gives himself so completely to us may receive us entirely in return. adapted from Saint Francis of Assisi For here and now in this Holy Eucharist, the wounded and risen Christ rushes toward us to bring us home and buries his most beautiful face in the dirty crook of our neck. The broken Bread we share is itself his kiss and divine embrace. Let us go to him.
Today's homily by one of our monks, with insights from Gerhard Lofhink and Pope Benedict XVI.
