4th Sunday Lent C - Homily 6

Homily 6 -2022

How often have I read and heard to-day’s parable? During the week, my mind started working on a fresh message from it, for myself and for you, too, at today’s Mass. It is a story, of course, composed for the occasion by Jesus, not an actual incident. But I have been wondering how on earth he imagined a father like the one in the story. In the culture of the time, it would have been near to impossible, unthinkable — almost a bad dream. The instinctive, but fiercely, patriarchal culture of the time would have seen to that; and automatically suppressed the thought before its ever coming to consciousness.

Jesus did think of it, nevertheless, just as he also thought of that other unthinkable, “love your enemies”. In fact, this story is simply a variation on that theme — one that in our culture, in another place and another era, we let slip under our radar. To us, it is a lovely story of unmerited forgiveness — so long as we let it remain merely a story.

You probably remember elsewhere in the Gospels an incident when James and John quietly asked Jesus to let them “sit, one at your right hand and one at your left, in your glory”; and Jesus’ spontaneous reaction was to exclaim, “You do not know what you are asking.”

I sometimes feel like saying the same thing as Jesus when I hear some of the “Prayers of the Faithful” that we list off at Mass; or when I take time to reflect on some of the things that I have asked of God; or even when we say, in the Our Father, habitually and without thinking, “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth”. Can I hear the voice of Jesus repeating, “Do you know what you are asking?”

Perhaps, over the past couple of weeks, we have prayed that the war in Ukraine will stop. Do we know what we are asking? We are asking that enemy nations learn and agree to treat each other with sincere respect, to forgive each other for their long and vicious memories — effectively to love one another. Anything less simply postpones hostilities until the next war. [Remember Kosovo — six-hundred-year old memories! Or even Ireland — too complicated for me to follow.] It is important to realise that when nations react to each other as they invariably do, it is not just their leaders who are responsible for hostilities. Leaders behave as they do because almost everyone else thinks like that. Prayer for lasting peace in Ukraine involves ultimately prayer for the conversion of the whole world — starting with ourselves.

Success there, and in the other theatres of armed hostility around the globe, means a radical, deep, deliberate change of mind and heart in a critical mass of the world’s population — a timely spur to the world’s continuing evolution — what Paul, in today’s Second Reading, referred to as the “new creation in Christ”. It will have to involve us — we, too, must experience a radical, deep, conscious, personal, deliberate change of heart on our part, too.

We love the way that the father in today’s parable forgave his wayward son. But few of us, if any, are good at forgiving. So often, in so many cases, we do not even want to forgive. And, if we have tried, how often have we been strong enough, motivated enough, practised enough, to succeed?

In today’s Second Reading, Paul showed the way. We can start by tuning in, genuinely, to the heart of our prodigal Father, God — accepting, becoming saturated by, God’s radical, conscious, personal, deliberate, unbounded, amazingly transforming forgiveness of us all. There we shall find what Paul referred to as “the new creation in Christ”.

Nothing less will ever be enough.