FOURTH SUNDAY OF LENT C

[cappie]

An image is formed by these Scripture passages, most especially by the Second Reading and the Gospel story, of a God with open arms ready to receive us in a loving embrace. This image is constant and unchanging. Past and future don’t exist in God’s embrace: God is always waiting; God is always willing to take us in; God does not look back to our own miserable past, but God offers us the immediacy of love. Keep this image before your eyes. “It is all God’s work.” St Paul assures us “It was God who reconciled us to himself through Christ” Jesus and Paul make it quite clear; it is we who have moved away, we who must return and be reconciled. God’s arms remain open in order to embrace us when we return. These arms never push us away. Never ever.

 Jesus talks about two brothers. As it is written, the story invites us to compare the siblings as foils to each other, a “Goofus and Gallant” contrast. But thinking about the parable as an explanation of Jesus’ behaviour makes it problematic to think about the brothers as a dichotomy. Instead, we can think about the overarching theme of transformation. The younger brother, that “prodigal” son, leaves one normal day, experiences pain, mess, and desperation, and returns– returns repentant. The elder brother has elegantly entered a new normal when his brother departed, diligently doing his work and assuming the responsibility of a loyal heir. His brother’s return interrupts this and forces a new normal on him, one which is jarring and uncomfortable. He leaves the party, entering his own liminal space between what was and what will be.

The father, who easily stands in as the Saviour or the Creator or some other divine entity of love, does not stand idly by as his sons grapple with their identities and struggles and roles in the family system. The father steps into the liminal space to meet his sons– he runs out to welcome his youngest son home. He removes himself from party preparation to meet his eldest. The parent meets the child amid the mess and change and awkwardness. The parent does not wait until the child has figured themself out, but reaches out and accompanies them through the repentance, the return, and the transformation.

In the rabbinic literature of Pesikta Rabbati (a collection of commentary on certain Hebrew scriptures), the story of reaching and return is summed up like this:

A king had a son who had gone astray from his father on a journey of a hundred days. His friends said to him, “Return to your father.” He said, “I cannot.” Then his father sent word, “Return as far as you can, and I will come the rest of the way to you.” So, God says, “Return to me, and I will return to you.”

The child needs to go through the journey of repentance, restitution, and reparation in order to repair the breach but is always met with accompaniment and hospitality, just as God always meets us with forgiveness.

Forgiveness from God is a clean slate, no grudges kind of love, but human reconciliation requires sacrifice. We are reconciled to God in Christ, and so we must live out the same ministry of reconciliation. The self-examination offered to us during the season of Lent ought to reveal the transformation that comes from repentance, sacrifice, and forgiveness.

The Father’s words of longing and compassion still come to His prodigal children in the Sacrament of Penance. This is part of what Paul today calls “the ministry of reconciliation” entrusted by Jesus to the Apostles and the Church.

Reconciled like Israel, we take our place at the table of the Eucharist, the homecoming banquet the Father calls for His children. We taste the goodness of the Lord, as we sing in today’s Psalm, rejoicing that we who were dead are found alive again.