Cooperating with Jesus’ Mission of Saving Sinners, 24th Sunday (C), September 15, 2019

Fr. Roger J. Landry
St. Sylvester Parish, Medford, NY
Twenty-Fourth Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year C
September 15, 2019
Ex 32:7-11.13-14, Ps 51, 1 Tim 1:12-17, Lk 15:1-32

To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below: 

The following text guided today’s homily: 

Today’s readings bring us into the heart of Jesus mission, the core of our faith, the way we’re supposed to receive God’s action in our life and what he wants us to do as a result. That’s why it’s so important for us not just to understand the Word of God presented to us today, but to live it and help others to live it.

In today’s second reading, from the First Letter to Timothy, St. Paul tells us very clearly Jesus’ purpose in entering the world: “Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners.” That explains why he took on our human nature, why he suffered, died, and rose. In the Alleluia verse, St. Paul builds on this truth, telling us, “God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ and entrusting to us the message of reconciliation.” Jesus, after having come to save us, wants to send us out with his message and work of reconciliation, trying to bring as many as we possibly can to Jesus so that he may save them from sin and its consequence, eternal death.

That’s the proper context to understand what’s happening in the Gospel. At the beginning of the passage, St. Luke says, “Tax collectors and sinners were all drawing near to listen to Jesus, but the Pharisees and scribes began to complain, saying, “This man welcomes sinners and eats with them.” The Pharisees were literally, in Hebrew, the “Separated Ones,” those who distanced themselves from sin and sinners. They were scandalized that Jesus would have any contact with them at all, not to mention welcome them, treat them with kindness and even share meals and communion with them. They failed to recognize that they were sinners too, and in fact, some of them would conspire with their moral archenemies, the laxist Sadducees, debauched Herodians, and dreaded pagan Romans, to have Jesus executed. It was to them and their attitude about sin and sinners that Jesus addressed the three Parables of the Lost Sheep, the Lost Coin and the Lost Sons.

But before examine Jesus’ answers, it’s important for us to pause to recognize that the attitude of the Scribes and Pharisees didn’t expire in a time long ago in a land far away. It’s still very much present. Let me ask you: If before Mass today, you saw the person who used to bully you in grammar school come into this Church, piously genuflect to Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament and sit down next to you, what would your attitude be? Or how about some estranged family members who used to spread lies about you, hurting your reputation? Or what if the local drug pusher came, or some ladies of the evening, or MS-13 Gang Members, or the person who broke up your next-door-neighbor’s marriage? Would you rejoice at the possibility or certainty that they had converted, or would you slide over in your pew to separate yourself from them lest anyone think you their friends or happy to see them? How do you respond, for example, on days like Christmas, Ash Wednesday, Palm Sunday and Easter, when so many people who do not regularly attend Mass come? Do you rejoice to see them, in the hope that Jesus might touch them in a way in which they would receive his help to focus their lives on them? Or are you like some parishioners, who will give them a look so as to say, “You’re in my pew!,” or interiorly look at them as a bunch of hypocrites who don’t practice the faith with the passion and regularity they should? The point is: many Catholics are more like the Pharisees in the Gospel than we might want to admit. And that’s why Jesus addresses these stories not just to them, but to us!

In the Parable of the Lost Sheep, we see how God loves us individually. Jesus is our Good Shepherd, he calls each one of us by name, and none of us is a number to him. For city slickers like most of us, it might seem strange that a shepherd would leave the 99 and go out in search of the one lost stray, even risking his life to rescue the sheep from precarious perches where the sheep had wandered. Most of us don’t have that type of love for animals in general, especially if we were to have 100 of them or more. But what Jesus was saying was more, “If you had ten young kids, and one of the didn’t come home, wouldn’t you leave the other nine to go out in search of your child?” Jesus loves each of us more than the greatest earthly mom and dad loves each of his children. None of us is a number. He will come to find us. And he will rejoice when he finds us and leads us home.

In the Parable of the Lost Coin, we see a similar lesson. At first glance, this parable makes even less sense than that of the lost sheep. What woman would say, lost a quarter, and then spend all types of time sweeping the house looking for it, and then throw a big party upon finding it? But we have to know what the coin was. When a woman was married, she had a wedding veil, normally with ten precious coins that constituted her dowry. Not only were the coins precious, but the symbolic value was priceless. The present-day analogy would be if a woman had lost her wedding ring. She indeed would pick up the sofa cushions, look under the couch, sweep everywhere frantically looking for it, and, if she found it, would certainly rejoice.

Both of these analogies led to a similar application by Jesus: “In just the same way,” he said, “there will be more joy in heaven,” or “among the angels of God,” “over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous people who have no need of repentance.” God rejoices more in reconciling one of his sons or daughters than a shepherd rejoices finding his sheep, a woman rejoices finding her precious wedding coin, or a mom or dad rejoices finding a lost infant in the mall. In fact, the join is “more” than heaven rejoices over 99 righteous people. Insofar as the only truly righteous person in history — the immaculate, sinless virgin Mary — doubtless pleased God so much by her life-long “yes” to God, from the Annunciation in Nazareth, to her fidelity at Calvary, and beyond, what Jesus is saying is that heaven rejoices more upon reconciling a sinner than over 100 faithful Blessed Virgin Marys! If Jesus didn’t say this, we wouldn’t be able to believe it, but he did say it. That’s how much joy God has at every repentant sinner. No wonder why Pope Francis loves to say, “God’s greatest joy is forgiving!” And he wants us to experience that joy by coming to receive that reconciliation, and bring us to share it when others are reconciled.

That brings to the most famous short story of all time with three figures, the younger son, the older son and the father. It’s important for us to get to know each of these characters much better if we’re going to understand what Jesus is trying to teach us in this Parable.

We begin with the younger son. His essential sin was not all that he did to blow his inheritance on a dissolute life. It was to treat his Father as if he were dead. To ask for the inheritance while the Father was still living was tantamount to saying, “You’re dead to me, Old Man. I don’t want to wait until you croak. Give me now what you’re planning to give me when finally you breathe your last.” And the Father, doubtless more concerned over the direction of his son’s life than nursing his wounds at the son’s ingratitude and presumption, gave him the inheritance, probably figuring out it would be the only chance that the son might have of learning the lesson he had long missed. The son, as we know, went and squandered everything in an immoral life. Eventually when a famine hit the land where he was, he needed to do work that no Jew would ever have signed up for, to care for pigs (whom the Jews considered unclean animals). He was eventually so hungry that he longed for what the pigs were eating, something that indicated basically that he had become almost subhuman. But that’s when the grace of conversion first hit him. “Coming to his senses,” St. Luke writes, he realized that his Father’s hired hands were always well-fed and he decided to return to his Father’s house, to apologize for his sins, and asked to be treated like a hired hand. He recognized that at least his Father was a good man who cared for those who worked for him. When we hear the word today, “hired hand,” most of us, I think, imagine he was being asked to be treated as an “employee,” but it was nothing really of the sort. He was asking to be treated as “less than a slave.” The slaves were considered members of the household to some degree and they were taken care of and fed. The “hired hands” were not members of the family. They were responsible for their own upkeep, if they could get a job day-by-day. But the younger son recognized that the Father was kind and gave “more than enough food to eat” even to those who had no right to food. The son was beginning to reawaken to the Father’s goodness. But he still didn’t understand the Father. He rehearsed his speech as he was returning home, that he had sinned against God and against his father — both of whom he had treated as if they were dead to him — and didn’t deserve to be treated as a son, thinking that the relationship of filiation would now have been “dead” since he had basically already pronounced his father’s obituary. But the Father, seeing him far off, was filled with merciful love and ran to his son. I’ve always imagined a 60-year-old man in sandals looking foolish running to embrace his long-lost son, or the way a wife and children scamper across the airport to greet their husband or father returning from military service overseas. The son began with his well-practiced confession, but the Father interrupted him. He called for the finest garment to be put around him to cover up all of the swine excrement with which doubtless he had been covered. He put a signet ring on his finger, to show that he still had “power of attorney” over the Father’s goods. He had sandals plead on his feet to symbolize that he was free to go about as he pleased — slaves never had sandals. And he commanded that the fattened calf, normally reserved for wedding and the biggest celebrations, be killed for a feast. Whereas he was prepared to ask to be treated like a hired hand lower than slaves, the Father restored him to his full dignity!

Let’s turn now to the older son, who is meant to resemble the Pharisees and Scribes. He never really grasped the Father’s goodness or love either. When he got angry and refused to enter the party the Father was throwing for the younger son’s return, he passive-aggressively waited outside until the Father came for him. He couldn’t join in the celebration because, in his heart, his brother was still dead. When the Father pleaded with him to enter the party, he replied with anger that betrayed that he had never related to his Father out of love but only out of duty. “Look,” he said, “all these years I served you and not once did I ever disobey your orders.” That’s the language of a slave, not a son! You can almost hear him calling his Father “Master” or “Boss-man” rather than “Dad.” And it gets worse. “Yet when this son of yours returns…” He can’t even refer to his own flesh-and-blood as his brother. The younger brother had wasted his inheritance “with prostitutes,” he said, a detail that isn’t in evidence, a sign that that’s likely what he would have done had he been bold enough to do what the younger brother had done and gotten his own half of the inheritance. He was filled with envy and hatred against his brother as well as against the Father. He had never even been allowed to kill a young goat for a party with his friends and yet the other brother got a fattened calf. By this point of the story, we can clearly see that while the younger brother was restored to health the older brother was still sick. The younger brother now at least understood the love of the Father and was rejoicing in it, whereas the older brother was still in a judgmental, bitter pigsty of his own. We don’t know whether the older brother entered the party with him or not. The reason is because that was still an open question for the scribes and the Pharisees who were listening to the parable of Jesus, whether they would share his joy and come to welcome and eat with the same sinners, the same prodigal sons and daughters with whom Jesus was dining, or whether they would continue to remain defiantly and enviously outside.

We have to make two fundamental applications to own our lives, based on each of the sons.

First, do we recognize that we are sinners called by God to be reconciled? Do we recognize the times when we wander from the Father and his house through sin, the times in which we treat him as good as dead to us, come to our senses, recognize his goodness and come home? In today’s second reading, after Paul says, “Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners,” he says, “of these I am the foremost.” He describes, “I was once a blasphemer and a persecutor and arrogant.” But God treated him with mercy, not only bringing him to conversion and reconciliation in Damascus, but then choosing him to become one of his greatest followers. God wants to show us the same mercy. These parables are meant to communicate to us what God seeks to do for each of us through the Sacrament of Penance and Reconciliation. When we come to our senses, when we realize the Father not only is not dead but is good and cares for us and we begin to make the journey home, he runs out to meet us to restore us to who we really are. The Father initiates a massive celebration, having the special fattened calf slaughtered for the son’s return, because, as he says, “My son was dead and has come back to life again. He was lost and has been found.” That’s what happens every good Confession. Every reconciliation is a resurrection, when we’re raised from the dead by the Father’s mercy (which is why, I believe, Jesus founded it on Easter Sunday evening). The Sacraments is God’s great lost-and-found department for his beloved children. As Pope Francis said at the beginning of his papacy, “God never tires of forgiving us, but it’s we who tire of asking for forgiveness.” When was the last time you made a good confession? When was the last time you gave God joy by coming to receive his mercy, by which he seeks to help you enter into that joy?

Second, we need to be praying for others to receive his mercy, helping others to be reconciled to God, and rejoicing when they convert and come to him. In today’s first reading, Moses intercedes with God for mercy on behalf of the Israelites, who were proudly returning to the worship of money and nature in the golden calf. God tested Moses after the Israelite’s infidelity. Like he did with Noah, God proposes to Moses to start again from scratch with him, but he was doing so to train Moses in mercy. And Moses passed the test. He reminded him of his mercy, how he had been so good to Abraham, Issac and Jacob, how he had promised to make their descendants numerous, and how good he had been to those descendants in rescuing them from Pharoah. It’s a sign of the passion with which we should be praying for God’s mercy for others. But we should also be inviting people to experience that mercy, Since heaven rejoices more over one repentant sinner, how great it is when we’re able to be God’s instrument to help people come to receive it. When was the last time we encouraged people to come to receive God’s mercy?

Today at Mass, God has prepared for us not a fattened calf, but his Son, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world. He has renewed us in our baptismal garment, restored us to our dignity as children and heirs, and will send us forth with sandals, free, to glorify him by our life. Each of today has arisen and come to the house of Father. It’s here that he welcomes us and eats with us, even though we are sinners. It’s here when we receive his merciful love that we fill him, and he fills us, with joy!

The readings for today’s Mass were: