Fourth Sunday of Lent (Year C)  (March 31, 2019) - Laetare Sunday

Today is Laetare Sunday, the day in the middle of Lent on which the Church calls us to rejoice, as the Latin name suggests.  Why would we read the story of the Prodigal Son on such a day? 

The word "prodigal" means “generous” but also “spendthrift” and “squandering,” and it actually applies more to the father than it does to the younger son: the father knows beforehand what is in the son's heart and how the son will handle the money, and when the son returns home the father is ready to give him even more.  This is in spite of the fact that the son breaks his father's heart: the son sees his father only as a source of money – and a supposed resultant freedom – and is eager to cut himself off from anything else the father offers...

More than wealth, what the father offers to this wastrel is love, but the young man does not see how much his father yearns for him to return that love.  When the son returns and approaches his father's house, the father is already out on the road, carefully watching, and sees his son coming and recognizes him even while he is still far off.  He is eager to offer his son full restoration of everything, not only wealth but his original place in the family, something the son can receive and cherish now that he has found humility and is willing to repent and redeem his ungratefulness by a new way of life. 

We can see how this part of the story calls to us, but the tale is not complete until we consider the older brother, who would have been generally considered, precisely as the older brother, to have more inheritance rights than the daughters or the younger sons.  He clearly works on the basis of establishing his merit and increasing how much the father “owes” him; he never knows the father's love because he never feels that he has earned it yet.  There is a certain arrogance here, a belief that he can be accepted and even loved sheerly on the basis of his own efforts and sacrifices, and his attitude towards the welcome which the father offers his brother is very revelatory of the difference between him and his father.

Our merit and worthiness, even our sinfulness, are not what God is about.  Our God is always on the lookout for us, wherever we are and whatever we are doing, already gifting us with what we need to live properly and to discover and live in His love – but our eyes and our hearts are childishly turned away from Him. 

Here that amounts to our holding tight to our guilt and our shame, refusing to open ourselves to accept the forgiveness, peace, freedom, confidence, and everything else that comes with God's love.  Our Father's love is so constant, perfect, and overwhelming that even guilt doesn't matter – as long as we are seeking Him in a concrete and heartfelt manner and giving ourselves to the  humbling act of continually turning and returning to Him.

All of this is not a matter of our understanding and insight, not if we want to truly profit from it.  It is a personal matter, a question of our hearts and our radical simplicity and trust as children of God.  Thus it is a matter of our turning to our Father in prayer to ask him to help us make that passage from our childish refusal to be loved to that childlike trust and joyful openness to Him.

If we can do that, this truly can become Laetare Sunday for us. 

6th Sunday of Ordinary Time (Year C) February 17, 2019

The words of the Beatitudes as we find them here in Luke (6:20-26) seem to concentrate on the defenseless poor and on the hungry of all sorts, at least at first glance.  These are, in that view, the marginalized, those who make us feel at least uncomfortable, ashamed, or guilty by their very existence or presence.  These are people who must build their lives in whatever difficult living situations they face, be they poverty, mental health problems, addictions, forced emigration from their homes, lack of education, abuse, or something else.  They must learn to know, love, and serve God in precisely those circumstances; this is where God asks them to know His love and to live in it. 

These people have little choice about their threadbare and precarious living situations, but Jesus calls all of us to learn the same lesson: we must not measure and value our lives only in terms of the gifts He gives us, we must learn to know, love, and serve God by living wholeheartedly  where He has planted us – which is itself a gift, albeit sometimes a difficult one to see as such and to live.  This calls many of us to “downward mobility,” both an inner and an outer simplicity lived in the cardinal virtue of hope, a simplicity which we reflect in our outward lives and manner. 

Of course the most important part of that is to go beyond our personal situations and to spend our selves in loving and helping others of all sorts as Jesus did and does: we must remember how He was drawn to the weak and broken and to follow Him there in our own love. 

In many cases, God's disposition of things in this way seems at the worst illogical and even unjust in the eyes of the world, such an absurdity that the very existence of these people “proves” to the world that if God even exists He must be either incompetent or incredibly cruel.  That is the view of the worldly wise; for them the Christian view of this situation is then nonsense and acceptable only to fools, but it is exactly what Jesus has been saying all along. 

“Truly I tell you, it will be hard for a rich person to enter the kingdom of heaven.  Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God” (Matthew 19:23) is one of His clearer statements, for example, and His “Enter through the narrow gate, for the gate is wide and the road is easy that leads to destruction and there are many who take it” (Matthew 7:13) points in the same direction.

I rather think that God's poor and hungry, His “blessed,” are those who have very little pretense about them, little of the shells, barriers, and walls that the rest of us hide behind to protect ourselves and to offer us a false message of security and success.  These truly poor of spirit are people of every age, every country, every level of wealth or social class who are truly seeking God and are trying their best to do what it takes to find Him, know Him, love Him, and serve Him.  They live in absolute hope and with the unconscious courage and peace which it provides.  Giving up their outward power, wealth, comfort, privilege, and/or position is only a first step, but sometimes a necessary one (Mark 10:17-22); what is important is the inward freedom from such things. 

Epiphany (Year C)   January 6, 2019

An “epiphany” is a revelation, a “showing forth” of something previously hidden, and today's Gospel reading certainly shows that, but it is only the best recognized epiphany in the Gospels, in a sense the flashiest and most symbolic.  This is in Matthew (2:1-12), but there is another and somewhat parallel epiphany in Luke (2:8-20), where the angels call the shepherds to visit the newborn king.  The shepherds come to the stable bearing no gifts, but in their faith the shepherds' rejoicing is instead itself a gift to them from God Himself.  I myself value far more the epiphany which the shepherds experience than I do the revelation to the Magi, but the two are not as parallel as they might seem at first glance: the tale of the Magi is of an entirely different sort of literary form and is a revelation to the world and to intellectuals rather than to Israel and the poor.

Neither of these stories is either the first nor the complete revelation of who and what this Child is.  The Old Testament has all sorts of hints about Messiah's coming, who He would be, what He would achieve, and how He would suffer, but in the Gospels we see a clearer fuller, and more concrete revelation of the Lord at His coming.  We see it most vividly in what happens at His presentation in the Temple (Luke 2:22-38) and His later visit to the Temple at the age of 12 (Luke 2:43-47), His Baptism in its various recountings (Matthew 3:13-17, Mark 1:9-13, Luke 3:21-22), His Transfiguration (Matthew 17:1-8; Mark 9:2-10; Luke 9:28-36), and even His Passion and Death (Matthew 27:51-54; Mark 15:35).  They are all revelations of who He is, all of them different and all emphasizing different aspects of His identity to different people in different ways at different times. 

After the Resurrection, the Ascension, and the forceful coming of the Holy Spirit, the revelation of Christ was up to those who waited for Him in hope and recognized Him when He came; that revelation was then in the hands of those people, who consequently spoke from their hearts about Christ and, like Paul, moved the hearts of others. 

None of those revelations is complete in itself, nor do they form a final revelation when taken all together: in every way, Christ is too much for that.  Christ is still revealing Himself in history, in visions, in the Church, in saints – and even in and to each of us as we seek Him. 

Today it is – or at least should be – we ourselves who reveal Jesus, and it is not our words which move people, it is the essence of who we are and how we act which witnesses to God and reveals Him.  There are many people who are both good and generous and provide much of what the poor and the marginalized need, but they do not do it with a truly Christ-like love and spunk to them; they simply do not radiate Christ.  When we, as Christians, empty ourselves in order to be filled with the Word, we reveal God.  We change and generously share not only by our words but by the witness of our lives: we ourselves become epiphanies.  Each of us will reveal God in a different way, according to the gifts that God gives each of us and which He works His will in the world and in us.