18th March 2007LENT IV (Laetare)

Fr David Cherry 

Joshua  5  :  9 – 12 ; II  Corinthians  5  :  16 – 21 ; Luke  15  :  1 – 3  &  11b – 32

‘Laetare Sunday’ – ‘Rejoice Sunday’.  Here in the middle of Lenten observance : don’t forget it is all about rejoicing in God.  So Refreshment Sunday – pink instead of violet.   The Christian life is always a rejoicing – somberness is never eclipsed by a deep and abiding joy.  Gloom and doom are from the evil one.  They are the work of Satan and have no place among us. Penance is a joyful home-coming.

Penance is a joyful home-coming.

So we are found rejoicing in Motherhood: the motherhood of God (signified in the Introit as a home-coming to the heavenly city, Jerusalem); the motherhood of a People, through time, conveying to us in Word and Sacrament the treasures of God’s love for us; the Motherhood of earthly motherhood.  So today : Laetare: Rejoice!

Rejoice in what?  Rejoice in the new culture that has been brought about by God and that you and I are being brought into: a culture of grace, gratuitous love, generous, accepting love; a culture which is not based on a transaction – I’ll scratch your back if you scratch mine.  We are being brought into this culture. We call it : grace, graciousness, gratuitousness, the culture of God - as we leave behind the culture of deserving where each gets his just deserts; where what goes round comes round; where rivalry is the currency; where one is dodging a god who will-nilly punishes the good and lets the bad go free.   

Rejoice!  Because this is not true.  God is not like that!  Rejoice because we are discovering that a vengeful god is not the God who is leading us through this wilderness, our confusion.

In the first lesson the Israelites, after 40 years in the wilderness find themselves foreigners in a new land that is not yet theirs.  They have been on a journey of discovery of who God is: a god unlike any other god.  A god who is not a god at all. They have been brought through a time of purgation into a new relational climate.  

It is of this new relational climate, which we find so hard to dwell in, to make our home in, and allow to take hold of us and make us new, that we are invited to be Ambassadors through whom God makes his appeal to others.  We find it hard to inhabit, to seep into us, to shape our feelings and view of things We’ve been discussing in the Lent Group the sheer, ever-creative Oomph of God towards us; the effervescent, fizzing up, of God’s movement of love which holds all things in being.

And this is what our two brothers are not able to quite get yet in today’s gospel about the prodigal love of God.

The younger brother wants what he thinks he rightly deserves and we are not told what the older one does with his half of the inheritance.  Neither realise that the father’s love is theirs and all that he is and has is for them anyway.  In the words of St Paul – they see from a ‘human point of view.’  It’s a relational climate of deserving, not of grace.

 And there is a deeper point : the Authorised Version says the younger brother asks for ‘the portion of goods that falleth to me’.  The Greek is deeper because ousia means substance, very existence.  The father gives away his very existence, his very substance (not the goods he owns).  And what he receives – the Father’s life, his existence – is squandered, wasted on riotous living.

This prodigal-loving father suffers the loss of his life and of his son’s existence and longs for his return – the return of his son to his right mind, his true sense as one created and held in being by the Father.

It is in this lost climate of thinking that you have what is justly yours that you come to your senses.  What I have is gift, given by a loving God.  Who I am, my very existence, the substance of what makes me me, is gift and being squandered.  But the culture of God’s grace hasn’t come home to him yet – he still expects to carry on living in the climate of deserving.  “Make me one of your hired servants.”  And his older brother is in the same place. He also thinks he deserves more than he has received.

And the father doesn’t forgive – he only loves and celebrates.  The son receives this love and it looks like forgiveness to him.  He is being brought home into the culture, the climate that is about grace, and he finds himself in that company, which Jesus spoke about in another parable, rejoicing over one sinner who is brought home to the truth.

Will the older brother the following day realise how different God’s culture is?  Will you and I?

Repentance is the fruit of finding oneself reconciled, celebrated for who one truly is.  Remorse is the realisation that who I became and who I thought I wanted to be, is not really who I wanted to be at all; not really who I am.

We ask forgiveness as a result of receiving love.  We ask forgiveness as we realise that in our true homeland, the currency of exchange has nothing to do with deserve or earning; neither competition nor a just price.  Forgiveness is not a transaction.

So it is of this gratuitous love - Mothering - we are called to be Ambassadors for Christ entrusted with the message of reconciliation.  Perhaps roses – signs of our calling as agents of God.  

Rejoicing let us continue in Lent to “arise and go to our Father, and say unto him, Father, I have sinned against heaven, and before thee. And am no more worthy to be called thy son” that we may come to that sheer and gratuitous freedom which God celebrates in you and me.