Entering the Feast of God’s Mercy, 24th Sunday (C), September 11, 2022

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Convent of the Missionaries of Charity, Bronx, NY
Twenty-Fourth Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year C
September 11, 2022
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 points were attempted in the 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 sinners 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 soon conspire with their moral archenemies — the laxist Sadducees, debauched Herodians, and the 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.
• Before we examine Jesus’ answers, however, it’s important for us to pause to recognize that the attitude of the Scribes and Pharisees didn’t expire at a time long ago in a land far away. Many Christians today, for example, do not rejoice on Christmas, Ash Wednesday, Palm Sunday and Easter when people who do not regularly practice the faith come to back to Church, crowd parking lots and occupy the pews they normally sit in. Many do not rejoice to see the person who bullied them in school, local criminals, the person who destroyed their best friend’s marriage, or family members who gossiped about them come to Church converted. When priests or religious are disciplined for bad behavior and are sent away, many of their confreres or fellow sisters are reluctant to see them return, less open to the joy that they might have repented than the dread that they might not have changed. Today’s cancel culture is one of a total lack of forgiveness: if someone makes a mistake, or if someone just doesn’t like what someone has done, they try to destroy without any possibility of rehabilitation. These are all reasons why Jesus’ stories this Sunday are still so relevant, because many of us are more like the Pharisees in the Gospel than we might want to admit.
• In the Parable of the Lost Sheep, we see how God loves us individually. Jesus the Good Shepherd calls each one of us by name, and none of us is a number to him. It might seem strange that a shepherd would leave 99 sheep and go out in search of one lost stray, because most of us don’t have that type of love for animals in general, especially if we have 100 of them or more. But Jesus was saying, “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 moms and dads loves each of their children. He will come to find us. And he will rejoice when he finds us and leads us home.
• The Parable of the Lost Coin, at first glance, makes even less sense than that of the lost sheep. What woman who lost a quarter would spend all types of time sweeping the house looking for it, and then throw a big party upon finding it? But we need to know what the coin was. When a woman was married, she had a wedding veil, normally with ten precious coins strung like a crown that constituted her dowry. Not only were the coins precious but their 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 parables 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, Jesus says the joy is “more” or greater over one sinner’s return than heaven rejoices over the fidelity of 99 holy ones. No wonder why Pope Francis loves to say, “God’s greatest joy is forgiving!” And God wants us to experience that joy by coming to receive that reconciliation, and bring us to share it when others are reconciled.
• Those stories are the warm-up acts that introduce the Parable of the Prodigal Son, or better the Parable of the Lost Sons, because each son has something important to teach us.
• The younger brother’s essential sin was not that he blew 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 any wounds at his son’s ingratitude and presumption, gave him the inheritance, probably figuring that it might be the last chance for the son to learn who the Father really was. 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. When we hear the expression today, “hired hand,” most of us 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 to some degree members of the household and they were taken care of and fed. The “hired hands” — like he was tending the swine — were not members of the family. They were totally responsible for their own upkeep, and that of their family, if they were lucky to find 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 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. 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 that doubtless clung to his clothes. 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 placed 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 weddings and the biggest celebrations, be killed for a feast. Whereas the son had asked to be treated like a hired hand lower than slaves, the Father restored him to his full dignity and threw a celebration like he had never had even before he had wandered.
• The older son is a figure like the Pharisees and Scribes. He never grasped the Father’s goodness or love either. When he got angry and refused to enter the party the Father was throwing for his brother’s return, he passive-aggressively waited outside until the Father came out to beg him to enter. He couldn’t join in the celebration because, in his heart, his brother was still dead. When his 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 as a slave. “Look,” he said, “all these years I servedyou and not once did I ever disobey your orders.” You can almost hear him call the father, “Master!” And it got worse. “Yet when this son of yours returns,” he quipped. He couldn’t even refer to his own flesh-and-blood as his brother. He enviously protested that 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. While the younger brother now at least understood the love of the Father and was rejoicing in it, the older brother was still in a sick, judgmental, bitter pigsty of his own. We don’t know whether the older brother eventually entered the party. It was still an open question for the scribes and the Pharisees who were listening to Jesus, whether they would share Jesus’ joy and come to welcome and eat with the same sinners, the same prodigal sons and daughters with whom Jesus was dining.
• 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 have wanderede from the Father and his house through sin, the times in which we treated 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 Sacrament of Penance 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 arrogantly returning to the worship of money and nature in the golden calf. God tested Moses after the Israelites’ infidelity. Like he did with Noah earlier, 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. Moses reminded God of how merciful he is, how he had been so good to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, how he had promised to make their descendants numerous, and how generous 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?
• Teresa of Calcutta was a great disciple and apostle of the Sacrament of God’s mercy. She said in an interview, “Confession is nothing but humility in action. We call it Penance, but really it is a sacrament of love, a sacrament of forgiveness. … It is a place where I allow Jesus to take away from me everything that divides, that destroys.” Paraphrasing the message of today’s Gospel, she added, “We should be very simple and childlike in confession. ‘Here I am as a child going to the Father.’ … Confession is a beautiful act of great love. Only in confession can we go as sinners with sin and come out as sinners without sin… by the greatness of the mercy of God.” What a great gift!
• 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 wants to cover us anew in our baptismal garment, restore us to our dignity as children and heirs, and send us forth with sandals, free, to glorify him by our life, through running out to greet others in his name with the same joy and mercy with which he never ceases to run to embrace us. 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: 

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