30 March 2025

30 March 2025 - Fourth Sunday of Lent

Transcript

Reading:  

Luke 15:12

Write:  

“Father give me the share of your estate that should come to me.”

Reflect:   

What is the son really saying to his dad? He is saying – in effect – “dad, you are dead to me! I don’t care anything about you and I don’t want anything more to do with you. Just give me the money and leave me alone.” Does that sound surprising? That is what it meant in that culture. You are not supposed to get your inheritance until your dad died! It is the same in our culture. But this bold and brash young man went against everything that his culture stood for. And he paid a price for it when you read the rest of the story. He ended up a penniless caretaker of pigs. Remember, pigs were filthy animals that the Jews were not allowed to eat, or, I think, even keep.

So, now put yourself in the place of the older son and the father. What might their dinner conversations have been like after the younger son left? I don’t think it would take much imagining, given the way the older son responds to the party, to imagine that it was probably a pretty heated discussion about the worthlessness of the younger boy. I have to admit my thoughts would be the same. In fact being merciful would be the farthest thing from my mind.

But listen to these comments from Pope St. John Paul in his encyclical “Rich in Mercy”: “That son, who receives from the father the portion of the inheritance that is due to him and leaves home to squander it in a far country ‘in loose living’, in a certain sense is the man of every period, beginning with the one who was the first to lose the inheritance of grace and original justice [that means from Adam on]. The analogy at this point is very wide-ranging. The parable indirectly touches upon every breach of the covenant of love, every loss of grace, every sin” – every one of our souls. By sinning one loses the freedom of the children of God (cf. Rom 8:21; Gal 4:31; 5:13) and hands oneself over to the power of Satan. The scribes and Pharisees, who despised sinners, just cannot understand why Jesus acts like this…

Apply:   

Now here’s an additional mystery – this is an important point: We should also consider that if God has compassion towards sinners, he must have much – much – more towards those who strive to be faithful to him. That is the condition of some of us, thankfully.

God’s mercy is so great that we cannot grasp it: as we can see in the case of the elder son – who thinks his father loves the younger son too much – that his jealousy prevents him from understanding how his father can do so much to celebrate the recovery of the younger brother; it cuts him off from the joy that the whole family feels. It’s true that he was a sinner. But we dare not pass so final a judgment on him. Can we have pity in our hearts while we remain weak in our own mercy?

Let me tell you another story. This one out of my own life, when I needed to learn more of mercy. I have a brother who is just younger than me by about a year. He did not come to my ordination, or my first Mass – that is like not going to your brother’s or sister’s wedding – and he was here in Omaha! I was angry with him for a number of years. In fact, the only way I could pray for him was to say “God, you bless him because right now I can’t.” I did not say that with very good feelings. But I knew I needed to bless and pray for my brother. So I did – even as I acknowledged my anger. It took quite a few years before I understood what happened.

What I did not know was that my brother was always in competition with me from his point of view. We worked at the same place in high school. We went into the Army right after high school. He went to college when he got out just as I did. But that is where it failed. For some reason he did not have what it took to finish college. So when I was ordained, I did something he could not do. So out of embarrassment – he did not come. 

I did not know that’s what was happening. I did not know he thought he was in competition with me. I was busy living my own life. My oldest sister pointed this out to me. It put everything in a new perspective. I had a solution to my anger.

It was, again, many years later that my brother said something to me that finished the healing I needed. He said that if he ever got married, he wanted me to do the ceremony. I guess he was saying that he has been healed too.

But this is how sin gets in the way of our lives. The parable of the prodigal father – yes, the prodigal father – is meant to remind us that God in his mercy will always bring us back.

Saint José Maria Escrivá said this: “God is waiting for us, like the father in the parable, with open arms, even though we don’t deserve it. It doesn’t matter how great our debt is. Just like the prodigal son, all we have to do is open our heart – to be homesick for our Father’s house – to wonder at and rejoice in the gift which God makes us of being able to call ourselves his children, of really being his children, even though our response to him has been so poor. ”

During this Lent, maybe we all need to look a little closer at how we are either one of those sons in our gospel and what our reaction is to the prodigal father who is waiting for us. Let me finish this weekend by a paragraph from Pope St. John Paul:

“Mercy, as Christ has presented it in the parable of the prodigal son, has the interior form of the love that, in the New Testament, is called agape. This love is able to reach down to every prodigal son, to every human misery, and above all to every form of moral misery – to sin. When this happens, the person who is the object of mercy does not feel humiliated, but rather is found again and ‘restored to value’. The father first and foremost expresses to him his joy, that he has been ‘found again’ and that he has ‘returned to life’. This joy indicates a good that has remained intact: even if he is a prodigal, a son does not cease to be truly his father’s son; it also indicates a good that has been found again, which in the case of the prodigal son was his return to the truth about himself” (John Paul II, Dives in misericordia, 6).

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