4th Sunday of Lent

I have always thought that, even if we had somehow lost or misplaced the rest of the Scriptures over the centuries and all we had left was the parable of the Prodigal Son, it would tell us all we need to know about God. Over and over again the New Testament tells us that God is love, and the parable we have just heard spells out in story-form the nature of that love. It’s a love that is utterly unconditional; it’s a love that is lavish and generous beyond our wildest dreams; and because of this, it’s a love which presents us and the world with two enormous challenges. The first is to come to terms with the fact that we ourselves are loved in this unconditional and lavish way. The second is to realise that we are called by God to love others in the same way, the one I would like to reflect on today.

Left to ourselves, of course, we could never love the way the Father in the story loves, something I have said many many times over the years. At least I thought I had, until one day, just a few months ago, when I found myself chatting to a parishioner who felt that, in constantly inviting you to think in new ways about drug addicts, prisoners and others, I was being unreasonable, expecting too much of people, asking the impossible. When I pointed out that it is Jesus who is asking us to do these things and that it is only through the grace of God that we could ever love like this, the person was quite taken aback, claiming that he had never heard me say this before. And so let me say it again. Or better still, let St Paul say it in today’s second reading. ‘For anyone who is in Christ’ he writes, ‘There is a new creation; the old creation has gone, and now the new one is here. It is all God’s work….For our sake God made the sinless one into sin, so that in him we might become the goodness of God.’ Or, as the Eucharistic Prayer puts it each week, ‘By the power of your Spirit living in us, make us more like your Son.’ What we are talking about here, and not for the first time, is the mystery of grace, the mystery by which, through the Spirit living in us, God enables us to do what we could never do ourselves, which is love the way he loves and so come to share his own life with him.

But it doesn’t come easily, and that is what we have been talking about since Lent began. We have seen how the first step towards learning to love as the Father in the story loves is to have the way we see the world transformed through prayer. Not the kind of prayer that ask for things, but the kind of prayer which allows God to work deep inside us and transfigure the way we see the world. And as this slowly but surely happens, as we begin to glimpse the world and other people as God sees them, one of the things that ceases to exist is the distinction human thinking makes between the deserving and so-called ‘undeserving’ poor. This is what the older brother could not begin to understand. He could not get his mind round the fact that he had kept the rules and worked on the estate all his life and yet his Father loved his waster of a brother as much as he loved him. And every time we fall into the all-too-human trap of feeling sorry for the elder brother because, like him, we see some people as more deserving of love than others, the drama continues. But I repeat: this transformation in the way we think is God’s doing. We cannot do this ourselves.

And yet, at some level of ourselves, and this is the profound paradox of grace, we need to want it. God empowers us, but we must also choose it, and that is what we reflected on last week. We saw how, if our deeper desires, the ones stirred in us by God, are to guide us, then, by positive acts of self-discipline, self-control and self-denial, we must learn to act against the more superficial feelings and desires which otherwise tend to control us. To love the way the Prodigal Father loved does not come naturally. It’s a choice rooted in God’s grace. It’s the result of our responding to the movement of God’s Spirit living in us and I’d like to illustrate this from my own experience. Every day people come to my door looking for help. But they are not all the same. Some are polite and appreciative while others are demanding. Some have simply hit a difficult patch in their lives and need short-term help, while others are chronic drug-abusers showing no visible sign of ever getting out the bit. Not unnaturally, I like some of them better than I like others, the young pretty ones having a head start on the more surly males of the species. But what I cannot do, and what none of us can do if we are serious about the Gospel, is act on these feelings. Sometimes I do, of course, especially if something else has irritated me that day or they come at what I consider an inconvenient time, but deep down it’s not what I want. What I want is to love them the way the Prodigal Father loved the younger son. That’s the grace I constantly seek from God and I invite you to see that, in the end. it’s the only grace anyone who is serious about following Jesus can seek.

And, of course, it leads us to the third and final element of Lent, which is almsgiving. Next Sunday we have the Annual SCIAF Appeal, an opportunity to give generously, and perhaps even lavishly, to those in need. But SCIAF is the easy part of the equation. Those who benefit from what we give are so obviously the ‘deserving poor’ and it is relatively easy to give to them. The real challenge, however, lies closer to home, with those whom society sees as undeserving. If we only love those who love us; if we only love the loveable, then what right do we have to any credit. Even the pagans do that. If we are to love the way God loves, then our love must be perfect. It is not merited or deserved but freely given and that’s where the real challenge lies.

The elder son was right. What happened wasn’t fair. If God is fair then we are all in trouble. It’s his sheer lack of fairness that is such good news for flawed human beings everywhere.




BIDDING PRAYERS

Seen through purely human eyes, the world is divided into the deserving and undeserving, those who are on our side and those who are against us, those who are our enemies and those who are our friends. When we begin to see the world as God sees it, however, all such divisions disappear and are replaced by a vision in which every human being is our brother and sister. And so we pray that, in the course of this third millennium, God’s vision will become the world’s vision too…..….Lord hear us

Throughout history, humanity has suffered under the illusion that it is possible to create peace through violence or the threat of violence. As a result, our story is one of constant warfare as one conflict inevitably leads to another and then another and then another. And so we pray we will finally see the absurdity of this never-ending story and begin to write a new one based on a new logic………….…………...Lord hear us

In an attempt to control the culture of revenge and counter-revenge which ruled the ancient world, and introduce an element of fairness into the way people solved their disputes, the Old Testament taught an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. Jesus, however, calls us beyond this limited way of thinking to an entirely different concept of morality, and we pray for an openness to it……………………………Lord hear us

The story of the son or daughter who rebels and leaves home to explore life in other ways and other places is repeated down through history. Sometimes this leads to estrangements which go on for years. And so we pray for families split in this way that, with God’s grace, they may reach out to each other and so experience something of the joy and celebration with which today’s parable ends……………...Lord hear us

The tendency to distinguish between the deserving and undeserving poor has deep roots in our culture but has no place in a genuinely christian view of the world. The causes of poverty are complex and often very deep-rooted, but at some level all poverty is genuine and deserving of a response from us. And so we pray for the wisdom we need to discern the best way of responding to the various forms of poverty we see around us in Britain today………………………………..Lord hear us

This is Mothering Sunday. There is no mention of the mother in today’s parable, but it is not difficult to imagine her in the background influencing everything the father does. And so we pray for mothers everywhere and thank God for that very special witness of unconditional love they so often give, especially to their sons who have wandered from the straight and narrow in some way.. And we pray, especially, for our own mothers, living or dead………………………………………….Lord hear us