Let us begin by invoking the Holy Spirit: Come, Holy Spirit! Come, Holy Spirit!
As we have made our way though the Gospel of Luke during this liturgical year, there has been a particular theme that has come up again and again. Mercy and forgiveness. Last week Father Tom reminded us in his homily that Jesus wasn’t always “nice.” Jesus was direct, and said things that were hard to take. But we should understand that Jesus is just. And he is merciful. Our Gospel passage for this Sunday is one of the best-known and most striking examples of divine mercy. It is commonly known as the Parable of the Prodigal Son. The word “prodigal” means wasteful or recklessly extravagant. And we can see how obvious it is in this parable how the younger son took his inheritance, spent it foolishly in a foreign country, and found himself in a situation where it seems as if he had no other option than to return home begging for forgiveness.
He first insults his father by asking for his inheritance early. When is it when we normally receive our inheritance? When the patriarch of the family dies. He wants what will come to him at his father’s death. So the son is basically saying that he wishes his father were dead, or at least that he wants to be no part of the family. He then offends his community by spending in a foreign land money that was hard earned by a Jew in Israel and meant to strengthen Israel. Then he also insults his Jewish heritage by living and working with pigs, ritually unclean animals that no good Jew would even touch let alone live with. So the younger son has, in effect, turned his back on his family, his country, and his faith.
In the Gospel of Luke, Jesus usually tells parables when he is responding to some sort of personal criticism. And the parables usually are told for two purposes. The first is so that we might be able to relate to or identify with a certain character in the stories. And the second is that Jesus takes conventional thought and practice, and turn it completely upside down and tells us that God doesn’t work that way. When the younger son returned home to his father, the father had every right by law to disown his son; even put him to death for his treatment of his father (Remember the Fourth Commandment: Honor your Father and Mother; to dishonor them publicly breaks one of the Commandments, which meant stoning to death). It was probably shocking to his audience that Jesus would suggest compassion and forgiveness to someone who had treated him so badly. But Jesus is letting us know that God, “The Father,” doesn’t seek revenge, only forgiveness and love.
Note that it says in the parable that when his father caught sight of him …, He ran to his son, embraced him and kissed him. It was undignified for a man to run like this, but he did it in order to protect his son as well as welcome him home and forgive him. He was protecting his son from “running the gauntlet” you might say. If you are unfamiliar with running the gauntlet, that is when a convicted man must pass between two rows of soldiers armed with various weapons in order to torture and kill the criminal for his crime. This could be what the son had to face as he returned to the town he once rejected.
In this parable, maybe we can identify with the younger son, who turns away from God, finds himself in trouble, and returns asking for mercy and forgiveness. Each of us has probably put ourselves in this position once or twice (possibly more?). Maybe we can also identify with the older Son, who see ourselves as self-righteous and judgmental, with the thought that our service is deserving of God’s gifts. But maybe in this parable Jesus is pointing to the action of the father of the two sons, suggesting that our behavior should imitate his, in offering forgiveness and mercy for no other reason than love. It’s not to be earned; it’s not to be waited for. And it should be given freely and with great joy.
In order to understand how we might be able to embrace this attitude of the Father, to love and forgive as He loves and forgives, we can look at the words of the prayer that Jesus himself taught us, that we pray at every Mass right before we receive him in Holy Communion.
“Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.” My forgiveness is contingent upon how well I forgive others. That’s not easy for me to do. The Catechism of the Catholic Church states that “this outpouring of God’s mercy cannot penetrate our hearts as long as we have not forgiven those who have trespassed against us” (CCC 2840). The Catechism says that this is a daunting petition in the Lord’s Prayer. No kidding! It’s daunting because we don’t love as God loves. As Jesus says elsewhere in the Gospels, the measure you give will be the measure you receive (cf. Luke 6:38). As you judge, so shall you be judged (cf. Matthew 7:1-2).
This aspect of mercy and forgiveness is so important that Jesus even repeats it after he teaches his disciples the Lord’s Prayer. “If you forgive others their transgressions, your heavenly Father will forgive you. But if you do not forgive others, neither will your Father forgive your transgressions” (Mt 6:14-15). These are pretty sobering words. Jesus is calling us into this kind of love, a Trinitarian Love, the Love of the Cross. Remember that Jesus didn’t come to die just for you, or for the righteous, or for those who we believe are righteous. Jesus died for Adolf Hitler, for Osama bin Laden; he died for Herod and for Pontius Pilate; he died for those who we might not want to put on the list, including those who have hurt us in any way. He died for all of them because he loved them. That’s the kind of love that Jesus is calling us to. That’s the kind of forgiveness He’s calling us to. The love and mercy of the Father.
But guess what? We don’t love like that. We don’t forgive like that. So we need supernatural grace to do it. The only way that we can ever imitate the love of Christ is to forgive like he does – to love like he does. A total gift of self. But how do I do that? How am I supposed to forgive like Jesus when it feels like someone has stabbed me in the back? When someone has disappointed me so much? Do I just forget what happened and not feel anything? How do I deal with that? Well, the Catechism gives us some wisdom here, too. And it says: “It is there, in fact, ‘in the depths of the heart,’ that everything is bound and loosed. It is not in our power not to feel or to forget an offense; but the heart that offers itself to the Holy Spirit turns injury into compassion and purifies the memory in transforming the hurt into intercession” (CCC 2843).
So it’s not like we don’t feel the pain, or act as if an offense never happened. But we are called to intercede anyway and pray for the person who hurt us. It’s an act of the will. Even when our mind and emotions feel the pain, our will should say, “I pray for them anyway.” If our actions are dependent upon our mind and our emotions only, then we will never be able to love and forgive as God does. They’re just not enough. We need God’s supernatural grace to do that.
Look at what Moses did from the first reading today. The Israelites haven’t exactly been easy on Moses since they left Egypt, complaining even after God saved them from the Egyptians, and making the golden calf while Moses was on the mountain receiving the Commandments from God. And this was right after ratifying the Covenant with God, where blood from the sacrifice was sprinkled on the altar and the people. This signified that if they broke the covenant with God, may our blood be poured out like the blood of the sacrifice. So God would be completely justified in wiping them out, and doing away with them.
But what did Moses do? He prayed for them. He asked God to remember the promises he made and be merciful to those people who rose up against both Moses and God. Now I don’t think that God forgot the promises he made to Abraham, Isaac, and Israel. He is God, after all. But I think that Moses, in his prayer of intercession for the people, came to a fuller understanding of the mercy and forgiveness of God, and would realize His deep love for them. That’s the kind of prayer Jesus asks of us. That’s the kind of love he is calling us to.
Even Saint Paul reflects on this when he says in our second reading from his letter to Timothy: “Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners. Of these I am the foremost. But for that reason I was mercifully treated, so that in me, as the foremost, Christ Jesus might display all his patience as an example for those who would come to believe in him for everlasting life.”
We all face a great challenge. These readings focus on the loving mercy and forgiveness of God, and Jesus challenges us to do the same. We can begin today at this Mass when we pray the Lord’s Prayer together. Pray especially over the words “forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.” When we approach the altar today to receive Holy Communion, think about the commitment we are making to God. When we come to the Eucharist, we receive Christ in our bodies and in our lives. Each one of us, then, is bound to take Him into the world and to bring Him and His mercy and forgiveness to others.
Holy Spirit, help us to be merciful, even as our heavenly Father is merciful (cf. Luke 6:36).
In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.