Our People

Homily for the Fourth Sunday of Lent (Gaudete Sunday) 2007

Our Lady Star of the Sea Parish, Watson’s Bay

By Most Rev. Anthony Fisher OP
Auxiliary Bishop of Sydney
18/3/2007

Which character are you in the most famous religious story ever told that we have just read (Lk 15:1-3,11-32)? The Church retells the Story of the Two Brothers in Lent for it is our great story of penitence, forgiveness and celebration of penitence and forgiveness – as well as of impenitence, unforgivingness and a refusal to celebrate.

A well-to-do family has two sons. Like so many families, there is a mystery in why one turns out one way, another so differently, even though all receive more or less the same upbringing, affection and advantages. In this family one asks for his inheritance early. In the Ancient Near East this was terrible request. Not only did it amount to abandoning one’s family and its domestic projects, but also to saying, “Frankly Dad, you’re as good as dead, at least to me, so I might as well take what I’ll get after your death now.” The younger son’s request amounts to writing his father off and cutting himself off. It would stab any father through the heart.

But the father loves the boy enough to respect his freedom. So off goes the lad with his early inheritance and he squanders it all. He ends up in the deepest squalor imaginable to a Jew: feeding pigs. Indeed his degradation is even worse, for he ends up dreaming of eating with pigs!

Many people only come to their senses when they are bereft. Alcoholics, it is often said, will only face the gravity of their situation when they wake up in the gutter. Adulterers, when they face the prospect of losing spouse and children and home. The greedy, by facing the humiliation and insecurity of bankruptcy. And that’s the story of each one of us here: one way or another, at one time or another, we are humbled by being forced to face up to our weakness, our desperation, our need for forgiveness. So it is that the Church in every age and especially in Lent never tires of exhorting her children to return to the Lord, to know, as St Paul put it in our Second Reading (2 Cor 5:17-21), that “God in Jesus Christ was reconciling the world to himself, not holding men’s faults against them”. The Church exhorts all her children to join the Prodigal Son in his return to the Prodigal Father, especially through sacramental Confession, that great re-enactment of the sinner’s return and Father’s absolution.

Eventually the lad comes to his senses and resolves to return. We hear from his lips the first Christian “Act of Contrition” and like many Catholics he rehearses it and learns it off by heart. “Father,” he recites, “I have sinned against heaven and against you: I no longer deserve to be called your son. But please take me back…”. And of course he is received by his Father with open arms, even before he has got all words out!

The elder son represents another approach to being lost and found, sinful and in need for mercy. His is the story of virtue indignant at vice. I suspect that many of us good-living, hard working, religious people feel more than a bit of sympathy for this older brother, even if we don’t think we are perfect as he seems to.

Where the elder brother in our tale seems to have gone wrong was not so much in failing to own up to his own prodigality, but in failing to be prodigal enough: not with money and women like his brother, but with mercy and hospitality like his father. He too is “standing outside” and in need of returning home: not physically, but spiritually. He too needs the experience of confessing “Father, I have sinned against heaven and against you: please have me back” and then receiving the Father’s lavish love.

So the Church exhorts us, too, not just when we are like the younger son, in obvious moral mess, but even when we are doing pretty well, periodically to examine our consciences and celebrate sacramental Confession. There we can face up to the question of which of the two brothers we are and the fact that we are probably a bit of both, more one than the other at times, but in either case in regular need of reconciliation and a fresh start. All of us, I hope, know the experience of a child reconciled to God, the humiliation of confession, of course, but also the feeling of a weight lifted, the knowledge of a new opportunity received, the enduring sense of God’s power and love to make all things new.

Yet we would only dare approach the Sacrament of Confession, Absolution and Reconciliation because of the story we heard today and because of the greatest ever retelling of that story in the Lenten and Easter journey of Jesus Christ. The Father, we are told, caught sight of the lad while he was still “a long way off”. That suggests he was looking for him, searching the horizon, day and night, hoping for the boy’s return. He catches a glimpse of the lad and is “moved with pity”: Luke’s Jesus uses the same Greek word here for the man’s compassion as he uses in the other greatest parable ever told: the Good Samaritan was also “moved with pity” on seeing a man mugged and left for dead. So the compassion-filled Prodigal Father runs to the rescue, to the son “who was dead and has come to life” as does the Good Samaritan. He “clasped youth in his arms” – or, to read the text more literally, he falls upon his son’s neck. He kisses him tenderly, calls for fine robes and kills the fatted calf. Such is the experience I have sometimes felt myself when hearing the Confession of someone who has been away from God or from his Church for decades or has had some terrible thing to tell which was keeping him away from God. I want, as I know God wants, to hug them and throw an extravagant party for them and reassure them that all is forgiven and their former dignity restored!

But it is easy to miss what this giving costs God and that is why it is good to hear this story in Lent, as we face the Cross most directly and see the humiliation of God hanging naked, abused and dying. In the ancient world a rich and powerful man like the one in this story did not leave his house to meet someone of lower rank: he would wait for them to arrive, often without even standing. If ever he did leave his house it would be on a horse or the ancient equivalent of a limo, or at worst engage in some sedate and dignified walking. He certainly wouldn’t run after an inferior, as the Father does in our story.

Nor did a man of such import in the ancient world engage in the public display of emotions such as tears and kisses, in front of servants, neighbours and strangers. Nor would be throw a feast to reward someone who had disgraced the family name and dignitas, frittered away the family property, and written the pater familias off as dead. Nor would he celebrate the return of a philanderer with fine rose vestments and a ring rather like I am wearing this morning – thereby totally reinstating the one who had so harmed him. A long period and many acts of restitution would first have been required even by the most merciful of personages.

Lastly, the pater familias in the ancient world would never have gone outside a second time, this time to plead with another disobedient son, and then listened patiently to all his unjust gripes not just against a younger brother whom he judged but also envied, but also against that same loving father.

What the Father does in our story, then, would for a man of his rank and circumstances in the ancient Near East have been deeply degrading. Yet time and again, rather than standing on his dignity, God comes to us to plead with us and cajole us and welcome us and embrace us, to clasp us to his bosom. And he does that through his Church, at least when we are at our best, by Word and Sacrament and Service.

Here at Mass we stand not just with the contrite son and the other one who should be thankful, declaring our Confiteor and our Thanksgiving. We also join the Father in a party for the tax-collector and sinners, for the lost who have been found, for the sinner who has been reconciled. We take part in an over-the-top celebration in which God gives us not just water turned to wine or a sinner turned to saint, but something so much greater we barely dare imagine it. “My son,” he says, “you are with me always and all I have is yours”: take now my very being, bread and wine become my very self. Take everything I am, for all I have is your. Take my body and blood, my humanity and divinity, my substance and power and destiny.