God runs to us with His mercy
This is an excerpt from the homily given at the One Conference March 5.
The Gospel text of the prodigal, or wasteful, son speaks to us of God. God is our Father Who out of love created us to be free and endowed us with a conscience. He suffers when we lose our way and rejoices when we find it again.
One way – just one way – that this Gospel can be read is to understand it as an illustration of our journey to God, with its different stages of growth toward maturity.
Our friendship with God grows gradually. At first, as children, we depend on our parents for everything. Then we assert our autonomy (a critical stage), and finally, if we develop well, we reach a mature relationship with them based on gratitude and authentic love.
Childhood dependence
There is usually a phase that resembles childhood: a faith prompted primarily by need, a kind of dependence whose only prayer is that of petition, of needing to be satisfied. I think that our pilgrimage always begins in this way, and it does contain a fundamental truth, God is our Creator and we are His creatures, “the work of His hands.”
The elder son’s obedience was childish, because it was filled with anger and resentment. He refused to share in his father’s joy. His relationship was immature because it was based purely on his sense of duty and obligation. It did not come from his heart.
I think this is what mere external compliance to the law is: good as far as it goes, better than non-compliance, but far from a healthy relationship shaped by love.
Rebellion
In the second stage in the journey we strive to become independent: making our own decisions, resenting parental rules.
Often, too, in the spiritual life, there is a stage of rebellion. As people grow up, they often want to free themselves from submission not only to parents and their demands but also from God and His commandments. They want to make their own decisions, which is fair enough, but sometimes even thinking they can do without God.
This stage can lead to atheism, often of the practical kind; that is, living as if God does not exist. They conceive of him as merely an enforcer or spoil-sport of happiness.
It seems to me this is the common spiritual malaise of much of the western world, and undergirds its hostility to religion, particularly Christianity, in our own society. They think of religion as a series of prohibitions on their freedom, a list of “don’ts,” a system of social control.
But as Pope Emeritus Benedict said, “Christianity is not a type of moralism, simply a system of ethics. It does not originate in our action, our moral capacity. Christianity is first and foremost a gift: God gives Himself to us – He does not give something, but Himself.”
In the parable, the younger son exemplifies an immature rebelliousness. He takes his inheritance and is prodigal with it. He wants to be free from his father, no longer burdened by the duties and responsibilities of home. He wants to live on his own, grasping everything that life can offer.
He wants to be able to do whatever he likes, following his own desires and his own will alone. The prodigal son is the original “you can have it all” man.
Maturity
The third stage of the spiritual life is maturity, although the earlier stages are not eliminated. We recognize our dependence on God, though it is not slavish, and we continue to rebel through our weakness and by our sins, though not completely and not without contrition.
Quoting Pope Benedict again, “Fortunately for us, God never fails in His faithfulness, and even if we distance ourselves and get lost He continues to follow us with His love, forgiving our errors and speaking to our conscience from within in order to call us back to Him.”
“Only by experiencing forgiveness, by recognizing one is loved with a freely given love, a love greater than our wretchedness but also than our own merit, do we at last enter into a truly filial and free relationship with God.”
That is the Christian maturity to which the disciple aspires: “a truly filial and free relationship with God.” But note something important, absolutely crucial. This comes about by grace, by God’s intervention. It is not our own doing.
‘Rich mercy’
There are many ways of forgiving. It’s often done reluctantly, sometimes with an expressed or implicit “but I will never forget.” The father of the prodigal son, like God, took the first step. He ran to meet his son.
This, of course, is how God treats us. He kisses us in forgiveness; dresses us in the new garments of innocence. The one important thing for the father is that his son has been found.
