FOURTH SUNDAY OF LENT YEAR "C"

FOURTH SUNDAY OF LENT

Cycle “C”: Luke 125, 1-3, 11-32

A certain psychiatrist was once asked whether he read the Bible. “I not only read the Bible but study it,” he said. “If people would only absorb its message, many of us psychiatrists could close our offices and go fishing. If many patients plagued by guilty feelings took to heart the parable of the prodigal son, they could be healed overnight.”

Deep down, we all have a fundamental need. We need to be loved. We need to feel that there is someone who truly understands us, values us and cares for us. Yet for many people there is a problem. We are so burdened with feelings of shame, of guilt, inability to overcome our failings, that we cannot believe there is anyone who could love us in that way. We cannot believe in our hearts that someone could forgive us for all that has gone wrong in our lives. In other words, we cannot cope with God’s love.

 The administrator of the largest psychiatric hospital in London said, “If the patients here only knew that it means to be forgiven, I could discharge half of them on the spot.” Jesus told this parable to illustrate the amazing love of God that makes him long for us to turn to him for forgiveness. Actually God is the main character in the parable. It’s a parable that can have a deep and lasting effect in our lives. It can transform lives. It changed the prodigal from a fearful beggar, starving and excluded, into a beloved son who can join the feast inside the father’s house. Despite the son’s foreboding, the father spoke not a word of reproach against his younger child, even though he deserved a hot tongue and a cold shoulder. The father knew well that the dirty, smelly lad is coming home primarily because he in hungry and needs a place to hand out. That he has wasted his father’s money is of no great moment.

Let me tell you about that one line exchange between a father and his teenaged son. The son asked, “Dad, how soon will I be old enough to do as I please?” And his dad answered, “I don’t know; nobody has lived that long yet.” In today’s parable the younger son suddenly got the itch for independence, form his own party and call the shots. His father gave him enough rope, not tying it round his neck, but his waist. The party was soon over; he had placed his money on slow horses and fast women. The girls kissed him “chiao” and left him in a pigs’ sty where there were only animal rights. The young fellow had been pushed off his pedestal, he hit hard rock – it wasn’t a rock concert, but the hard rock of reality. The rope round his waist tightened and tightened as he began to starve. He would pull himself up because he remembered his father still held the other end.

 Our Lord Jesus is telling us that God places no conditions when forgiving the worst rogue among us. All we have to do is to head in the direction of our Father. Like the prodigal, our motive may not be the purest. How often have we not made our confession out of fear, out of disgust with ourselves; confused and crestfallen, because we thought we were better than that. Then again, when we are walking back to God, we don’t have to finish our journey. God is willing to meet us before our trip is finished. God is among the very few who stoops to conquer. A journalist asked Abraham Lincoln how he would react to the rebels after hostilities ceased. The President answered, “I will treat them as though they had never been away.” Here is another little story. The French forces under Napoleon defeated the Russians at the battle of Borodino. Losses on both sides were heavy. As Napoleon walked the battlefield the next day, taking a count of the dead, he heard a cry of pain from a fallen soldier and ordered a stretcher. One of his aides pointed out that the wounded man was a Russian. But Napoleon answered, “After victory there are no enemies, only human beings.”

A word about the elder bother in today’s parable. He knew his father’s heart was aching over his missing son. Why didn’t he give joy to his father by going out in search of his younger brother? His sibling’s misadventure cost him nothing. As the elder brother, two thirds of his father’s estate was legally his. His money was safe and protected. His brother had wasted one third of the estate. Notice, too, that the older fellow had a nasty mindset. It was he who rubbed in the line “this son of yours”, this son of yours had spent his inheritance on fast women and slow horses.

The younger son had changed; the older had not. It is within anyone’s power to change a thinking process. Thought by thought, moment by moment, it can be done. It’s important to do it if a person wants the quality of life to improve. You can start finding the good inside you and in others by deciding to change. Nothing is more powerfully creative than your own mind and it’s capable of higher levels of thinking than you’ve yet called on it for.

PRAYER: (The St. Hilda community)

O God, we bring you our failure,

our hunger, our disappointment, our despair,

our greed, our aloofness, our loneliness.

When we cling to others in desperation

or turn from them in fear

strengthen us in love.

Teach us, women and men,

to use our power with care.

We turn to you , O God,

we renounce evil,

we claim your love,

we choose to be made holy.