The God of the prodigal son is a forgiving,, loving Father.

 

FOURTH SUNDAY OF LENT  C  2022

Today’s Gospel, the parable of the Prodigal Son, is one of the most loved of all the parables.  Actually, it is wonderful parable of the merciful, forgiving Father.  It can be rightly called the Parable of the Forgiving Father.

Sometimes messages can be confusing:  For example,

Wife texts husband on a cold winter morning:  “Windows frozen; won’t open.”

Husband texts back:  “Gently pour some lukewarm water over it and then gently hit the edges with a hammer.”

Wife texts back 10 minutes later:  “Computer really messed up now.”

Yes, messages can be confusing at times:  Is this Gospel parable more about the prodigal son or the forgiving father?

The way I would like to reflect on this parable with you today is to see how this parable tells two ways we can become alienated from God.  It is the parable of two lost sons.  What they share in common is the absence of joy in their lives.  It is hard for them to rejoice in the joy and the celebration of the father in this parable. 

I invite you to consider the stuck point for both the prodigal son and his older brother.  Both of the sons had a falling out with the father. The younger son is lost in sin, and the older son is lost in self-righteousness.  Neither was filled with joy.

 

 

It’s appropriate that we pray over this parable on Laetare Sunday; Rejoice Sunday.  The color of our liturgical vestments indicates that joy is to mark our discipleship of the Lord Jesus.

In the parable, the younger son insults his father by asking for his share of his inheritance.  But instead of responding with offense and the desire to banish his son, he gives his son what he wanted – his share of the inheritance.  He then squandered what he had in irresponsible living.  Soon he experienced emptiness and famine.  He then resigns himself to being treated like a hired hand.  His sin has become his identity.  He is no longer son; he is a sinner. 

But when his father spotted his son off in the distance beginning his return home, he is filled with joy at the sight of his son.  All that the father cares about is that his son was lost and now is found.  Celebration is the only response.  Joy replaces the need to discipline and punish his son.

The encounter of the joyous father and his repentant son is a moving image of God’s abundant love and forgiveness and joy.  It is shocking.  It undoes our conventional sense of fairness and the need for discipline and gives a wonderful image of the desire that God has to share forgiveness and pardon with us.

The God of the Parable of the Prodigal Son is a forgiving, loving Father.

 

 

In contrast, the elder son in the parable, the good and obedient son, doesn’t get it.  His brother doesn’t deserve such abundant love.  He should be punished and disciplined.  Perhaps he should be excommunicated.  There is no way the older brother could find joy in his heart.

Who of us can say that there is not a little bit of the older brother in each and every one of us?  I must confess there is a bit of the older brother that needs to be rooted out of me.  I have had many years of training in keeping laws and rules and regulations and get jealous or angry if someone is not keeping the rules like I try to do.  We older brothers can be very self-righteous and judgmental of others.

Instead of being joyful for the love and forgiveness our loving God offers to sinners, we have a tendency to coach God on how to be God.  Being cold like the older brother is a worse fate spiritually than being in the recklessness of the younger son.  The fun-loving, sinful younger son won the favors of his father even before he admitted his sins.  This is something the older son could not do.

His own lack of joy makes him a lost son.   The resentment of the older son happens when we live in an external game of merit rather than rejoicing in the inner abundance of God’s grace that is given to each and every one of us. 

 

 

We are made in God’s image.  In God’s likeness, we are called to mirror his compassion and forgiveness.  The revelation of God as grace should make us rejoice.  But before we can celebrate, we must deal with the two conflicting mindsets that this parable illustrates.  Like the younger son, we can be so attached to our past sins, and so we cannot quite believe we are sons and daughters of love.  This keeps us from joy.

 Or we can be alienated from the simple presence of God’s abundant love.  This happens when our spiritual journey is only about reward and punishment and find ourselves resentful and envious.  This too keeps us from joy.  Only when we break the stranglehold of these two blocking mindsets will we hear the music in the house and know we are at home.

In this parable, God wants us to know that we are all sinners.  Whether our sins are explicitly outrageous like those of the younger son or whether we are much more self-righteous and think that the abundance of God’s grace is not fair, the message is that all of us in a spirit of humility need to call us to repentance and to rejoice, to find joy in God’s excessive love for each and every one of us.

May this Lenten be an opportunity to celebrate the sacrament of reconciliation and celebrate the forgiving, healing love of our God.

 

May we see the sacrament of reconciliation not just through the lens of obligation or guilt; rather can reconciliation be a source of joy and celebration as was the experience of the prodigal son when his forgiving father celebrated with extravagant joy at the reconciliation of his younger son.

Again,  our Lenten mantra is the words spoken to us on Ash Wednesday:  Repent and Believe in the Gospel.  We repent so that we can rejoice in the reconciling love that God has for each one of us.

May God give you the gift of joy.

Something has to die before something is born.

 Third Sunday of Lent  C  2022

 

An elderly woman decided to prepare her will and told her priest she had two final requests:

First, she wanted to be cremated, and second,
She wanted her ashes scattered over Wal-Mart.

"Wal-Mart?" the priest exclaimed.
"Why Wal-Mart?"
"Then I'll be sure my daughters visit me twice a week"

This elderly woman certainly had a sense of humor.

But we need to take a careful at today’s Gospel as we ask ourselves who Jesus is and is Jesus an angry Savior?

 

Jesus, in today’s Gospel, sounds angry and threatening and we must talk about that. “Repent or you will perish,” he says. The tower at Siloam fell on eighteen people. Then it seems like Jesus wants to curse the fig tree.

Is the loving Lord whom we have known actually furious and offended?

Let us look: 

The closer you come to the real center of God, the more your fear turns to gratitude.

News comes to Jesus that Pilate has murdered a number of Galilean people. Still worse, Pilate has mixed their blood with that of sacrificed animals. This is a terrible, gruesome story, worthy of denunciation. Is it like what Putin to the innocent people of Ukraine?  Is it like the madness in the violent slaughter of so many innocent lives?

Well, Jesus draws a point from it:

Do you think that because these Galileans suffered in this way they were greater sinners than all other Galileans?

By no means! But I tell you, if you do not repent,
you will all perish as they did!

What is the logic here? It seems you don’t have to murder people in order to get punished. You can qualify just by failing to repent!

Why is Jesus so harsh? Is he a truly an angry savior? Was he angry in the same way a lot of people think the God of the Old Testament was? Unforgiving, warlike, furious, demanding an infinite sacrifice to make up for humankind’s sins against an infinite God?*

No.

On the contrary, when we look at the First Reading, we do not find an irate God at all. Instead, we find a tender one, grieving over the troubles of his people.

 God said to Moses:  “I have witnessed the affliction of my people in Egypt
and have heard their cry of complaint against their slave drivers,
so I know well what they are suffering. Therefore I have come down to rescue them.”

God speaks these words miraculously to Moses from the midst of a burning bush that is not consumed by its own flames! He begins to instruct Moses about how to rescue God’s people. Great compassion from the depths of the transcendent God.

Didn’t Jesus have the same kind of compassion for his own people?

Yes.

He tells a parable in the second half of the Gospel that might help us understand.

An orchard owner orders his gardener to chop down a sadly unproductive fig tree. The gardener advises him to leave it one more year and see if, with some tending, it will bear fruit. Give it one more chance.

Who does the heartless orchard owner represent? We always assume that it is God.  But, on the contrary, Jesus is not the orchard owner but the gardener, asking mercy for the disobedient fig tree. Each one of us is that fig tree in the parable.  We are the recipients of the mercy of Jesus.

 

Christ presents himself as the gardener --- the one who patiently and humbly works in the situations of our lives to bring forth life and healing.

 

As we look at our lives during Lent, we ask ourselves:  are we bearing fruit?  We are called to use and share the giftedness that God has given to each  one of us.  Life is precious.  Life is also short.  We are called to make the best of each day that is given to us.

 

The Lord’s call for us to repent is not a new demand being placed on us by an angry Savior.  Recall the words spoken to us as the ashes were placed on your forehead on Ash Wednesday:  “Repent and Believe in the Gospel.”

Repentance is necessary for us all.  In the Gospel parable, Jesus’ call for repentance is balanced by the patience of God as seen in the image of the compassionate gardener.  The parable of the fig tree is about a compassionate God, the gardener, giving us a chance over and over again to bear fruit.  The gardener spoke the compassionate words:  “Sir, leave it for this year also, and I shall cultivate the ground it and fertilize it.  It may bear fruit in the future.

In spite of the whole history of humankind to the contrary, we still think life should be painless.  And contrary to that same unanimous experience, we won’t accept the fact that most growth, most progress, most good things in life come out of some pain.

 

This is not an accident; it is the basic structure of life.  It is simply a fact of life that something has to die before something is born, that the old must make way for the new.  In Christian terms, it is the paschal mystery of the death and resurrection of Jesus.  Its first principle is that only those who lose their lives ever find a life.  It means that God can bring good out of evil and life out of death.  It also means that burning bushes are likely to scorch us while they enlighten us.

 

 

Lent invites us to believe in the Gospel of God’s love for us.  Jesus loves you Can you believe it?  The Christian life is a response to God’s overwhelming love.

Yes, we are called to repent, to a change of heart, to conversion.  We then are empowered to show that love to all without exception – especially to those considered unlovable, beyond love, or not good enough.

 

Repent and Believe in the Gospel!  This is a demanding Lenten way of life.  Yet, imagine what we would be life, what the Church could be life at the end of Lent, 40 days later, if we took these summonses to heart?

 

 

Repent and believe in the Gospel.

 

 

 

   

 

                                                                 

May the Lord give us the gift of listening and trusting in His plan for us even when things aren't going as we planned.

 

Second Sunday of Lent  C 2022

 

The Gospels contain a strange spiritual wisdom. It puts the end of the story in the middle.

 

We need to be alert to wisdom that is strange sometime.  For example, someone the other day it’s not good to talk about your troubles.  80% of people don’t care and the other 20% are glad you are having them.  Not true for parishioners of St. Joseph’s.

 

What the apostles experienced in this beautiful Transfiguration experience was like the end of the story appearing in the middle.  Why?  The apostles needed their faith to be strengthened to have a faith and hope in accepting their Savior as one who was going to be crucified in his journey to resurrection and new life. The apostles had balked at the future Jesus was insisting upon.  The privilege of witnessing Jesus’ Transfiguration was for the purpose of confirming Jesus as someone to whom they must listen to.  They have, as of yet, not understood the mission of Jesus.  They must open themselves up to what Jesus is saying about his suffering, death, and resurrection.

 

The Transfiguration shows us that evil does not win in the end.  The message is that our lives are not governed by chance; rather we stand under the continual providence of God.

 

We are now experiencing the massive and reckless and violent Russian invasion of Ukraine.  This war demonstrates the worst of humanity showing no regard for the dignity and sacredness of the lives of the Ukrainian people.

 

But we deeply believe that sin and evil are not the final word in human lives.  The Transfiguration shows us that evil does not win in the end.  We stand under the continual providence of a loving God.  Faith can move mountains, not to mention a stupid war.

 

The Transfiguration takes place on the road to Jerusalem and the road to Easter.   To understand the grace of the Transfiguration involves some risky listening on our part.  The Transfiguration is an epiphany of Jesus’ glory – a glimpse of the resurrection.  In going up the mountain, Peter, James, and John saws the transfigured Lord to strengthen their faith for the days ahead.

 

 

 

As the apostles experienced the transfigured glory of Jesus, Peter says: “Lord, it is good that we are here.”  While he was still speaking. Behold, then from a cloud came a voice that said, ‘This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased, listen to him.”

 

To this point, the apostles have been unable to understand Jesus’ predictions about his upcoming suffering, death, and resurrection. They have not listened.  In fact, there was no need to listen because they already knew what they wanted the Savior to be like – a successful, prestigious, powerful Messiah.  Now the voice of God commands them to listen.

 

It’s easier to listen to the Lord on the mountaintop when the blessings of life are very apparent.  It is more difficult to listen when we come down from the mountain and are in the midst of the valley of loneliness, of fear and of anxiety.

 

The apostles were given the vision of the transfigured Lord to overcome their resistance to listening to Jesus in moments of suffering.  Knowing they would soon go down to mountain and journey to Jerusalem and experience His suffering and death, Jesus wanted his apostles to experience a moment of revelation to sustain them and to make sense of the suffering that was to come.

 

The grace of Transfiguration is to see the other side of the mountain when one is buried in the cross and suffering of the moment.  The grace of Transfiguration is we are able to see differently.  We are able to be hopeful when there seems to be no hope.  We seek to look at the circumstances of our life with a third eye, a seeing that enables us to know Jesus is present to us as Lord and Savior.

 

The real action of discipleship is not just on the mountaintop but in the upcoming events of death and resurrection in Jerusalem.  As we pray over this Transfiguration Gospel, know that the message for us is not just the identity of Jesus in his transfigured glory but it is a story for us to reflect on what it means to be a disciple of Jesus.  In the words of the Father:  Listen to him.   As with the first disciples, we need to let go of old notions of discipleship that get in the way of listening to the message of Jesus.  We need to accept the cross in our own lives and to trust more fully in God’s plan for our lives.

 

Are we good listeners?  Do others know us as good listeners?  Are we able to listen to the voice of God when things aren’t going as we planned?

 

 

Do we hear the cry of God’s poor?  Are we responsive to the needs of people locally and around the world?

 

From the first Scripture reading in the Book of Genesis: “The Lord said to Abram: ‘Go forth from the land of your kinsfolk and from your father’s house to a land I will show you.  I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you.’”

 

What was asked of Abram sets the stage for us to reflect on our own cost of discipleship.  The detachment that was asked of Abram is this:  Abram is commanded to leave his country, his kinfolk, and finally his father’s house, that is, what we would call his entire support system, material and psychological, the whole deal, and depend on God alone.

 

Does this not challenge us to reflect on our cost of discipleship during this Lenten season?   Lent’s call to stark honesty compels us to ask if our discipleship of Jesus is too comfortable.  Our Lenten conversion process requires some measure of detachment from self-centeredness and attachment to values and priorities and preferences that may be countercultural.

 

The call of Abram who was later named Abraham was to leave home and settle in a foreign land.  God asked and so Abram went.  He had trust and hope.  How do we respond when God asks us to move beyond our comfort zone and to more fully trust in the plan of God for us?  If our call to discipleship is any way similar to God’s call of Abram, we will need to revisit our old wisdom.  In some way, the Lord asks of you and the Lord asks of me to let go of some of my comfort zone and to trust more fully in God’s plan for us.

 

Jesus’ message is that his disciples must be willing to join Him in His passion and death.  The disciples had difficulty hearing this reality.  We too have difficulty listening to Jesus when our discipleship involves dealing with the crosses of life – the cross of sickness, the cross of the death of a loved one, the cross of coping with a relationship that has gone wrong, the cross of coping with the insanity of war.

 

May God give us the gift of trusting in His love for us even when things are not going as we planned.

 

 

 

 

Into what Lenten desert is Jesus inviting us to more fully trust in His love for us?

 

FIRST SUNDAY OF LENT  C  2022

We enter into another Lenten season.  We were marked with ashes this past Wednesday as Lent formally began. These ashes acknowledge that we all belong to the order of penitents.  We all confess that we are sinners, and we stand in need of the Lord’s healing forgiveness.  The light of Christ that is within us has been dimmed by the darkness of our sin.   We acknowledge this reality with these ashes.  We were given the mantra to:  Repent and believe in the Gospel.

 

God led the people of Israel into the desert, to forge them into a new people.  The Spirit led Jesus into the desert to clarify the meaning of his Messiahship.  The Spirit leads us into the desert of Lent to reflect on how we have not always resisted temptation and have failed to love.  In the desert we seek mercy and forgiveness.  Lent is God’s gift to us to become more aware that we are God’s redeemed and forgiven people.

 

In the Lenten season, we seek to enter the same space as Jesus.  We are led by the Holy Spirit into the desert to experience fasting and self-denial and to be tempted and to be tested by the devil.  As disciples of the Lord Jesus, we are tested; we are tried during the Lenten season to gauge our commitment of turning away from sin and being faithful to the Gospel.  How do we deal with the Lenten call to embrace spiritual disciplines?  What fasting are we willing to embrace in the Lenten season?  What spiritual discipline of prayer can we make a commitment to?  What almsgiving, what are willing to tithe in the service of others?

The story of Jesus’ temptations reveals to us the deepest thing about him:  he had total trust in his heavenly Father.  Jesus turned to the Word of God in the face of temptation and expressed his trust, his obedience to God’s plan for him. 

This Lent, into which desert are you being led into by the Spirit?

My hope for myself and for you is that you will encounter the Lord in prayer this Lenten season.  May this encounter fill you with joy and inner peace.   Make a decision, for example, to pray the Stations of the Cross on the Friday Evenings of Lent with other parishioners; experience the merciful love of Jesus in the Sacrament of Reconciliation on Saturday afternoon or on our parish Lenten day of prayer on April 6 or by asking one or our priests at any time; and celebrate the Eucharist more frequently during Lent.

May our Lenten prayer further motivate ourselves to share the merciful love of Jesus with others.  Participate in one of the corporal works of mercy:  Feed the hungry, clothe the naked, shelter the homeless.  Make a difference in the lives of people in need.

For example, the rationale behind your generosity to operation rice bowl is that our Lenten sacrifices become the source of hope and change for some of our poorest brothers and sisters around the world.  May our Lenten spiritual disciplines lead us to share what we have with those who are hungry and in need of our generosity.

Jesus finding himself in the desert being tempted by the devil was not the result of bad luck or being at the wrong place at the wrong time.  Rather, this was by divine design.  Jesus was led by the Spirit into the desert.

Now this isn’t always true for us.  Sometimes we can find ourselves in the desert of disappointment or failure, not led by the Spirit of God’s love but rather they are the result of bad choices we have made.  Our desire for pleasure, power, or greed can sometimes get the best of us and lead us into the wilderness. 

But with Jesus, he is being led by the Spirit of God’s love into the desert to be tempted by the devil to use his power in ways that are not in God’s plan.  The devil was tempting Jesus to become the Messiah without the cross.  The devil was tempting Jesus to take the short cut to achieve his power as the Messiah.

Jesus was led by the Spirit into the desert to be humbled, to be tested and tempted, to struggle with the forces of evil and thereby fully trust in God’s plan for His life. 

 My question for you and for me is what desert are we now being let into by the Spirit of God’s love to be humbled, to be tested and tempted to validate our faith and trust in Jesus as the Lord and Savior of our lives?  Are you aware that you are being led by the Spirit of God in the ways you experience your Lenten journey today?

As with our life being turned upside by this pandemic, as you have grieved the loss of someone you dearly love, as you have dealt with illness in your life and the in the life of a dear family member, as you have been hurt and your confidence has been betrayed, as you struggle with the temptation of pornography, as you have had to deal with more than your fair share of challenges, as we witness the horrific Russian invasion into Ukraine, can you see these experiences as being led by the Spirit into the desert to be tempted by the devil.  Can these life wrenching experiences be example of how you are being led by the Spirit into the desert?

The Stations of the Cross describe the stages of the suffering and death of Jesus.  As we experience the stations of the cross of illness, of death, of brokenness in our own stories, may we too get the help of Simon of Cyrene and be strengthened by the love of Mary our mother.  As for Jesus, our own stations of the cross are our way of discipleship.

Yes, there are demons; there is sinfulness in our lives that we seek to turn away from.  Yes, we encounter Satan in the desert of our inner wilderness.  But that is not the end of our Lenten journey.  The real purpose of our Lenten spiritual disciplines is that we are to encounter God in the desert of Lent.  May we allow ourselves to believe in His love.

The Lenten desert is about wrestling with the demons of our life; but the Lenten season is also about conversion; it is our retreat in which we encounter God with blessed and grateful hearts.  We embrace the spiritual disciplines of lent – we embrace prayer, fasting, almsgiving – so that we are clearly place God as first in our lives.

May we encounter the God who loves us in our Lenten journey.