FOURTH SUNDAY OF LENT March 14, 2010 Reflections on Joshua 5:92, 10-12 Psalm 34: 2-3, 4-5, 6-7 2 Corinthians 5:17-21 Luke 15:1-3, 11-32 by Sister Patricia Coughlin, O.S.B, D.Min.

This morning we welcome Dorothy and Don Andries as we remember the life of their son, D.J. in a special way at this Mass. We are with them in their sorrow and faith that, like the son in this morning's gospel, he rejoices in the embrace of God.

If we follow the flow of the Sunday readings this Lent we can see the theme of sonship/daughtership running from the feast of the Baptism of Jesus through Jesus' Temptation in the Desert into the Transfiguration. Last Sunday emphasized the theme of repentance and reconciliation which carries through today and into next week. This theme is gathering momentum: last week's gospel told us that there was still time to repent; today's readings say, “The old order is gone; time to get moving into the new.”

So this morning we have perhaps the world's most famous parable and a literary masterpiece for our meditation. It's a story in three acts and it forms a trilogy with the two parables that precede it in Luke's gospel, all three of them about someone searching for and finding what has been lost and then sort of going overboard with joy upon finding it. It probably wouldn't be very prudent for a shepherd to leave 99 sheep to the mercy of wolves to search for the one lost and then to throw a big party nor for a woman to turn her house upside down and to throw a party for the neighborhood because she had found one coin, even a fairly valuable one.

The Prodigal Son story has had quite a few alternate titles suggested for it like “The Lost Son,” “The Loving Father,” “The Lost Son and Brother,” and, from an eldest son, “The Slighted Brother.” It takes place in three acts. In the first act a younger son of a prosperous landowner asks for his share of the estate which would be 1/3 according to the laws of the time. This was a terrible thing to do. It was tantamount to wishing his father dead. And most likely the father would have had to sell some of his land for cash to do as his son asked. Doing this would have brought tremendous shame, in a way we cannot imagine, upon the whole family. Most fathers of the time would have gotten extremely angry and disowned such a son, but right away we see the father's extravagance. He does as the son wishes despite the deep cost. Certainly he is an overindulgent parent. The supernanny would not have approved.

If the father is extravagant, the son is crafty and calculating. He never asks for his inheritance in so many words because that would have meant accepting responsibility for providing for the family and this young man is not interested in responsibility. So he asks for his “share of the estate.” When things turn out badly for him-and they turn out very badly because for a Jew to be herding an unclean animal like pigs for a gentile would have been the ultimate in degradation and shame - and he's faced with starvation, he comes to his senses, but in his self-talk, the motivation for ending his exile in a foreign land is not to reconcile with his father but to eat. He realizes that he has thrown away his status as a son and figures that the best he can do is to work as a hired servant, one who came in during the day but was not part of the household.

Act Two begins with the younger son's homecoming. Again, the father's behavior is extraordinary. When Luke describes the father as “deeply moved” as he saw his son coming up the road, he uses the same Greek word that he used to describe the Good Samaritan's feeling for the beaten man by the roadside. A man of status would never come out of the house to greet visitors, certainly not his children ; they came to him. But this father not only comes out of the house, he casts all sense of his dignity, station and public image aside to run, something that a man of his status would never do in public, to meet the son who has shamed him and to show his deep emotion for all to see. The son never gets to finish his hired hand speech because his father is ordering robes, sandals (worn by a son, not a servant) and a signet ring (giving the son authority to transact business on his father's behalf) to be put on him. The son thinks of himself as a disowned sinner, but his father thinks of him as the lost son who has been restored to him. His sonship has been found because his father has found him, the beloved child.

If the story had ended there it would have had a simply happy ending. But Act Three adds complications. The brother has a lot to complain about. It seems that nobody bothered to tell him that there was a party going on. He has worked much harder and been more responsible than his brother. We never find out if the father is going to leave his younger son 1/3 of the remaining property, thus diminishing the elder's inheritance, but this possibility must have crossed his brother's mind. Apparently his father took him for granted. But again, we see the father acting in an extraordinary way. I had never noticed this, but the father leaves the party and goes to meet his elder son who is sulking outside and pleads with him in the presence of the servants-again, something that a father of his time would never do.

Biblical scholar Kenneth Bailey has some thoughtful insights into this elder son. He is dutiful and hard-working. It makes you wonder if he ever let anybody know that he wanted a goat for a feast with his friends. Apparently he was never spoiled as his younger brother was. But he seems to have disowned both his father and his brother. He never calls his father “Father” and refers to his brother as “this son of yours.” He seems to think of his work as a matter of contractual obligation and is angry that he has not been compensated fairly. Bailey raises the possibility that the elder son thinks of himself as a servant. It is his father who addresses him tenderly as “Son.” In a way he is as lost as his wayward brother.

I've heard people say that repentance is not feeling bad but acting differently. Bailey has another thoughtful insight about repentance - repentance is the acceptance of being found. Sometimes this is really hard. The younger son's shame at what he did led him to believe that his only course was to live as a servant, not as a son. The elder son's seeming conviction that he needed to work as a servant to earn his father's love. But that is not how the father sees it. The father humiliated himself in his efforts to draw his sons back into the family. But being drawn back in when you feel shame for what you have done or resentful because of what was not done to you can feel humiliating too. It entails looking the people you have hurt in the eye and having them look at you or coming to terms with the truth that you can't have what you most desire through your own effort and good deeds. Letting ourselves be loved and welcomed back from the exile we have imposed on ourselves is a surrender and a repentance, not easy to do.

Costly love is the term that Bailey uses for the father's actions which he claims are a prefiguring of Jesus' costly, extravagant love shown on Calvary. But can we cope with such extravagant love any more than our two sons could? How many ways do we feel unworthy to accept the love of others or fear losing our self-sufficiency if we accept it? What if we let ourselves open, our eyes and ourselves to the concrete, humble usually not extravagant or showy acts of love that surround us every day? Of course, these are mixed up with the human faults and failings of ourselves and others and are often hard to see and to accept. We've all had the humbling experience of being treated kindly by someone we don't like or have judged harshly.

This seems to be my year of finding literary connections in these reflections, but, years ago I came across a poem by Robert Hayden, someone I'd never heard of and I've never forgotten it. It shows the costly love of a very different and flawed father from the one in the gospel. It's not the greatest poem ever written, but I think it shows costly love that might be easier for us to understand, the kind that surrounds us whether or not we look for it.

Those Winter Sundays

Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,
then, with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.

I'd wake to hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he'd call,
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house,

Speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love's austere and lonely offices?

Accepting that we are loved, that we have been sought and found leads us to true poverty of spirit and true repentance, recognizing that it is not through our power or accomplishments or wonderful deeds that we are loved. Then we are open to let the extravagant love that God has for all creation flow in us and through us into the lives of others. As we draw nearer to Holy Week and its commemoration of Jesus' costly love, may our eyes and our hearts be opened to the love that surrounds us.

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