Today’s gospel is the famous parable of the Prodigal Son. Like many of these popular parables, it is often misinterpreted or simplified. So, the deeper message is lost.
In order to understand it, we need to know that many will tell you the story has three characters—it actually has four. We will address the fourth in a few minutes.
We know the basics of the story—the younger son demands his inheritance and goes off by himself to live a bohemian lifestyle.
In the process, he flies through his money in partying and loose women until he has nothing.
It reminds me of Willie Nelson’s famous song: If you have the money honey, I have the time. When you run short of money, I run short of time.
This is what happens to him. But look more closely. He is working with pigs and does not even have enough money to buy food. That means he has been rejected completely by his jewish community, because he is living with gentiles. Jews have nothing to do with pigs. Notice, he cannot even buy food for himself and no one cares about him. It is possible that he is homeless and living with the pigs because he has nothing else.
This means that he has been rejected by everyone.
Fr. Rufus Pereira used to teach that the greatest pain we may suffer is abandonment. Hence why Jesus says on the cross: “My God, my God why have you abandoned me.”
This man is completely abandoned by everyone. The one who had the whole world in his hands, through his money, is now abandoned and forgotten and nobody cared.
Now he returns to his Father’s home just to live as a hired hand. Imagine, he is in gentile territory and returns to Jewish territory. How many farms did he pass by on the way, he could not have hired himself out to any one of them? Obviously, not. Remember, whatever job he had, whatever he paid, it would have paid more than he had at that time. However, he had been abandoned by everyone.
He is the guy who is hated, rejected, chased off. The one you see sleeping on the Boston Common alone and everyone chases him off their property. He is no more than a thing to get rid of like bugs.
When he returns to his father’s home. His father alone sees him as his son.
Remember, I told you that there were four characters. The fourth is one of the servants who stirs the pot with the older son. He tells him that the Father is celebrating his return in a way that makes the older son angry. This means that even the servants at his father’s farm did not want to see him back either. But the Father alone sees in him what no one else can see. The son he loves. They see nothing else. He sees right into his soul and sees a humbled, repentant man who learned a painful lesson. He experienced the worst of all pain being abandoned by everyone. He is repentant and asks for help.
Now, here is the next step. We know that this is how Our Father in Heaven looks at every repentant sinner. No matter what he or she has done. But just as the father in the parable tries to instruct the other son to understand his mercy, so God tries to instruct us to understand his mercy as well.
When the repentant sinner walks through that door, he must be welcomed into the community. Because if we are channels of God’s grace, we will not only be a welcoming parish but a healing parish. This does not mean we are naïve. However, that is the point. When people are in trouble, where do they come? They come to the Church, because that is where they find the Father. You and I are His representatives. He calls us to have His vision.
We need to discern from the repentant sinner, to the manipulative one who wants to take advantage of us, that is why we have to be cautious or we’d welcome the prodigal son in his selfish, unrepentant, manipulative stage. Remember, all of us need the mercy of God. We can only find it if we are repentant. We need to extend the mercy of God to the repentant as well. When we do, we become channels of God’s healing mercy. That is what we are all about.
We need to understand that people may enter that door looking for the mercy of God and they must find it in our parish. The more we seek to be a holy community, the stronger and more healing this parish will be. The more we risk the most broken people to come to this parish, because they realized that they need God’s mercy, the more powerful this parish becomes.
This parable not only reminds us that God’s mercy is ours even if we are not as bad as the prodigal son, but that the prodigal son or daughter may be present in this parish right now and we need to be representatives of God’s mercy to him/her.
Remember, every saint has a past and every sinner has a future.
The world has no concept of this and because of it, those in the world will end up eating themselves. They do not believe in forgiveness only justice. Forgiveness without justice is naiveté, but justice without forgiveness is tyranny.
Every Catholic parish must be a place that can properly balance justice and mercy to a point that we become channels of God’s healing power. We can only come to that point by being people who seek holiness. The more we seek holiness, the more we become channels of God’s healing love. That is our call that each of us has so that every repentant sinner who walks through that door finds the healing love and mercy they need because we become, as a parish, channels of God’s mercy.
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