One of the most famous of the parables of Jesus, proclaimed on this 4th Sunday of Lent, is the renowned Gospel we call the Parable of the Prodigal Son. The word prodigal isn’t one we use every day. It comes from the latin “prodigus” which means wasteful, excessively extravagant, or greatly lavish. The prodigal son was certainly excessively lavish and wasteful, selfishly demanding his share of his father’s estate. He took it, he left his father and brother, and went with all that money, and what did he do? He was prodigal with it. He wasted it on drinking, gambling, prostitutes, and soon enough he had squandered it all and was reduced to eating pig food. Finally, he gets the idea that he could go crawling back to his father, and perhaps enter into lowly servitude in order to subsist. He would have to live with the consequences of his prodigality, his lavish waste.
And yet, could we not also call this the parable of the Prodigal Father? Wasn’t the father, in a sense, prodigal? Not Prodigal in wasting money on earthly pleasures, of course, but excessively lavish and extravagant…in mercy, in forgiving his son. For when his prodigal son attempted to return, the father would have had every right to turn the wretch away: “How dare you show up here. You made your bed, now sleep in it.” And yet the father was Prodigal, lavish, in his mercy. He says, “Son, your return here, to my embrace, to the shelter of my house is something to celebrate. Welcome home.”
The point of Jesus’ parable of course is that WE are the prodigal sons and daughters. We waste God’s many gifts, we squander His blessings; instead of using the time we’ve been given to pursue truth, goodness, and beauty, we pursue flattery, selfishness, and the boring ugliness of sin. We are prodigal in our relationship to God. Yet, thanks be to God, God is Prodigal in Mercy. When we kneel before the Father, and say, Father I have sinned against you, I’m no longer worthy to be called your son or daughter, what does God Our Father do? He wraps us in the mantle of His Mercy, He calls for celebration in heaven when a sinner repents. He lavishly showers immense blessing upon the contrite, he welcomes home the wayward and the squandering with open arms. If that’s not good news, if that doesn’t cause us immense joy, what will? How appropriate that we have this message of joyful reconciliation on this 4th Sunday of Lent, which is called Laetare Sunday, Joy Sunday. God’s mercy is the source of our joy.
As you probably know, we have a beautiful print of Rembrant’s painting of the Return of the Prodigal Son in the parking lot entrance way. This was one of Rembrant’s last paintings before his death, and he beautifully depicts the son, in clothes, tattered from his life of dissipation, his sandals deteriorated from his wayward path, kneeling penitentially at his father’s breast. His father calmly embraces his son, laying hands on his shoulders as if to absolve him of sin. The dark scene is illuminated by the father’s tenderness, a symbol of weary and sinful mankind taking refuge in the shelter of God's mercy.
Now here is the challenge though: we must not let the message of mercy become a generic. God’s mercy is not just something that Jesus wants us to think about. Rather, he wants us to experience it, concretely and personally.
We are to really, physically kneel down and utter those words, “Father, I have sinned against you. I no longer deserve to be called your son or daughter. I have squandered your blessings. And here are the precise ways I have sinned.” And this humble acknowledgement and accounting of sin is primarily done in the Sacrament of Confession, the Sacrament instituted by Jesus Himself for the forgiveness of sins committed after baptism.
It is there in the Sacrament of Confession, we hear the words we long to hear, the words of our father saying, “welcome home, all is forgiven, you are still my son, you are still my daughter.”
Our Lord has given us the Sacrament of Confession to be that precise, concrete, personal moment of reconciliation, where we admit our prodigality before God, and we rejoice in God’s prodigality, who lavishes his mercy and forgiveness upon the repentant. And there is no better time to return to the Sacrament of Confession than the season of Lent, as we prepare for Holy Week and Easter.
To be honest, there has been a great falling away from the celebration of this Sacrament over the past few decades. We are soberly aware of some distressing statistics. In a recent CARA study, only 12 percent of Catholics go to Confession at least once a year. 42% said, they never go. It’s not good. We are in danger of becoming Prodigal—wasteful—of one of the most beautiful, powerful, and life-changing ways that God wishes to encounter his people. “No thanks God, I’m fine, I don’t need your mercy.” How dangerous.
There are various excuses one hears for not going to confession: “the priest yelled at me when I was little, some priest or nun told me that Vatican II did away with the need for frequent confession,” this is not true. “I forgot how to go to confession, I forgot my act of contrition, it’s been too long, I wouldn’t know where to begin” or the worst of all “I don’t have any sins to confess”, which likely means you have failed to thoroughly examine your conscience…there are a lot of excuses, but none of them amount to anything, compared to the mercy God wishes to give you in that sacrament. If we really understood how much the Father wishes to meet us in the Confessional, we would run to the confessional. If you are avoiding confession out of laziness, embarrassment, fear, anger, confusion, or you disagree with the very institution of Confession, it’s time for a change. God, the Father, is waiting for you; for some of you, he’s been waiting a long time, but he is ready, to embrace you as the Father embraced the son in the Gospel today.
In the Lenten Scripture readings and orations today the Church challenges us to consider the joy of being reconciled to God. The Opening prayer spoke of hastening with promptness and eagerness to encounter God. And the prayer before communion speaks of the joy that comes from receiving the remedy for sin. Let’s allow God to answer these prayers in our life.
If you haven’t already, please make a Lenten confession, that you may know the peace and joy of the embrace of our merciful Father. To quote Paul in our second reading: “We implore you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God.”
And let us all pray for those who are lost, those who have left the Father’s house of the Church, that the lost may be found, that those dead in sin may through repentance and grace receive new life. There are inactive members of this parish and members of our family who, let’s be honest, are lost. And our prayers and our penances are so important in winning for them the grace of repentance. St. Paul, saw himself as an ambassador for Christ, an ambassador for the reconciliation that comes through Christ. Let us too be ambassadors for reconciliation and mercy.
May we be generous with God, continuing our Lenten penances with great gratitude and joy over the gift of God’s mercy, that his grace and mercy may abound in our parish and in our families for the glory of God and salvation of souls.
