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| Entrance to 'Newgrange', a 5000 year old passage grave in Eastern Ireland |
Trying
to say anything about God is extremely difficult if not impossible,
because God is completely beyond our understanding. St. Thomas
Aquinas was a great genius and wrote one of the greatest works of
theology called the Summa Theologica. Towards the end of his
life he had a vision of God or heaven, and after that he stopped
writing and he said ‘It’s all trash, we have no idea!’ This is
one of the reasons why Jesus spoke in parables, to try and give us
some idea of what God is like. Today’s parable of the Prodigal Son
is a particularly beautiful one.
This story
could also be called ‘The parable of the forgiving Father.’ We
usually tend to focus on the rebellious son who basically told his
father that he wished he was already dead and so he wanted his
inheritance now. Having insulted his father as much as is possible,
he eventually comes back in hard times to ask forgiveness. Now the
son is looking at all he has done wrong, all the sin, all the insults
to his family, but the father looks right beyond the sin and just
loves his son. He doesn’t condemn him, he doesn’t ask for an
apology, he doesn’t do anything that you would expect him to do.
Instead he just celebrates and loves his son. Maybe it should be
called ‘The parable of the foolish father’.
This
teaches me something about God in a very practical way. When I think
of myself before God, I tend to do as the younger son did. I usually
think only of the sins I have committed and my failings rather than
my strengths; but from the parable I realise that God’s approach to
me is very different. God is not interested in my sin, or my
weakness, or what I could have done better. He is interested in me as
a person, and He rejoices and celebrates every time I come back to
him, especially if I have drifted away from him. God rejoices in the
child before him, like you would with a toddler. You don’t focus on
what a small child has done wrong, you just see the child that you
love.
Then
there is also the older brother. In many ways I think most of us are
probably more like the older brother than the younger. We probably
haven’t done anything too outrageous; we may even have been quite
faithful to our duties all through our life. But we may well despise
those who have apparently walked away from God, and especially those
who obviously do what is wrong. It is easy for us to resent the fact
that God loves them. This is exactly what the Pharisees (who were the
religious people of the time) were doing. They said, ‘Why is this
prophet hanging around with those people. They are disgusting,
they do everything wrong and they know it.’
However,
through the parable Jesus is showing us that that is not how God sees
things. God does not act as we do. It may be understandable from our
point of view, but we are in no position to judge the heart of
another person. We can judge their actions as right or wrong, but we
cannot judge their heart. Only God knows what causes another person
to act as they do. This was what the older brother did. He resented
the Father’s forgiveness, but the Father also loved him, forgave
him and reached out to him.
God
is not interested in what we have done wrong. His desire is just that
we are reconciled to him so that we can enjoy all that He has done
for us and all that He has created for us. His design for us is
that we find happiness. This is the mercy of God that we trust in.
That is also why in the second reading the Apostles are at pains to
point out that we have already been reconciled to God, through
the death and resurrection of Jesus. There is nothing we can do that
God hasn’t already forgiven, so long as we turn to God and ask for
that forgiveness. That is why we talk about forgiveness and
repentance so much, especially during Lent, because this is what God
asks us to do.
What we are appealing to you before God is: be
reconciled to God.
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