Fr Paolo Consonni MCCJ
When I was in the Novitiate, our Novice Master told us a story about the need to understand the concrete situation of the audience before preparing a homily. The story was about the Gospel of this Fourth Sunday of Lent, the Parable of the Prodigal Son (Lk 15:11-24).
As he related, one confrere was invited to preach a retreat in the Nursing Community of our Congregation, where old or gravely ill confreres were taken care of. The majority of them were over 80 and had spent decades of missionary life in Africa and Latin America. They were strong men forged by difficulties and with plenty of human and spiritual experience, now relying on their wheelchair and on those around them for all their necessities. The young preacher focused his Lenten meditation on the figure of the younger brother who, after dissipating his inheritance, repented, changed his way and returned to his father’s house.
Our Novice Master, who by chance happened to be there, thought that the meditation although very well presented was, somehow, off the mark. Sitting in front of the preacher were not youngsters rebelling against God by dissipating their lives, but old men of God who had spent all their lives in situations of poverty and even war. He explained that in that particular circumstance, it would have been better to focus on the father in the parable. Those old missionaries knew what it meant to be an old father, to be put aside and disregarded as outdated or useless and to entrust the fruit of their lifelong work into inexperienced (and sometimes, reckless) hands. They knew what it meant to be misunderstood, to gaze at an empty horizon in loneliness and to let go of the past. Our Novice Master concluded: those old missionaries should have been encouraged to become more and more like the Father of the Parable. The more we advance in age, the more we understand that conversion has to do with embracing others with the same tenderness and compassion of the Father who cared only to restore his son’s life and dignity, more than “changing old habits” which have become part of our personality.
After so many years, the comments of my Novice Master still make sense to me. In fact, because we are burdened with many guilty feelings, we often tend to identify only with the younger sinful son who must stop doing bad stuff and “go back to God”.
Sometimes we empathize with the complaints of the elder brother, who felt the Father was favoring the younger brother while disregarding his needs. In spite of the fact that we don’t commit any serious sins, we often are unable to feel God’s love for us, and as a consequence we do not love Him in return. We are dutifully bound to God, but not intimate with Him at all.
In both cases, the problem is an initial distortion of God’s image. Since Adam and Eve, humanity has always had the tendency to perceive Him as an overbearing and dominating figure.
To re-discover God as “Our Father” and to imitate Him is therefore the core of the Lenten spiritual journey of conversion. We do not simply believe in a generic metaphysical entity we call “God”, but, as we recite in the Creed, “I believe in God the Father Almighty” (it should be without comma in between). The greatest novelty of Christianity lies in this profound experience of having a loving filial relationship with this Father. “All that is mine is yours” (Lk 15:31) is exactly the opposite of the “owner-slave” model we use to distort God’s relationship with us.
Jesus’ life, death and resurrection was, therefore, the supreme manifestation of the Father’s heart. “Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful” (Lk 6:36) is the path that Jesus wants us to take in order to express our faith and, at the same time, relate to one another.
Not an easy task. The war in Ukraine, between two mainly Christian nations, has exposed the dysfunction we often experience in our relationships as believers just as the family in this Sunday’s Gospel. “We are convinced that, without an openness to the Father of all, there will be no solid and stable reasons for an appeal to fraternity. We are certain that only with this awareness that we are not orphans, but children, can we live in peace with one another” (Fratelli Tutti 272), recently wrote Pope Francis.
So, during this week of Lent, let us gladly receive the Father’s embrace for each one of us, perhaps through the Sacrament of Reconciliation, rejoicing in the fact that we were dead and have come to life; we were lost and we have been found. And let us pass on this embrace to others, as good images of the Father, as Jesus did. Our world truly needs it.
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